The Vixen

by Francine Prose

  He shrugged. “Eliot,” he said, though I hadn’t asked—and I could have guessed. Eliot House was where the prep school students lived, the guys who would go on to be Upper East Side neurosurgeons. The arty rich guys, like Warren, favored Adams House. The surgeon’s asking me which house I’d been in, and his telling me he’d lived in Eliot, was a comradely backslap and a put-down, both at once.

  “What did you major in?”

  “English.”

  No way I was going to say Folklore and Mythology and watch a brain surgeon’s response. But it wouldn’t have mattered. Dr. Albert didn’t care.

  He said, “I’m quite a reader. When I get two minutes.” He held up both hands and rotated them, miming a surgical pre-op scrub and how busy he was. I stared at the thick, hairy fingers that had just been inside my mother’s skull.

  He said, “I’ve been wanting to read that new book, that bestseller . . . The Roosevelt Family of Sagamore Hill.”

  Jewfish, I thought. Jewfish.

  The doctor was waiting for a response.

  I said, “I’ll send you a copy,” though we hadn’t published it. The doctor would forget our conversation as soon as it was over.

  “That would be great,” he said. “Very kind of you.”

  A self-involved phony had saved my mother. Yet still I wanted to kneel. I wanted to weep. I wanted to kiss his hands and hug him.

  The nurse urged Dad and me to go home and rest. She would watch over Mom.

  My father took a cab all the way from Mount Sinai to Coney Island, an unheard-of expense. He dropped me off at my apartment. Did he want me to come home with him and stay overnight? He wanted to be alone. We both did. And yet we clung to each other as I got out of the cab.

  I hadn’t forgotten my prayers, my promise to do the right thing. All I had to do was carry it out. One step after another.

  Ten days later my mother came home, already feeling much better.

  Chapter 14

  I devoted every moment to rewriting The Vixen. I worked on it at the office and through most of the night, at my apartment. I used the version I’d edited with Anya, but I went further to turn it—word by word, sentence by sentence—into something halfway decent.

  When my intervention came to light, The Vixen would never be released, though it would be a much better book than the one Warren had entrusted to me. The novel wouldn’t say that Esther was guilty. It wouldn’t insist that she was innocent. The reader would mourn her death even though no one knew for sure exactly how much she knew, or what she’d done.

  I worked in a fever of exhilaration and purpose. I was taking revenge. Not on Anya, not so much on Warren, but on the lying and pain, the grief and death that men like McCarthy—and Warren and Crowley—had caused.

  It was the sweetest kind of revenge: wholesome, direct, guilt-free. A revenge without violence, without corpses or blood. A plot was being foiled, justice was being served, without injury or death. No real harm was being done except to Landry, Landry and Bartlett, which had never been what it seemed, or what I’d been led to believe. There was a slim chance that Warren would report me to the authorities whom he pretended to scorn and fear, but I didn’t think he would. He’d want the whole thing to go away. Never to have happened.

  I made minimal edits to the first ten pages, so that someone—for example, Warren—skimming the book for a quick read wouldn’t be alarmed. I had to keep the characters’ names, Esther and Junius, though I longed to change them. Anyway, it wouldn’t matter if the book never appeared in print.

  Around page eleven, I started making substantive fixes, eliminating the trashiness and the clichés, making Esther more complex: a woman who knew what her husband believed but not what he did. In my version Esther lived by the highest ideals. She was a loyal American. She believed in justice for all. She hardly understood the crimes she was accused of. She’d wanted to be an opera singer and wound up housebound with two boys, knowing that her life would never be better than it was, but that most people had it worse. That was what she thought about when Junius lectured her about Communism, speeches I had to keep short for fear of alienating the reader. She thought about the contradiction between her love of comfort and her desire that everyone in the world could be as comfortable as she was. She’d never lost the hope of someday singing on stage. Sometimes she heard Puccini arias in her head. Writing that, I thought about how I’d wanted to study medieval Icelandic: about my wanting that still.

