I thought of the Icelandic sagas, of the tragic feuds started by women. Women were always shaming and nagging their relatives into avenging a death, a dirty look, a trivial insult. Was Warren warning me away from Elaine? Steal a woman—and it’s war. I wanted to think that could be true, but I knew that I wasn’t even remotely a threat.
“Do you know my favorite part of my war work?” Warren was saying. “I loved naming the missions. Operation Othello! The literary touch! That’s why they wanted me on board. Times like that, I knew we would win. My God, to feel that sure again. That certainty of being guided, of being on the side of the angels. Operation St. Anthony’s Fire. Obviously not a real plague, not even we would do that. The rumor was enough. Fear works wonders, as you’ve doubtless noticed. It’s a vital weapon in any arsenal, if used judiciously. Oh, the bedbugs! You wouldn’t believe how easy it is to persuade vermin to move from one set of beds to another. Operation Vitus. Amazing how rapidly a few itchy bites can demoralize a population. We had an entomologist consultant from St. Louis. So . . . what’s happening with The Vixen?”
“Right,” I said. “The Vixen.” I’d practiced how I was going to begin, but now I couldn’t remember. “Mr. Landry—”
“Warren. Please. How many times must I ask my team to call me Warren?”
My team? Was I on Warren’s team? Calling him by his first name was the least I could do for a teammate. “Warren, I realize this novel is a special case, not what we usually publish.” I drained my drink in one swallow because that was what men in the movies did for courage. “But I think the book could be better.”
“Better is good,” said Warren. “Better is optimum. Better is why we hired you.”
The Vixen couldn’t have been why they’d hired me. Anyway, better wasn’t enough. I needed to know how far I could push Anya Partridge. “On the sentence level there’s lots that could be done. And in a larger way . . . I feel she draws an awfully hard line about something that’s never been clear.”
“A larger way. Meaning . . . the politics? The Rosenberg case? Is that what you’re saying? Please tell me that’s not what you’re saying.”
“I guess that’s what I’m saying.” How had that slipped out?
“Jesus Christ help us,” said Warren.
Why didn’t Warren order more whiskey now that we really needed it? He turned toward me so that I had to lean back, regarding him from a perspective that turned the bull-and-rooster mural into a backdrop for the lecture that I sensed coming on.
“I don’t know your true feelings about this subject.” He caught himself mid-sneer and seemed to be listening to a voice—Elaine’s?—reminding him that true feelings were nothing to be sneered at. “Unless you are suggesting tearing our vixen to pieces and publishing a pro-Rosenberg, pro-Moscow, pro-Communist, pro-atomic-spy novel. And if that’s what you have in mind—”
“It’s not.” In fact, I’d been thinking of something halfway between Anya’s novel and the book that Warren was describing.
“If that’s what you’re suggesting, then let me tell you that such a novel will never see the light of day. That would be the first problem, and the second would be that if such a book were to be published, we would lose our jobs, our business, and probably find ourselves—or anyway, you would find yourself—testifying before some hostile, functionally illiterate Senate committee. Then we would all go to jail or, best case, drive taxis and starve. And our authors would be left without a publisher. Is that how you envision our future . . . Mr. Putnam?” He pronounced my name as if he knew that Putnam wasn’t my legitimate surname. Had Uncle Maddie told him? Uncle Maddie would never. It was his last name too.
“That’s not what—”
“You can’t be too careful these days. Perception is everything, and you can’t be perceived as being soft on Communism, as having been tarred with Herr Marx’s gluey brush. At the same time you can’t be too anti-Russian since, if Communism falls, as it certainly will, Russia might be our next market.” Warren chuckled. “In any case, something that seems anti-Communist—our Vixen, for example—is not so much anti-Communist as pro-American. Because here in the United States we are free to write anything we want. Do you see what I mean?”
Yes, I did. And I didn’t. My doubts didn’t stop me from nodding so vigorously I felt vaguely motion sick.
