I nodded.
“Good. Because look what just came in.”
He handed me a mock-up cover.
The Vixen, the Patriot, and the Fanatic
A Novel by Anya Partridge
The fat purple typeface dripped shiny purple droplets down a lurid orange page. In the upper right quadrant was a beautiful blond woman in a long tight dress with a mermaid tail sewn from the American flag. In one hand she held a leash. At the end of the leash was a large red fox. I thought of Anya’s pelt in a cardboard box in my room, under a burrow of papers and books.
“It’s . . . amazing.” I’d always thought I’d be more courageous if I was put to the test. But I’d pictured a Viking test, a standard-issue challenge to one’s bravery and resolve. I’d never pictured a test like this. I’d lacked the imagination. However bad I’d thought The Vixen was—the cover made everything worse.
Warren grinned. Did he really like this cover? Did he think it was funny? Irresistibly commercial? Could we publish something so radically different from the sober elegant jackets for which the house was known? We never used images, just a background of some deep color and an elegant white type to communicate our seriousness and high ideals.
“Glad you like it,” said Warren. “Glad you like the cover as much as we do.”
He laughed, then abruptly stopped laughing. “You didn’t really think we’d publish something this . . . slutty. We were just winding you up, a bit. Seeing how you’d react. Sorry if our little joke didn’t strike your funny bone. This is the actual cover.”
He handed me another mock-up. No image. Just type, against an off-white background. Larger type than we usually used, but that was the only concession. The Vixen was in red letters, The Patriot in type patterned with the Stars and Stripes, The Fanatic in bold, hard black-and-white letters that looked part Communist, part Nazi.
“What do you think? Is it too much? A little loud for us, right?”
I couldn’t answer because my eyes had misted with tears as I tried to understand why Warren would have gone to all the trouble creating the fake cover. Why would he do that to me? He couldn’t have done it alone. More people must be in on this. More than I suspected. But who? Who were they, and how much did they know? It must have meant telling others the secret in order to design the phony cover as another test of my courage and dignity, another test I failed. I failed again to persuade myself that being the butt of a practical joke was a sign of acceptance, like hazing, a harsh initiation into Warren’s club.
“Good. Then we’re understood. You’ve missed our May Day deadline. I want the finished manuscript by . . . let’s see. Two weeks from today. On my desk. At the latest! Or send it straight to copyediting. I assume that will work for you.”
“I’ll make it work,” I said.
I was about to leave when Warren held up one finger.
“You know,” he said, “I do think it was a pity that Crowley didn’t recruit you. Despite the family security concerns, you would have been good at the job. You’re intelligent and sensible. Reasonable. Even . . . malleable, when necessary. You know that it’s often a wise idea to listen to people who know more than you do. And to do what they tell you. That’s why I thought you’d be a good choice for this, spinning Anya’s straw into gold for my political friends.”
Malleable meant spineless. Is that what Warren thought of me? Was it true?
“Malleable?” I needed to hear how it sounded.
“Do you want me to spell it out? In all the time I’ve known you, Simon, I have never heard you say one word that you didn’t vet for my approval. You’ve wanted me to like you, as if we were ever going to be friends. Even over drinks, even drunk, you didn’t have the balls to say what you really thought. What is the point of drinking, old boy, if we can’t have our . . . disagreements? Anya walked all over you, as I knew she would.”
I needed to ask him what he meant, but I seemed to have forgotten how to speak. Warren paused a moment, to let the dust of the ruined city settle.
“How did I get distracted? Right. We were talking about recruitment and family security concerns . . . so let me ask you about your family’s sympathies. Tell me: How do your people vote?”
It was none of his business, but I said, “They voted for Roosevelt. They’re Roosevelt Democrats.”
“Ah, Franklin,” said Warren. “Dear homely Eleanor. I’m sure you know that funny story about their fishing expedition.” He waited.
I shook my head no.