  With each line I wrote and rewrote, I felt as if I was keeping a promise to my mother, a promise I’d never actually made. I’d promised whatever I’d prayed to when she was in surgery. God, love, science. The god of something. I’d promised to do the right thing. Prayers in extremis can be quickly forgotten. But my heartfelt vow stayed with me.

  I tightened pages and trimmed scenes. I added an episode in which the Rosensteins’ lawyer tells them that the state has, as its most damning evidence, the Jell-O box they’d allegedly used as a signal. My character Esther says, “I always hated Jell-O. It was bad for the kids. But Junius, with his sweet tooth, insisted on having it in the house. As it’s turned out, Jell-O was very bad for us—fatal. It was my husband’s fault, though I loved him and I love him still.”

  In my novel, Esther tells the prison matron at Sing Sing, “Who would have believed that I would be going to the electric chair because my husband liked a gelatin dessert? A monster must have invented the story about the torn Jell-O box. The match-up with the Russian never happened. Not in my kitchen, not in my sister-in-law’s kitchen. Nowhere. It never happened. It was evil to say that it did.”

  I hated knowing that the Jell-O box was Warren’s invention. Obviously I left out the passage in which Esther licks the Jell-O powder while the spy and her husband watch. The missing page was still lost, but I rewrote it.

  I was making this scene up partly from scratch, since the original page was still missing. But no matter what I would have liked, I couldn’t leave out the Jell-O. It was part of history now, though as Anya (oh, Anya!) said, a novel wasn’t history. Whatever I did, the Jell-O found its way onto the page. I wrote a scene in which Esther dreamed she went to the supermarket, and there was nothing on the shelves but boxes and boxes of Jell-O.

  This was the first time I felt as if a piece of fiction were writing itself, the first time I experienced that sense of being guided, the freedom of no longer being myself, a glimmer of those moments of grace that I was lucky to enjoy from time to time, later, in my life as a writer. Perhaps, like love, those flashes of freedom and inspiration might have seemed less precious if they weren’t so rare, so unexpected, and, like love, so impossible to fake or will into existence.

  On weekends I went to the library to read old newspapers and microfilm. Making Esther my point-of-view character with necessarily limited knowledge gave me the freedom not to know—not to say—exactly what happened. The author and the reader could only know as much as she did. She’d done some typing. She and her husband were Communists. She loved her children. And after her conviction, she knew that she was going to die. I felt something like the pleasure I’d imagined when I’d thought that Warren might have a great book for me to edit. Later I’d feel a deeper joy, writing the book I’d imagined, but for now this was fine with me. It beat paralysis and despair.

  One problem with the original version of The Vixen was that the reader was supposed to celebrate Esther’s death. She’d slept with way too many men, neglected her kids, and betrayed our country. I made her death a tragedy and turned her fictive romance with the district attorney into a doomed love affair. I made her love her husband no matter what he’d done—or not. No matter what she’d done. Everything I’d learned in college, in life, it all went into The Vixen. As the book improved, so did my mood.

  As long as I was writing, I felt almost . . . optimistic. Maybe it was the experience of losing myself—and forgetting my problems. I wasn’t worried. I wasn’t afraid. I was happy, writing.

  Revising The Vixen, li
ne by line, was how I became a writer. It showed me what I could do, what I wanted to do. Rewriting The Vixen was, for me, like taking the first mild seductive dose of a drug to which I became addicted. Writers start out in many different and peculiar ways: as reporters, factory workers, cops, secretaries, teachers, mental patients.

  But it’s always seemed to me that the way I started writing was one of the strangest.

  I would be lying if I said that I never thought, This will show Warren how malleable I am. Even many years later, I’d catch myself thinking, This will show Warren, and I’d have to remind myself that Warren Landry was dead.

  * * *

  Now I had three versions of the novel. The original, the one that I’d created “in collaboration” with Anya, and this new one, drastically altered, the novel I might have written if I’d wanted to write a novel like The Vixen, the Patriot, and the Fanatic. Which I never would have wanted. I never would have written anything like that, but improving it had become an obligation. My assignment to myself. It was work I believed I had to do, as good a reason to write as any.