“Dissident Eastern Bloc authors don’t get published in their home countries. We’ve put a few of these brave refugees on our list, but only after they’d gone safely into exile. One Czech writer in particular . . . well! Better let sleeping dogs lie. Americans who publish the hard Left don’t get to publish anymore, except, I suppose, for those broadsides some commie street bum wants to sell you for a nickel. And those of us in the reasonable middle are getting screwed from both sides. I hate to ask, I don’t want to ask, but to quote Senator You-Know-Who, Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?”
I longed to know where Warren’s question fell on the continuum between serious and ironic. But Warren was unreadable, partly because I couldn’t bring myself to look at his face long enough to read it.
“No!” I said, so loudly that the bartender said, “Is everything all right, gentlemen?”
“Yes. For the moment, good sir,” said Warren. “Everything couldn’t be better.”
I said, “No, I am not. I’m not a Communist. That is not what I’m saying.”
But what was I saying? My mother had known Ethel when they were girls. I didn’t believe that Ethel and Julius should have been executed. I had promised myself to keep Ethel’s name bright and unsullied by lies.
I said, “I mean the literary side of The Vixen. I have corrections and suggestions on almost every page. I’m not sure how I can do all of it in a memo, or even with marginal notes. We spoke about changing the names. If the writer and I could just have a brief talk . . .”
“The literary side of The Vixen? I assume that’s a joke. But it’s funny. I like you, Simon. Let’s play out our little drama. I’ll get in touch with Anya. I’m sure a phone call could be arranged.”
Here was where the whiskey helped. This was what it was for. “I meant a brief talk in person.”
“You’re saying you want to meet Anya?” As Warren grinned at me, over his drink, the wrinkles around his eyes seemed calculated to the millimeter for maximum merriment and self-assurance.
Oh, why wasn’t I in some library, reading about warriors who had been dead for so long that nothing could hurt them? It was so much harder protecting the newly dead, who didn’t need my help any more than the Vikings did. I was protecting something else, something even more precious than the future of the two Rosenberg sons. But I couldn’t have begun to explain. In the sagas, you only avenge your kinsmen. Not your country, not your neighbors, not your mother’s childhood acquaintance. Ethel and I weren’t related. But she had grown up alongside my mother. Mom could have been her, except that Mom wasn’t a Communist, and she’d married Dad and had me.
Another glass appeared before me, and I drank it down. How quickly would it kick in? Not fast enough to make me sound less shaky and stiff.
“That would be the ideal, yes. Talking to the author would be the best-case situation.” My voice rose and faltered on the knife edge of control.
Warren threw back his head and laughed. At what? At his confidence, his authority, his current level of contentment? Perhaps he was laughing at my fear, my confusion, my desire for an easy fix. My longing for the scenario in which we would end the Cold War, defeat McCarthy and Khrushchev, bring Ethel Rosenberg back from the dead, and never publish The Vixen.
“Excuse me for asking, Simon, I should know the answer, but have you ever in your young life actually dealt with a living writer?”
Warren knew I had. Florence Durgin had cried when I told her that Warren wanted to postpone her book. She said that her tears were not about her. She wanted her son to see the book. Maybe her book would turn him away from the dangerous path he’d chosen. Human kindnes
s prevented me from asking why her son couldn’t read it in manuscript.
“Authors have to be pampered,” Warren said. “Like helpless puking babies. Fed on white bread soaked in milk. Metaphorically, that is. In actual fact, they love to eat, especially when someone else is paying. Needless to say, Anya Partridge is not Florence Durgin. Anya’s brain needs to be stroked. One word—one unintentional misunderstanding—and it’s game over. Simon, have you ever seen a deer in the headlights?”
“Yes,” I lied. I could imagine what a deer in the headlights looked like. I had never been on a country road at night.
“Anyway, our little Anya makes Bambi look like Winston Churchill. Our Connecticut deer are domesticated compared to the wild Miss Partridge. With this woman, kid gloves might as well be sandpaper mittens.”
Wild and rough was what I’d dreamed. I stared down into the shot glass that seemed to have emptied itself.