“Well, apparently the Roosevelts were fishing off the coast of Long Island, and someone in their party caught a fish. Eleanor asked the captain what kind of fish it was. ‘A jewfish,’ the captain said. Eleanor said, ‘Oh, dear, I was hoping we’d left the Jews behind in New York.’”
Warren’s imitation of Eleanor’s wobbly voice was perfect. The voice that had brought my parents such comfort and reassurance now aimed its nasty bigotry at us. And Warren thought it was funny.
My enduring shame is that I didn’t tell Warren Landry to go to hell, or punch him in the nose, or make some other pointless dramatic gesture. My enduring shame is that I promised to get the manuscript in on time. And I thanked him.
“Thank you, Mr. Landry.”
“Warren,” he said. “How many times must I remind you . . . ?”
“Warren.”
I left his office door open.
“Please close the door,” he called after me, but I didn’t: my small, pitiful act of rebellion.
* * *
After my meeting with Warren, the world looked different, streaked with filth and at the same time washed clean, stripped of the grimy veil behind which filth had hidden. The elevator was crowded with strangers, all either plotting or being plotted against. Wind whistled up the elevator shaft. I felt the wind blow through me.
Crowley! That beatific old man who’d learned so many obscure languages and customs, whom so many strangers trusted, to whom people told the magical stories they’d handed down for generations. The old fraud had been a snoop, a covert op dispatching coded reports about troop movements and fortifications. Maybe he was saving some lives, probably ending others.
I couldn’t risk lunch at George Jr.’s. I couldn’t face Elaine or anyone from work. I walked the extra block to Nedick’s and sat at the counter and ordered an orangeade and three hot dogs: suicide food. My drink was the color of an atomic blast. I took a sip, more from curiosity then thirst. Flecks of fake pulp stuck in my throat. The hot dog spit fat in my mouth. I longed to be back on the boardwalk, eating hot dogs, mourning Ethel on that sad Friday night when she died. Before everything that happened since.
A kindly waitress, name tag Kate, asked, “Is everything okay?” Nothing was okay. Everything was not okay. But thank you, no, I’m fine. The ground had given way beneath me. Everything was a lie. I should have stayed in the thirteenth century. The Icelandic lords had spies who attended feasts at their enemies’ homes and reported back. But those murders and revenges were so personal, modest, domestic. There was bloodshed and death, but so little death, so little blood compared to what Warren had likely shed. I no longer doubted what The Vixen was meant to accomplish or what I’d been asked to do. I knew how I must have looked to Warren. How much of myself I’d lost. The question was how I could find and reclaim it.
* * *
I left Nedick’s and returned to the office.
On my desk was a slip of pink paper, torn from a pad and printed with While you were out. It was the form that the receptionist, Violet, used to notify my colleagues about missed phone calls. No one ever called me at work. Could it have been Anya?
Despite everything I still wanted to see her. I wanted the old lies back.
The message said, Your father phoned. Meet him at Mount Sinai Hospital. Room 1401.
Elaine stopped me on my way out. She must have been there when the call came in. She knew everything. She cared.
She said, “Simon, if there’s anything I can do . . .” Tears shone in he
r eyes, magnifying their beauty.
“Thank you,” I said. I wished she’d met my parents. I wished she could go to the hospital with me. I wished she knew more about me. I wished I could tell her I loved her.
* * *
I could have learned to live with the memory of my mother lying under the blanket in her thin hospital gown and ID bracelet, of my father facing the door, spread-kneed, perched on the edge of her bed. I could have learned to ward off the onslaught of grief when I remembered the harsh, flickering light behind my mother’s head, the indigo shadows beyond its reach, the stark composition of two figures. My mother’s head was shaved and wrapped in the kind of thin mesh netting they put on expensive melons and tubs of ricotta. What were Mom and Dad doing in a Caravaggio? A Rembrandt?
More painful memories would come later, scenes from my parents’ last days. And yet that vision—Mom, Dad, the rumpled hospital bed, her washed-thin white shroud flecked with tiny blue stars—has stayed with me. It was my first early warning, the opening sentence of the sad book already being written.