  At the office, I kept the manuscript in the drawer to which Julia had given me the key. I’d read a few lines, then lock up the pages. I don’t know why I acted as if someone might steal the novel, or as if it might detonate in the hands of an innocent office cleaner. Maybe I feared that Warren might sneak in and read it when I stepped out for lunch.

  Fixing its broken sentences, its overwritten paragraphs, its corny, euphemized sex scenes all made me think of Anya. What a terrible writer! If indeed she wrote it. Warren had told me more than he should, but he’d still insisted that Anya was the author.

  One afternoon, I slid the manuscript into the drawer and, thinking of a sentence I wanted to add, instantly took it out again. Or tried to.

  Something stuck. The drawer wouldn’t open. I reached behind the stack of pages and felt a sheet of paper wedged in the runner. I gently pried it loose, smoothed it out.

  I’d found the missing page.

  The previous page ended with the Russian agent and Junius Rosenstein watching Esther lick the Jell-O box. Esther told them that the Jell-O was good to the very last drop as Agent Gusev struggled not to imagine what else her pretty pink tongue had touched. The government never claimed that this scene took place in their kitchen—it was alleged to have happened at Ethel’s brother’s house, in New Mexico. But Anya (or whoever) must have thought it worked better this way, and I had to admit that she (or whoever) was right.

  The novel resumed on the page I held now.

  Comrade Gusev knew that he would do anything—anything. He would betray his country or blow up the planet to lick the powdered Jell-O off the tip of Esther’s tongue. So history turned on this kitchen drama that this irresistible spy enacted with the simplest prop: a box of strawberry dessert.

  It was Warren’s Jell-O box. Now it belonged to the world. It was the detail that everyone knew. But it was Warren’s creation.

  Under interrogation Agent Gusev told the attorney general about the Jell-O. The patriotic lawyer asked him how he could have done the evil he did, how he could have made the world more dangerous, exposed every man, woman, and child to the threat of nuclear annihilation.

  When Gusev told the prosecutor about the Jell-O box, the lawyer was infected with the fatal desire to watch Esther Rosenstein pleasure an empty box of Jell-O. So you could say that the Jell-O box did seal the Rosensteins’ doom, not only because it was the Communist spies’ secret signal, but because it promised the kind of pleasure that no man could resist.

  There was another paragraph, but I couldn’t go on. I wished the page had never resurfaced. I certainly hadn’t needed it to continue my revision.

  But the content mattered less than where I’d found it—and the typeface.

  This wasn’t the thick blurry alphabet produced by Anya’s vintage typewriter. The streamlined type, the tiny flaws in the letters, were identical to those in the version I’d gotten from Warren. Julia was the only one who would have opened and closed these drawers in the months before I got here. Julia must have typed it. Julia had put the manuscript in the drawer. Maybe she’d locked it up, as I did. I needed to see her, to talk to her, to ask her what she knew.

  Could she have written The Vixen? I hadn’t thought to suspect her. I knew so little about her. I’d only met her that once, and what I’d thought and remembered was: She was very pretty. Lovely and haunted and angry. I’d sensed there was something she wanted to tell me.

  I went out to the reception desk and told Violet that I had found a ring in my desk. In Julia’s former desk. I was pretty sure it was gold. I assumed it was Julia’s. I wanted to return it.

  Violet asked, Was it valuable? I said I didn’t think so. She waited for me to show her the ring, but she could hardly insist. She offered to mail it to Julia. She could insure it and (don’t tell Mr. Landry) charge it to the firm.

  “I want to return it myself. I want to tell her I’m sorry for . . . I don’t know. Taking her job.”

  Violet looked as if I’d just appeared, as if she’d never seen me before. She said, “I always thought that girl got screwed. She calls here every so often. Looking for copyediting work, poor thing. That baby’s probably four, five months old.”

  She wrote Julia’s phone number on one of the pink slips—While you were out—on which she recorded telephone messages like the one that said to meet Dad at the hospital. It made me superstitious, but also determined. It reminded me of my hospital waiting room prayers.