“Refill?” said Warren. “Encore?”
“No thanks,” I said. “I’ve got more reading to do tonight. I’m trying to keep up with the mail.”
“Any gold in the slush pile?”
“Middle-aged suburban adultery. The last novel I rejected was called The Concupiscent Commuter: A Love Story.”
Warren laughed: an obliging chuckle. “I get it. Bad imitation Cheever. Boring. Been there, done that. Adultery is one of those sins that’s more fun to commit than to read about. Though probably there are others . . . Gluttony, sloth . . . what am I forgetting? Maybe every sin except murder . . . and even that . . . well, anyway. Don’t look so shocked. I’m joking! All right, give me a few days. I think I can arrange a meeting with Anya. Let me work on it. Bartender! One last round!”
But that wasn’t the last round. It was the last business round. The last professional round. Now it was almost as if we were friends, a younger friend, an older friend, one of whom worked for the other. Warren held forth on a range of subjects: Abraham Lincoln, the Founding Fathers, the First World War, the Russian science program. Why the British working class had resisted the teaching of Charles Darwin. The early career of George Orwell.
I was happy to listen. Nothing more was required.
Warren had a peculiar tic. He would reach back under his shirt and touch the back of his neck. I’d never thought about it, but now, having heard Elaine’s account of the disastrous Christmas party, I wondered if he was probing the place where his former partner grabbed him. What was Preston Bartlett’s problem? Without knowing the details, I took Warren’s side.
I enjoyed hearing Warren ramble. Nothing was being asked of me except to stay upright, nod my head, and not fall onto the bar. My last memory of the evening is of Warren bundling me into a cab and calling the driver Driver.
I recall him giving the driver money and my address. I wondered how he knew it. It must have been on some forms at work. How did he remember? I was grateful that he did, that he could deal with Driver for me.
He said, “Let’s do this again sometime. Better yet, let’s have a proper meal. Cheerio.”
Then he scuttled off down the street, moving surprisingly fast for an older man who’d drunk all that whiskey.
Chapter 6
Anya Partridge’s author portrait gave no clue as to the location of her dark, seductive opium den of a bedroom. I’d pictured a sanctuary carved out of a walk-up or a basement apartment, something down a few steps from the street on the fringes of Greenwich Village or a bombed-out corner of Chelsea. But the card that Warren gave me said Elmwood and listed an address on River Road in Shad Point, which, I learned, was forty miles north of Manhattan. Everything about the name, the location, and Anya’s photo converged into the image of a stately Hudson River mansion, the house where Anya grew up, or where she was being kept in extravagant style by her lover, an ancient but still lusty robber baron.
I was touched by Warren’s offer to lend me his car and his driver, Ned, for my meeting with “our author.” Did Warren call Ned Driver? Warren called him Ned. I was grateful, yet I checked the gift for signs of a Trojan horse. Was Warren so insulated that he thought I needed an escort to venture beyond the edge of Manhattan? Or had he found an ingenious way of knowing how long I spent with Anya? Was he Anya’s jealous lover? I doubted it, considering how casual he was with Elaine and the women he courted at the office, all of whom seemed above and beyond possessiveness and drama. Maybe Warren was making sure I was doing a good job, not screwing things up with a writer we needed to succeed.
Ned was waiting for me outside the office. It was a foggy, raw April day that reminded me of the unseasonably nasty weather at my college graduation. Ten months ago. My God. How could all that time have passed? What did I have to show for it except some scrawled notes on a bad novel in my briefcase? The pages of the scholarly book that I would never write flipped past me, too fast to read, and my unwritten study of the sagas snapped shut before I could make out the title.
I told myself not to despair, to enjoy the moment. Relax. I’d never ridden in the back of a Lincoln before.
The sensation of floating above the road took some getting used to. I’d had dreams of traveling in an airplane that stayed on the ground and navigated the streets instead of the air. In those dreams I was always relieved because road travel seemed safer than flying, but now I felt disoriented, gliding along without feeling the blacktop bumping beneath me.
