by Ed Ifkovic
“So?”
“Well, I’m the drunk, and all I have in my purse is Carter’s Little Liver Pills.”
In town Peter dropped Carlotta off at Merilee’s Hair Salon, just down the street from the Copperhead Tavern, where, Peter insisted, the Yankee Pot Roast must have been invented because it was so authentic and good. I’d be the judge of that, I thought, recalling my cook Rebecca Henry’s garlicky, sage-infused roast. We were served an ambitious lunch in country crockery, unfortunately chipped and stained—I cringed—but I found myself relishing the luscious slices of browned meat, smothered in a succulent onion gravy with mashed potatoes so light and airy they broke like meringue when a fork pierced them. Whole roasted onions, crunchy yet translucent. Shafts of carrot and celery, sliced thin, and flavored with rosemary and thyme. I nodded my approval and Peter smiled. “Told you,” he said.
I liked his smile. It was, I realized, Carlotta’s own hypnotic smile. On her it looked sensual—on him, wistful. He had her dark good looks, almost a kind of feminine beauty, what with those large soup-spoon eyes, deep ebony, and those sinful lashes, so long they reminded me of white-pine needles. The scar on the side of his face somehow added to the exotic allure—the brand of a dashing adventurer, a hero out of Dumas, perhaps. Dressed in a collegiate sweater that identified him as a Dartmouth graduate, with a Phi Bea Kappa key pinned to his sweater, worn under a tweedy cashmere jacket, he was still the young-man-about-town, a kind of Arrow Shirt collar man, this wandering son of a famous woman. He was nervous, his hands moved like excited wild birds, and the mannerisms, if not effete, were gestures aped from a mother who made her money off their exploitation.
“You don’t look like your father,” I said, flat out.
He looked surprised. “You knew my father?”
I laughed. “No, of course not. But you are so totally your mother’s son.”
“So I’ve been told. It’s a curse.”
“Good looks should not be a curse.” Never having considered good-looking myself, I always talked about my strong features: my large imposing head and my shock of magnificent and luscious hair. My own brand of vanity, I often reflected.
“My mother refuses to talk about my father. You know, he was a suicide. He jumped from her penthouse in New York while Mother was pregnant with me.”
“God,” I shuddered, “it must have been devastating for her.”
“You know, Martha showed me one photograph she’d hidden away. Mother could never stand to look at them. In fact, supposedly she burned them all. He was a handsome man, lankly like me, with my narrow head. Even in the photograph he looked doomed. I mean, his eyes looked so sad.” He smiled. “It was taken a month after they were married. They were married barely a year.”
“I’m curious. Why did Martha show you the photograph?”
“I asked her about him. I pestered her, actually. You know, when I was a small boy, Mother was either in New York, working and socializing, or, later, traveling in Europe for a year. I’ve told you that Martha raised me, made me feel like I had a home. When Mother returned, I always felt that she was a guest stopping in, some stranger who smothered me with perfumed hugs and dumped too many gifts on me, gifts always meant for a boy younger than I. It was as though she forgot how old I really was.”
“How sad.”
“No, it wasn’t, really,” he said quietly. “I didn’t know any better. I thought I was having a happy childhood, and I was. Martha was my rock. She loved me to death. Lord, the way she grilled the nannies she hired. She’d return from school and interrogate the nannies. When Mother returned, they sometimes played tug of war with my affections, and during my high school years I milked it, sad to say.”
“Martha,” I took a breath, “baffles me. She seemed to have led a sort of outré life, a little . . .”
He held up his hand. “I’ve heard it all. Most is not true. It’s my mother’s concoction, or shall I say, her exaggeration. Yes, Martha had brief affairs with a couple of men—her taste in men was as bad as Mother’s—but I once talked to Martha about it when I was an emboldened college boy. She told me she’d get lonely—that was her word—and, stuck at the Inn, stuck in that prissy girls’ school, she fell to temptation. These men sought her out, often reeling from my mother’s rejection of them, and they used Martha to get back at my mother. Like Jason Fargo. Like Nathan Brosnan. Both ex-husbands couldn’t wait to seduce poor Martha. It was not a parade of men traipsing through the Inn that Mother talks about. She’s wrong. I know. I was there, growing up.” Peter lit a cigarette, sat back.