My mother had her eyes closed. She didn’t hug or kiss me, but she knew I was there. She smiled. She knew that a smile was required. I felt she’d already left our world and risen out of reach. I wanted to hold on and keep her from floating further away.
I leaned down toward her.
“Don’t kiss me, honey,” she said. “I’m surgical-quality sterile germ-free. They’d have to start from scratch.” That didn’t sound scientific, but I wasn’t about to correct her.
I thought about Orpheus trying to rescue Eurydice from the underworld. Did I know any stories about grown children bringing a parent back from the dead? Aeneas carried his father on his back, but the father was alive. Demeter went to the underworld to rescue Persephone, but Persephone was her daughter. The rescue story I longed for would have violated the natural order. Crowley hadn’t told us any stories like that. The dead returned for vengeance but not for mother love. I could still hear Crowley’s voice in my head, but I couldn’t see him. The brave explorer drinking psychotropic home brew with the sworn virgins had turned into a seedy mole, slinking from doorway to doorway in some state socialist slum, leaving coded messages in a keyhole in Palermo.
“They drugged her,” said Dad.
My mother said, “I’m still here. Don’t talk about me like I’m not.” She sounded more annoyed than anything, which was a comfort, as she meant it to be.
Dad said, “Can I explain our situation to Simon? Simon, what can I tell you?” He was talking to me like a child, but I didn’t mind. Love and fear were inventing a new language that we understood, even if we’d just learned it.
There had been new tests, more tests, different tests based on earlier tests. Images and numbers. My mother’s migraines weren’t migraines. There was a growth in her brain. The doctors wouldn’t know what was going on until they went in there and looked.
In there meaning in my mother’s head? Went in and looked? This was not the time for Mr. Harvard Graduate to judge the word choice of the doctor who would soon have my mother’s brain, my mother’s life, in his hands.
Mom said, “These doctors act so modern. They know all the latest research. But if you ask me, we’re stuck in George Washington’s times, bloodletting and sticking on leeches.”
My father said, “They’re trying to help.”
Mom said, “I must be dying if you’re telling me not to criticize.”
I expected jokes, attempts at jokes, from my nervous dad. I wanted to hear Mom groan and tell him to lay off the humor, though she loved and appreciated his need to lighten things up. But we’d been changed beyond recognition. Would my father ever be funny again? It depended on what happened now. I had never contemplated two such different futures.
Two men in pale green scrubs and shower caps wheeled a gurney into the room. Dad and I scrambled out of their way. One attendant suggested that Mom remove her ring—the one with 1931 in tiny diamonds on the onyx that flipped to show her high school picture—and leave it with hubby.
Hubby. The word made us flinch.
“For medical reasons?” asked Mom. “Is my hand going to swell?”
“Probably not,” said the attendant. “It’s a legal thing. If it’s stolen, the hospital will be liable, and we’ll all feel bad—”
“No one’s going to steal it,” said Mom. “I’ll chance it. It’s the least of the risks I’m taking here, don’t you think, guys?”
No one was willing to rank-order the risks my mother was taking. They let her keep the ring. It was her protection, like Anya’s fox pelt. The thought of Anya seemed unlucky under the circumstances. I’d been trying not to think that the attendants’ uniforms were the same green as the uniforms of the waitstaff in the department store restaurant where I went with Anya.
Dad put his arm around me. I tried not to cry. I didn’t cry.
One of the attendants patted my father’s shoulder; another thumped my back. Reassurance, encouragement. How many shoulders had they patted, how many backs had they thumped that day? Why couldn’t I be grateful? Because they were taking my mother away. I shut my eyes as they wheeled her out. I was praying and praying.
Dad took me down to the cafeteria. We each took our own tray. We were separated on the food line by a young resident who couldn’t wait another second for his cracked, iridescent sheet of roast beef in pale greasy juice. At the register Dad and I discovered that we’d each ordered a large side of mashed potatoes with gravy and three pats of butter. It was the first time we’d laughed all day. Dad insisted on paying for us both. It hadn’t occurred to me to offer.
