New Haven Noir

by Amy Bloom

  The Beinecke is a pale stone tower set back from the street by an open courtyard, and as I walked across the flagstones I could hear my footsteps echo. I wondered what secrets I would find. I wondered if Jeanetta Wareham was already there.

  Inside the building, it was like a church. The walls were made of translucent alabaster, and the light glowed through them, cool and elegant. People spoke in hushed tones and moved slowly.

  I went down to register as a researcher. I’d done part of this online. The young woman at the desk was Asian, with black hair in a bowl cut. I gave her my name, and when I told her who I was working on, she glanced up at me.

  “Alison Ricks?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  She said nothing more, and I wondered if she had just checked in Jeanetta Wareham. I knew what Wareham looked like; I’d found a picture online. Short black hair and big teeth—too big—and small, close-set eyes, like a wolverine’s. Now I glanced around for her, but the only other person I saw was a young man walking toward the staff office. The hall was silent.

  They checked my ID and took my photograph and explained how it worked, and what the rules were. Where the material is brought to you, how long you can use it, what the restrictions are. You can’t bring pens or markers into the reading room, or, really, anything at all but your laptop. There are lockers, where you leave everything but your computer. These libraries don’t take chances: someone must once have slipped some priceless letters into a briefcase, because now everyone is monitored and there are security guards at the doors.

  I put in my requests and went in to wait in the reading room. It was a beautiful space, just below ground level, with a long wall of plate glass that looks into a sunken stone courtyard, empty and serene. In the room were eight long wooden tables. No one else was there, but on one table, on the far side of the room, was an open laptop with papers beside it.

  When my material arrived, I opened the heavy cardboard box and took out the first folder. I was entering into Alison Ricks’s life.

  The first folder held letters between her and a friend, Colewood Atchison, who was living in New York while Alison was in Naples. Inside was a sheaf of frail papers, inscribed in faded ink. The first was dated September 8, 1947. Dear Colewood, it began, How lovely to hear from you. Colewood was working for an arts magazine, and Alison wrote him about everything—her landlady, her boss, her struggles with Italian. He wrote about his job, the art scene, how high his rent was. I sank into their world: there’s little as satisfying as reading other people’s mail. When I finally looked up it was nearly one o’clock, and I was hungry.

  The table on the other side of the room was empty.

  * * *

  As the days passed, other scholars appeared, each one bent over a folder. The light came in from the empty stone-flagged courtyard, and the only sound was the quiet clacking of our keyboards. Sometimes our eyes met as we raised our heads to ponder, or when someone stood and gathered his or her papers to leave. Our eyes met, but we did not speak.

  On the fourth day Wareham was at her table when I arrived. She raised her head and we looked at each other. It was her, all right: small, with no neck and a big head and short black hair. Those close-set eyes like a wolverine. She stared at me hard. I stared back at her for a moment, then turned away. I didn’t want her to know I knew who she was. I didn’t want her to think we were in a competition.

  I wondered what she was finding out about Alison Ricks. Every time I asked for a file I wondered if I’d be told it was unavailable—if she’d have it already, spread out on the far table, revealing its secrets.

  That afternoon, when I turned my files back in to the desk, I asked, “Are there any other people here doing work on Alison Ricks?”

  The woman nodded. She wore a tiny gold chain around her neck, and round gold-rimmed glasses. I waited, but she said nothing more.

  “Really!” I said cheerfully. “Who else?”

  She shook her head. “We’re not supposed to talk about the researchers.”

  “Oh,” I said, “of course.”

  Someone was crossing the hall and I looked up. It was the young man I’d seen before, walking toward the door marked Staff. With him was Jeanetta Wareham. He held the door for her and they went inside.

  I wanted to know what was in that room, and why Wolverine got to go inside it.

  * * *

  An hour later I asked for some more recent files. If that was where the scandal was, I wanted to know about it. Though I didn’t know what it might be. I asked for the correspondence between Alison and her editor. The Asian woman shook her head. By now I knew her name: Chelsea.

  “I’m sorry, but that file is unavailable,” she said.

  I felt a little frisson at the word, as though I’d touched an electric wire. “Unavailable?” I said. “Because it’s restricted, or because someone else is using it?”

  “Someone else is using it,” she said.

  I nodded and asked for another file.

  Later that afternoon I was in the ladies’ room, inside a stall, when I heard the big outer door swish open. Someone came inside and began using a cell phone.

  “It’s me,” she said, her voice casual and intimate. “Just checking in.” I’d never heard her voice but I recognized it at once.

  There was a pause.

  “No, I’m here,” said the Wolverine. “I’ve just found some amazing stuff.” She said amazing as if it were edible.

  Another pause.

  “I know you do,” she said. “But it’s not like that. It’s just amazing.” Then her voice turned guarded: “I can’t talk here. I’ll tell you tonight.”

  The days were getting shorter, and it was dark now when I walked back through the streets to the car. I used different lots, but wherever I parked it seemed that I had to pass one of those forbidding secret societies with their closed, enigmatic facades. On High Street I saw what looked like a rose-brown stone tomb, two small but massive buildings linked by a tall doorway. There was no sign there, and no street number, no information, no words. It was utterly closed to the world. Every time I passed by, it reminded me that there were secrets I couldn’t learn.