“Millicent . . .”
“Now Millicent is a lovely woman. I love her to death, though she scares me a bit. But she has one grievance that rules her view of Martha. The minister. Her good, good friend’s son. That was sordid, I grant you. And Millicent took it personally. She warned Martha, she says, to keep away from him. But the minister was the one who stepped out of line, betrayed his wife and children. Lost his calling, disgraced. But Millicent never forgave Martha, and Mother added fuel to that smoldering fire. Mother never wanted Millicent to like Martha, even when they were children living next door. According to what Martha once told me.”
Peter asked me about the recent events, complained about Trooper Wolniak’s reticence, and I felt the need to defend the young peace officer, though I remained silent. But I did run through the chronology, answering his questions, giving my perspective. “She will be arrested,” he concluded.
I shrugged my shoulders.
We drank mulled cider from thick mugs and I became dizzy with the Apple Betty with ice cream that Peter insisted I try. “You’ll have to roll me back to New York. Thank God for my daily mile walk.”
Peter, serious, swallowing a forkful of dessert, “Do you think that my mother did it?”
My mouth filled with crumbly apple and sweet cinnamon, I shook my head: no.
But at that moment, coming from behind, Delia joined us and slid into a chair, smiling at both of us. “I’m so late. My car was in the garage all morning.” She saw our somber faces. “Yes?”
“I just asked Edna if she believed Mother killed Martha.”
“Jesus, Peter, we’re in a restaurant.”
“Edna said no.” He looked pleased.
I ignored Delia. “Tell me, Peter, who do you think killed Martha? You must have given this a lot of thought.” I waited.
“I have.”
“And?”
He sucked in his breath. “I’m sorry, but most of the time I believe my mother is the murderer.” Said, he sat back, closed his eyes, and tears seeped through, coursed down his cheeks.
Delia actually screamed, spinning her head around, drawing the attention of a few other diners. “Shut up, Peter,” she exclaimed, reaching out and gripping his wrist. “Shut up. Are you mad?”
“Edna asked me,” he explained. “Sometimes think I’m wrong, and I hope I am, but sometimes, well . . .”
“Do you hear yourself?” The young woman spoke through gritted teeth. “Just stop. This is your mother you’re condemning. For God’s sake, Peter, think of what you’re saying. And to a writer.” She glared at me. “This will be all over The New York Times tomorrow.”
“I hardly think The Times is waiting on my crime reportage,” I said, hotly.
Delia ignored me. “What do you think this will mean to your life as a playwright? Who’s going to produce your plays? And me? I’ve worked so hard, Peter, to establish myself as an actress. With no help from your mother, I might add. Not that I ever asked for any. You know that. But this could set me back years, if not stifle it entirely. I have a plan . . .”
She went on and on, getting hysterical, until Peter and I rose, almost at the same time, and headed to the door. Peter sipped a surprised waitress a wad of cash. Delia rushed to catch up with us.
Outside, on the sidewalk, Delia began to apologize, but I strode toward the car.
“Drop me back at the Inn, Peter.” I leaned in. “You can pick up your mother wh
en she is through.”
Delia stood there, looking helpless. “Did I say something wrong?”
Back at the Inn, I sat in the library, silent, silent. I rubbed my forehead. Images of Delia, that brazen woman, would not disappear. A faint knock on the open door, Julia leaving for the day. “Can I get you anything, Miss Ferber?”
“No, thanks.” Then, to her retreating back, “Julia?”
“Yes.”
“I was impressed by your son.”
She beamed. “Thank you. He’s a good boy.”
“Does he often come here to the Inn?”
“No. That was the first time. This is where I work.” She hesitated. “You know, Miss Ferber, every day I walk by my father’s house, back to River Road, and I wonder if he’s watching me. Or he’s turned away, as he works in the yard. But yesterday, when we were leaving, I glanced at his house, and he was in the window.”
I tried to picture Eben standing there, watching the daughter he’d banished.
“And,” Julia continued, “it was as though I was not even passing. I realized he did not even take his eyes off Andrew, the grandson he’s never seen, now a young boy. As we walked by, he watched Andrew, just . . . like he was hypnotized.”