  “Give Julia my best, okay?” Violet said. “Give the baby a kiss for me.”

  “I will,” I said. “I promise.”

  AS I WAITED for Julia to answer the phone, my panic should have been a sign that something more was at stake, something beyond the likelihood that she had written or typed The Vixen. As the phone rang and rang, I thought: Everything is lost. I reminded myself that if no one answered, I could always call again later.

  I was about to hang up when a woman said, “What.” Not a question, not a hello.

  If a heart could turn over, mine did. A baby yowled in the background.

  I said, “Should I call back later?”

  Julia said, “How can I answer that if I don’t know who the fuck you are?”

  “Simon Putnam.” I didn’t want to say, The guy who took your job. “You showed me around your office . . .”

  “Oh, right. Are you still working for Warren?” She gave his name a funny stress that I didn’t know what to make of. One rumor was that she’d had Warren’s child. The baby wailed again.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m there. Here. For now.” Why did I say for now?

  I was ready to spill my private torment, then and there, on the phone, over the shrieks of the baby. It took all my self-control not to blurt out everything that had happened since I inherited Julia’s office.

  No one was better qualified to understand and help me. Julia knew Warren, Preston, Elaine. She and Anya had met in the lounge when Julia visited Preston. For all I knew she’d written The Vixen and recruited Anya to play the writer. Robertson Crowley recruited Warren. And Warren had recruited me, even if I hadn’t known it.

  I wanted Julia to admire the depth of the crisis of conscience I’d been having since The Vixen landed on my desk. Once I’d wanted to tell Elaine, tell a therapist, tell total strangers. My urge to confess had grown stronger now that I knew why I had been ordered to keep the book a secret.

  I said, “Violet sends her regards.” How insipid! Violet sends her regards.

  “Violet sends her regards?”

  Another protest from the baby explained Julia’s impatience with a guy who had taken her office and was calling to waste her time.

  I said, “Violet told me you do copyediting. I might have some work for you.”

  “Fiction?” she said. “Nonfiction?” Already her tone had warmed, more like someone wanting a job than someone wanting to end a conversation.

  “Fiction,” I said. />
  “Can you mail it to me, or messenger . . .”

  I explained that it was sensitive. A rush job. We’d pay more. When had I gained the authority to use the Warren-esque we? “I could deliver it myself.”

  She hesitated, then said, “I assume it can wait till tomorrow?”

  “Of course.”

  “Fine,” she said. “Wednesday. Let’s say two. That’s usually Evan’s nap time. So it’s possible, not likely but possible, that we could actually talk.”

  Chapter 15

  A warm morning, early June. On my way to Julia’s, I sweated through my shirt before I reached the subway. Yet I refused to loosen my tie or unbutton my jacket, to shed any part of my uniform, my mismatched suit of armor.

  I tried not to worry obsessively. Having met Julia once, I felt that, like Anya and Elaine, she was—in the phrase that maddened my uncle—out of my league. The little I knew about her made me think less of myself. That she had a child made me feel that I wasn’t an adult. Her living in Harlem impressed me more than it should have. My vague anxieties barely masked my preemptive guilt about involving a single mother in something that might get her in trouble, when she likely had enough trouble of her own.

  I took the wrong train to the wrong stop. I got out on the west side when I should have been east. I walked through two parks, past a synagogue, three churches, under a railroad embankment. There was a hint of a breeze, a cool rustling of silvery leaves. I might have enjoyed the walk had I not been in hell.

  The address Julia gave me didn’t exist. I wandered up and down Madison between 134th and 135th, from the just-too-high number to the just-too-low number, as if the right place would materialize the next time I walked by. Two old men playing cards on their stoop, kids playing stickball in the street watched me pass and return. I tried not to project the misery and frustration of a man come all this way to see a woman who has given him a fake address.

  Finally an elderly woman in a jacket with gold buttons and a hat swaddled in navy tulle directed me down a narrow alley between two apartment buildings.