  What were those secrets? What had the Wolverine found out?

  * * *

  I drove up to the town of Cornwall, which is a tiny, sleepy village up in the northwestern hills. Its claim to fame is a wooden bridge, which doesn’t really make it famous. I went to the town hall, the historical society, the library, and the only restaurant in town, The Wandering Moose. The Moose knew nothing about her, and the historical society was closed, but at the town hall I learned that the Ricks family had bought their house in the twenties, around the time Alison was born. At the library a gray-haired woman wearing blue-rimmed glasses told me where to find the place.

  “No one’s left in that family,” she said. “She was an only child. Her parents died years ago. They were summer people, not locals. The house is closed up now. I don’t know who owns it. She came back for a while in the summers, during the sixties and seventies, but when she moved to London she stopped.”

  “And was she popular here?” I asked. “Did people like her? Did you know her?”

  The woman looked at me. “People liked her,” she said, shutting her mouth like a purse with a snap. She’d been friendly before, but now something had changed.

  “Did you know her?” I repeated.

  The woman nodded frugally.

  “After she left?”

  The woman said, “I went to see her in London once.”

  But that’s all she would say. She shook her head at all my other questions.

  “Closing time,” she told me finally.

  I drove out to see the house, up a long open hill with hayfields on either side. It was a white farmhouse, set on the edge of a stone retaining wall. I got out and walked around, but it was closed and locked. The shutters were crooked, and the lawn was tall grass. I looked out over the view that Alison Ricks had grown up with an
d wondered why she hadn’t come back. What had happened in London?

  I was working my way through the letters. I’d finished with Naples, and moved to New York. The letters between her and Coleman had stopped because they were then living in the same city. She wrote to another friend from college, though, and there were some letters to her editor. They were fun to read. Ricks was smart and engaging. She seemed to be part of a big group of friends that did everything together. She talked about what she did and who she saw, but she said nothing about her love life, which was a little odd for a lively woman in her twenties. I wondered if she were gay, and concealing it.

  I’d already begun writing the book at night, and by Christmas I’d done the first few chapters. They weren’t genius—they certainly weren’t Alison Ricks—but they weren’t bad. I sent them to Jake and he called.

  “They’re good,” he said, “I like them.” I had the feeling he hadn’t actually read them.

  “What do you hear about Wareham?” I asked.

  “Nothing yet,” he said, which reminded me that at any moment he might find that her book was about to come out. “Have you made any discoveries? Any secrets?”

  “There’s some great correspondence,” I said. “She writes a great letter.”

  “Yeah,” Jake said. “That’ll win you the Pulitzer.”

  “I think she might have been gay,” I said.

  Jake sighed. “Not a shocker. Would have been a shocker in the sixties, but not now.”

  “I know. But there’s something going on.” I told him about Wareham walking into the staff room. And searching through the files online I’d found there was some material that was restricted, not to be seen until twenty-five years after her death. It was only referred to by file numbers: Alison Ricks, Files X–XIV were not available.

  “I don’t know how she gets into that room,” I said. “They don’t give me any hint of it.”

  “Maybe she got special access through her editor,” Jake said. “Didn’t he go to Yale?” He thinks everything is determined by where you went to college. He’s sort of right, but not the way he thinks.

  “That wouldn’t do it,” I said. “It would be some other way. I think she’s been buttering someone up, but who? Some big donor, maybe.”

  “Ask the staff,” Jake said. “Butter them up.” Then he changed the subject: “I did hear something about London.”

  “What?”

  “Some rumor about the woman she lived with.”

  “What woman?”

  “That’s all I know,” he said. I could hear him shrug.

  * * *

  The next day the Wolverine was at her desk again. She sat hunched down over her laptop as if she were about to pick it apart and eat it. She was wearing her rodent expression, squinting at the letters, ticking at her computer. Which ones was she looking at? And what had she been doing with that young man heading for the staff room?

  I was buddies by now with Chelsea, and one day I asked her about the forbidden files.

  She nodded pleasantly. “That’s right. Not available.”

  “Is there any chance of just seeing them?” I asked. “Not taking notes, just reading them?”

  Chelsea shook her head. “Absolutely not. They aren’t even kept with the other files, so they can never be taken out by accident.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “By accident! Does that ever happen?”

  “It has,” she said, frowning. “It won’t with these. They’re kept in the staff office.”

  I nodded.

  “But I’ve seen other researchers go into that room,” I said.

  “Not to look at the files,” Chelsea told me. “It would be for some administrative thing. Like checking the chronology of the listings.”

  “Could I do that?” I asked. “Check the chronology?” I had no idea what that meant, which was so obvious that Chelsea didn’t answer, only frowned and shook her head.

  What was in the sealed files? I tried to deduce the content from their place among the rest, but there didn’t seem to be a chronological gap.