I smiled. “That’s a good sign.”
“I wish. But my father is built of rock, Miss Ferber. A man never known to change his mind, even if he wants to.”
Julia turned to go. “Julia,” I called to her, “can ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“Who do you think killed Martha?”
“I don’t know, but I think the killer made a mistake.”
“What?” Astonished.
“No one would kill Martha. It was Carlotta he was after. I’m convinced of that. I have no proof, but I feel it in my bones.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
On Wednesday afternoon Eben drove me to Stamford, where I caught the New York New Haven into Manhattan. Before coming to Connecticut, I had scheduled a meeting for Thursday with Frank and Nelson Doubleday, father and son, my publishers, invited my lawyers and agent, and now it was too late to cancel. I’d fully expected to be back in the city by then, of course. I chose not to cancel. There was just a little too much nonsense attending the publication of Cimarron last March, already a huge bestseller. Doubleday, pere i fils, I believed, needed to be more sympathetic to my difficulties. After all, the condemnation coming out of Oklahoma was deadly and stinging. There were even snide, cruel references to my being the daughter of the Jewish Ghetto who sullied the Panhandle state. How dare they? The patrician Doubledays, who’d buckled under back in the Show Boat days, censuring my work, needed to be talked to. In so many words: my words. So, at my own instigation, there was to be an afternoon powwow at the Cosmopolitan Club, with me playing fiery dragon and adamant author, letting them all have a piece of my imaginative mind.
“Please don’t abandon me, Edna,” Carlotta pleaded again.
“Of course not. I’ll be back Friday,” I told her.
I put in a call to Stas, and he ended with, “Maybe I’ll tell you the name of the murderer when you get back.”
I did not respond. I’d come to believe I’d have to be there when that moment arrived, the novelist and former journalist bringing a keen and incisive eye to the crime. The two of us, working together.
It was Carlotta’s idea to have Eben drive me to Stamford, rather than to the nearby connection at Rawley’s Depot. “Please come back as soon as you can,” Carlotta insisted. “Eben will drive you down to Stamford.” But Eben said not one word during the long ride. After a few attempts at conversation, ranging from trivial prattle about the brisk autumn days to more dangerous territory—“Carlotta’s doing poorly, no?”—I lapsed into silence myself, vaguely annoyed but ultimately content. The man probably had nothing new to say about the crime. He’d just make a nasty comment about Stanley, indirectly accuse Carlotta, and then spit tobacco out the window, the wad of cold slime undoubtedly smearing the rich enamel of the car. Today he smelled of apple cider, hardened into some fermented brew, as well as the fetid scent of unwashed clothing. I was pleased he insisted I sit in the rear seat. Still too close. Unfortunately, I told myself, it wasn’t the rear seat of a bus.
When he dropped me off to catch the 2:01 New York New Haven, he nodded, and said his first words. “Be here Friday at 3:10. ‘Proximate.”
“I should think so,” I noted. “There are enough drunks and wastrels getting off at Stamford than the Vice Squad can suitably haul in.” I meant to be funny, but Eben just walked away.
I was overjoyed to be returning to the city for a brief respite, not only to unleash my fury on my crusty but vacillating publishers, to be sure, but because I wanted some distance on Martha’s murder. Moreover, I might spend time with the ragtag remnants of the once-bustling Round Table at the Gonk, like Heywood Broun, maybe, or Peggy Wood. I’d be sleeping in my own apple-green bed in my creamy yellow and sea-green bedroom at the Lombardy, with Rebecca’s savory morning pancakes with the apple jelly. But I’d also ask questions. “I’ll ask around,” I’d told Stas, but not Carlotta. “My friends know Carlotta, of course, but some may have known Martha. Some know Jason Fargo.” I was thinking of Aleck Woollcott, who was a persistent, if sometimes tedious and venal, gossip. The eunuch as town crier.
The meeting the following morning at the Cosmopolitan went well. My verbal tongue-lashing silenced the obsequious men in the room. The Elder Doubleday agreed with everything I said, which didn’t mean he’d do anything about it. The Junior Doubleday actually remarked, “What do you care what Oklahoma says about you? You’re richer than the state treasury these days. Even after the Crash.”