Ned drove up the West Side Highway, then over a bridge that took us past bluff-side Tudor manors and along the Hudson through enchanted villages, past a ruined castle. Had we left the twentieth century? Had I rocketed into the past with Ned at the helm of our time machine? Ned didn’t speak. He didn’t want me to speak. His silence discouraged conversation.
We passed a massive complex of high walls and towers and fences, and I recognized Sing Sing from TV. Not the place so much as its cruel, bullying spirit.
Ned didn’t talk, didn’t turn, didn’t twitch. I was on my own with the irony of passing the place where Ethel and Julius died, and where Anya’s novel was set. Ned knew it was Sing Sing, but probably not about Anya’s novel.
How chilly it was. How bleak the sky looked, how sticklike and straggly the trees, how black and knotty the branches, how pale and stunted the grass. I weighed every banal observation about the weather, considered whether or not to mention it to Ned, and decided against it.
Not long past the prison we turned into a driveway marked by a sign that said Elmwood. My dreams of Anya, the tough-girl sexy rebel novelist in her cold-water basement flat had not included the manicured road that curled through a grove of ancient elms. I’d been closer to the mark when I’d imagined her as the pampered mistress of a Hudson River robber baron.
Ned stopped to let some pedestrians cross, shuffling like buffaloes at a watering hole. Bundled-up attendants pushed bundled-up patients in wheelchairs. Every head, healthy and sick, drooped on every chest. The attendants were in white, while the patients wore identical ugly parrot-green wool caps, pulled down their foreheads against the damp and chill. It was nice that they had warm matching hats, like members of a sports team, but the color flattered no one. There were too many patients and caretakers for me to think I was seeing someone’s elderly clan wheeled out for fresh air.
Elmwood was an institution.
I asked Ned, “Does Miss Partridge work here?”
Ned waited till the last inmate was safely across the road. Then he said, into the mirror, “She lives here.”
Ned’s tone said mental illness. What clue had I missed? After all those months “battling” the slush pile, I had yet to learn that lots of troubled people wrote books, masterpieces and trash, better and worse than Anya’s. Warren had talked in meetings about the gifted poets he’d known at Harvard who’d thrown themselves into the Charles and wound up at some ritzy nuthouse in the Berkshires. The difference was that we weren’t publishing the deranged fictions that passed through my office. We were publishing The Vixen, and Anya’s problems, whatever they were, had become my own.
The faux-Gothic stone mansion was overheated, and I began to sweat even as I pushed open the massive faux-medieval door. Rivulets ran down my armpits as I asked to see Anya Partridge. A nurse in a white uniform sat behind the reception desk. Another nurse, in an equally crisp white uniform, sighed, then rose and, looking back over her shoulder at me with resignation and pity, led me down the hall. I thought of Ethel’s Death House matron, that final kiss on the cheek, the prison guard telling the world how sad Ethel was and how much she loved her sons. I expected locks and keys, gates, alarms. But there were none.
I could have found Anya’s room on my own, so strong was the smell of incense wafting out from beneath the door. The nurse knocked gently, then stepped back, less like someone with good manners than like someone disarming a bomb.
“She’s expecting you,” the nurse said.
Anya Partridge opened the door, and we shook hands in a steamy cloud of perfume and French tobacco. She looked just like her photograph, as did the carved, canopied bed behind her, which she appeared to have just left. I was at once unsurprised and shocked that she so closely resembled her author portrait. I’d spent so long staring at it, I felt as if I knew her. And for a few deranged moments I imagined that she knew what we’d done in my dreams. As if she’d been there with me.
Beneath the florals and smoke was a syrupy candy scent that I thought might be opium. I was afraid to inhale, though I knew that was silly.
“You must be Mr. Putnam.”
“Please call me Simon,” I said.
“Then you must call me Anya. Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly.”
My strangulated laugh was pure hysteria. I wished I could take it back. I felt helpless, unnerved. Anya had already taken control. How had I let that happen? Surely this wasn’t how writers and editors customarily started their editorial meetings.
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