  At lunchtime each day the Wolverine would fold up her laptop and speed off, as though she were meeting someone. Of course we didn’t speak to each other in the research room, where the only sound was the quiet clack of keyboards, and we also didn’t speak to each other anywhere else. When we met in the hall we nodded as we passed.

  One day she was there with another woman. This one was also short, but blond, with that slick streaked-hair-gold-earrings-fuck-you look, like she’s too good to bother letting you cross her retina. The two of them sat side by side at the table. The Wolverine was showing her things, and talking quietly. The next day the new woman appeared alone. I saw her at lunchtime, walking up and down outside, talking on her cell phone, and I realized, with a horrid thrill, that she was a hired assistant. I wondered again how much the Wolverine had gotten for an advance.

  The letters to Ricks’s editor, William Jens, in the beginning of the seventies, were entertaining. Ricks hadn’t been part of the hippie crowd, but she’d been amused by it. She wrote to Jens about whatever she was working on, and talked generally about the literary world. It suddenly dawned on me that Coleman was a woman, not a man; it seemed more and more likely that Ricks had been gay. Toward the end of the decade I noticed that she began to seem uncomfortable talking about her work. When Jens asked her how things were going, instead of answering she’d deflect the question. At first she was breezy: I wish I knew! but then as time went on she sounded more serious: I don’t know. I don’t know when the next will appear.

  The Wolverine and I continued to nod casually to each other in the halls. One day, in the ladies’ room, I came out of the stall to see her standing with her back to me at the sink. She was examining her chin in the mirror. I looked directly at her, but she didn’t meet my eyes, and I had the feeling she was deliberately ignoring me, she was consciously denying my existence in the world, as though I was invisible. I felt affronted, in a way that had nothing to do with our competition, and I think that in that moment, when she picked sordidly at her chin, her eyes nearly crossed in her effort to focus, our relationship turned.

  That night I called Jake.

  “How’s it going?” he asked.

  “Well,” I said. “I think I have a lead.” This was not strictly true, but now I was surer about Ricks being gay.

  “You find out about London?” he asked, which was the question I didn’t want to hear. I didn’t want to leave the Beinecke, with its echoing stone courtyard and the secret societies standing guard around it. I didn’t want to leave the Wolverine panting over her laptop and slipping illicitly into the staff room. I didn’t want to leave her weaselly assistant. I had the feeling that if I left, something would go wrong.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “When?” Jake asked.

  “I’ll book a flight,” I said.

  * * *

  Two weeks later I was on the plane.

  During the flight I finally read Ricks’s last book. I hadn’t wanted to read it before, but now I had to. I read it high over the Atlantic, turning the pages faster and faster out of distaste: it was awful. The story was about a young woman in an abusive relationship, but the insights were puerile and simplistic, and the writing was utterly clumsy and dead. The next day she woke up and sighed. It was time for some hard thinking . . . Billy gave her a heavy look, like a bulldozer. It was painful to see the name Alison Ricks on the cover. Where were those golden sentences, where was that shimmering light-filled prose? I wondered if this had been her first attempt at a novel, or something written at the end, when her mind was wandering. I put it away with distaste, and also with sorrow.

  I’d gotten in touch with her estate, and they’d given me permission to come to the house. There was a housekeeper in residence, and I wondered if it was the same one I’d seen twelve years earlier. Twelve or eight?

  At that same tall house in Islington I knocked on the door and stood waiting on the sidewalk. For a
long time I heard nothing. The street was oddly empty, and lined with high dark trees. Finally I knocked again.

  The door opened suddenly. An elderly woman stood inside. I’d never seen her before. She was my height, with wide shoulders and a big bosom. Her frizzy gray hair was cut short.

  “Hello. Are you the writer?” She had a loud, wheezy voice, and a slightly cockney twang.

  I said yes, and she smiled and stepped back.

  “Welcome!” she said theatrically.

  She took me back to the kitchen, where we sat at a small wooden table. She made us tea and I asked her about Alison Ricks. I started with the basics: her name, and how long she’d worked there. I like to ask simple, factual questions first. People are sure of the answers, which gives them confidence, and then, with any luck, they open up.

  “My name is Eleanor Harkwood,” she said, “and I worked for Miss Ricks for thirty years. No, I lie, it’s a bit longer, really, as I worked part-time here before I worked full-time.”

  I asked lots of questions: when had Miss Ricks moved here (1980, just before her time), how did she spend her days (working at her desk, reading, working in the garden), who were her friends?

  “She had many friends,” said Miss Harkwood. “Many, many friends. All writer types, I think. Very intelligent people, they were.”

  “And did she go out often? Or entertain?”

  “She went out often, she loved it. She liked entertaining, they both did, but it was Miss Ricks who organized it. Miss Mays liked parties, but she didn’t do the organizing.”

  “Miss Mays?” I said, my head down over my pad.

  “Miss Pauline Mays,” replied Miss Harkwood. “Her friend.” The word “friend” seemed to be in quotes, and I looked up. She was gazing at me intently, as though hoping I was receiving some sort of signal.

  “Oh, Miss Mays,” I said, as though I knew who she was. “And did she live here too?”

  “Oh, yes,” Miss Harkwood said, nodding. “It was her house.”