I liked that.
But I took my best-selling moneyed status for granted, though I often feared tomorrow would find me woefully blocked and unable to write, especially given my current paralysis with American Beauty. What mattered, I thought, but did not share with the fawning men’s club gathered around me, was my reputation—not my celebrity. I was, if anything, a respected daughter of the Midwest, when the Midwest might still be considered West, frontier, corn-fed and milk-fed, where I’d fashioned myself into a working demon who would tolerate no whittling at my integrity. By the time I stood and left the room, adjusting the fashionable feather and sequined Marie Teacher hat and the diamond chocker around my neck, both worn to impress them, they considered themselves told.
Later I met Aleck Woollcott in the Rose Room at the Gonk, with me drinking a cup of coffee, he drinking perhaps two dozen cups, one after the other, accompanied by a sizable cream-cake confection I insisted looked like a French castle I’d once seen. The hugely rotund man eyed the cake, unable to resist smacking his chubby lips. As I described it, “Towers and pillars and turrets and wings and partitions, painted chocolate and vanilla, so complicated you could lose your way. Unless, Aleck, like you, you have a fork in hand and an open mouth.” Aleck, indeed, ravished the confection in five or six slurping assaults on it.
He, of course, wanted to know all about the murder—and Carlotta’s reaction. The New York Times, for which he reviewed, had covered it, of course, and even FPA’s medieval “Conning Tower,” written in that self-conscious and irritating dialect that mimicked diarist Samuel Pepys, opined, “Mistress Carlotta Small, of the Connecticut hamlet, doth fear the knock on the door by the country sheriff.”
But glibly rushing through a summary of events, I refused to indulge Aleck’s desire for juicy tidbit and witty observation. “Aleck, I need to ask you all you know about Carlotta and Martha Small.”
Aleck’s eyes got wide: “Edna, my dear,” he said, his voice almost falsetto, “am I to be a witness for the—” he paused—“persecution?”
I smiled. “I doubt that Connecticut is ready for your Falstaffian persona,” I chuckled. “You’d be tarred and feathered.”
“I’d rather be starred and flattered.”
I was abrupt. “What do you know about Martha?”
“Quite
frankly, nothing,” he responded. “Carlotta talked of her, but nastily, usually. Called her a mother hen looking for a place to lay an inappropriate egg. But I never met the woman, not being invited to the country estate. But Neysa McMein recently told me that some people suspect Carlotta herself was the intended victim. It makes sense, really. Critics wanted to kill her for years. I thought The Slave to Love was so odiferous it reminded me of Montauk at low tide. Although not as bad as your nerve-wracking and somnolent Broadway flop Minick.”
I ignored him. “Did Carlotta say anything else?”
“Not so as I remember, Edna. Really, you are so . . . investigatory.”
“What about her husbands?”
“She had three of them. More than most women are allowed, by law and local custom.”
“Each one lasting about a year or so,” I commented.
“We used to say she loved getting married, but she just despised staying married. The novelty wore off after the fizz left the champagne and the maid turned down the bed.”
“Did you know them?”
“Well, Edna, obviously the first I never knew. That was back twenty-five or so years, really. I was just attempting puberty.”
“After how many tries did you finally throw in the towel?”
“Ha!” he roared. “An attempt at humor. And, for you, a little questionable in taste. Anyway, Broadway legend has it he was handsome, droll, very dark and tall, like—well, I guess he was a dancer—but unhappy living in this world. Carlotta could smother a life force without really trying. Harold Brewster killed himself so early there was barely time for him to leave a memory for the rest of us to distort and abuse. Hurled himself out the window—her window. A number of years before I crossed from Jersey to this sin city. Carlotta paid all the bills, I gather. So I can’t tell you a thing about him. Wait. Yes, I can. People did say he didn’t like the prospect of being father—he wanted to travel and to be free. Little . . . what is the boy’s name?”
“Peter.”
“Little unborn Peter would be in the way. Supposedly, Carlotta said she’d leave the stage after, ah, Peter, was born, and Harold the Kept Husband was afraid he’d have to go back to work, soft-shoeing his romantic way through yet another dreary Earl Carroll review.”