He said that Mom had been in pain, but she was going to feel better. Then we ate our potatoes. After that we sat in the family waiting room on the neurology floor.
A minute passed, or an hour.
Dad said, “No atheists in this foxhole.”
I said, “Did they say that in the war?”
“Not where I was,” said Dad.
It was strange that he’d mentioned atheists, because I couldn’t stop praying. Let my mother be okay and I would do anything. I wouldn’t hesitate, I’d never waver, I’d do the right thing about The Vixen. I would see to it that Ethel’s name remained bright and unsullied by lies. I would be brave and honest. I’d be the kind of person my mother would be proud of.
I remembered a line from Rilke: “Shorter are the prayers in bed but more heartfelt.” It was from one of my favorite poems, “The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke,” a prose poem about a knight who falls in love and sleeps with a beautiful woman the night before he is killed in battle. When I’d read it in college, I’d felt it was written just for me: so medieval, so modern. In the waiting room, I thought, Rilke wrote the poem to rescue me from this place, at this moment.
“Shorter are the prayers in bed but more heartfelt.” The line was beautiful, but untrue. Long or short, in this place or that, all prayers are heartfelt. Everyone in the waiting room was praying nonstop as they dozed or chatted or looked at their watches.
I closed my eyes. I faked sleep.
Dad said, “Are you okay?” He was rooting through a pile of ragged magazines. Had his arms gotten skinnier in the past days, or had I only now noticed?
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m resting. Close your eyes a minute.”
My father said, “I’m keeping your mother alive. You can do what you want.”
Keeping Mom alive meant Time and Newsweek, Good Housekeeping. Dad didn’t care. He turned pages. I’d been so unhappy when I lived with them. Now I wanted those months back. I hadn’t known enough, hadn’t been wise enough to love that time in my life.
My father was doing a crossword puzzle when I fell asleep.
“SIMON.” DAD ONLY had to say it once.
I opened my eyes to see a nurse who seemed to be saying that Dr. Albert was just getting out of surgery and would come in to see us.
I asked, “How did it go?”
The nurse said,
“The doctor will explain everything.” She wasn’t allowed to tell us.
“Please.” I couldn’t help myself.
“She’ll be fine,” said the nurse.
When she left, my father said, “Do you think she was telling the truth?”
I thought she was. I hoped she was. I didn’t trust myself to answer.
Dr. Albert’s salt-and-pepper beard was trim, his wire-rimmed glasses shiny, his hands and his green scrubs too immaculately clean for someone just getting out of surgery. It was thoughtful of him to have changed so he wasn’t covered in Mom’s blood.
He said, “Well, that was a piece of cake.”
His bedside manner was just this side of clinically insane. Opening up my mother’s skull had been a piece of cake? Maybe he was nervous or had problems communicating. But charm and tact don’t matter as much when you have good news. No one says a piece of cake when a patient died on the table. Or if the prognosis was dire. He was communicating perfectly well. He was eloquent, in fact.
“Piece of cake for you maybe,” said my father.
“Obviously.” The doctor laughed. “For me. Your wife—your mother—will be fine. The small meningioma, that is to say the growth, that was causing”—he looked at Mom’s chart—“Mrs. Putnam’s headaches turned out to have been benign and easily excised.”
Growth. Meningioma. Mom’s pain had had nothing to do with the Rosenbergs or McCarthy. That’s what the doctor would have said if I’d asked.
Dad said, “This is my son. Simon. A Harvard graduate. He’s in publishing now. He’s an editor.”
“What house?” asked the doctor.
“Landry, Landry and Bartlett.” After my meeting with Warren, just saying it would have been uncomfortable if my relief about Mom hadn’t made everything else seem unimportant.
“I didn’t mean what publishing house. What Harvard house?”
“Kirkland.” The home of the public school wonks.
The Vixen Page 25
