July 30

Mrs. Brown called before nine this morning, beside herself. A second letter from the scorpion at the loyalty firm. Loren Matus. An incriminating photograph, he claims, but it makes no sense at all. I made her read that part of the letter twice. “A photo of Harrison Shepherd and his wife at a Communist Party meeting in 1930.” I’m to pay him a fee of five hundred dollars for the chance to examine it.

She took a letter, over the phone: Why this photograph could not be what he says. In 1930 Harrison Shepherd was fourteen years of age, attending an elementary school for the mentally damaged in Mexico City. His political leaning was to collect centipedes in a jar and set them loose under Señora Bartolome’s desk during the prayers. Since that year he has discovered no reason to marry, nor has anyone signed on for the job, but it might have quite entertained him to have a wife in 1930. A lot of people might pay money to see that. Signed sincerely Harrison Shepherd. HS/VB.

August 11

“Advance the spark,” says Tom Cuddy on the phone, “Square-o-lina here I come.” He has museum business with the Vanderbilts, will be staying three nights at the Grove Park, proposes we meet there. “An assignation,” he calls it. Oh Tom, Tom, vanity’s son, expecting me to show up with hat in hand, heart pounding. Knowing, in fact, I will.

The Assignation

Long time no see, says the handsome scoundrel, looking up from his highball. The firm handshake, the chair pulled out. The terrace restaurant at the Grove Park is very grand, white cloths on the tables and candles flickering, but all other chairs were empty. Tom must have been the only guest in the hotel.

“You’re brave, letting your boss send you here. Have they not heard about our quarantine, in Manhattan? Or are you all just so dashing, the plague can’t catch up?”

“Who’s afraid of a little polio germ?” he said. “Builds up the character.”

“Tommy, that’s no joke.”

“What’s your poison? This is a sloe gin fizz. Don’t let the name throw you, it’s a fast ticket. The apron back there at the bar has a heavy foot.”

“All right. A ticket on the fast train, please.”

Tommy signaled the waiter, who hovered constantly nearby in the dark, either at the patio entrance or over by the wall, sneaking a smoke. I have wondered if waiters will ever become invisible to me, as they seem to be for others. I wanted to help this lad out, go get the drinks myself and later help him carry the plates to the kitchen.

Tommy’s cigarette end glowed, constantly in motion. “Oh, come on, look what the polio did for FDR. A gimp leg gets you the sympathy vote, you can be maudlin as anything and they all go dotty for it. ‘I hate the wah, Eleanor hates the wah, our little dog Fala hates the wah…’”

The drinks appeared, followed by dinner, materializing from the dark just as Tom had, unreal as the image rising in a movie house. Cruelty is just a role he plays, like Hurd Hatfield as Dorian Gray. Tommy has seen some damage in his day. The Modern show he helped curate, ridiculed by Congress, he took that personally. And that’s probably the least of it, for a boy who wants so madly to belong, and will not quite.

The truth of Tommy is slow to rise, but he is down there somewhere, underneath the shining surface. The day we first met, sitting on a crate of Rodin in the train, he dropped the clever banter along with his jaw upon hearing the name Rivera. He has studied those murals in photographs. He wanted to know everything: the mixture of plaster, the pigments. And Frida, how she laid the paint on, with brushes or knives? The warm or cool colors first? That unearthly sadness that radiates from her paintings, does she feel it herself, when she’s painting? Those were his words, unearthly sadness. Tommy has handled two Kahlos already, in his time at the museum.

Later on in his room, lying on our backs smoking his herd of Camels one after another, shirtless in the dark, it could have been the Potomac Academy, or the tiny barracks at Lev’s. But those places couldn’t have contained him, Tom Cuddy is a one-man band. His questions don’t need answers, it’s hard enough just to work out what he’s asking. Who would win at arm-wrestling, Frankie Laine or Perry Como? Has Christian Dior gone screwball or hopped on the genius wagon?

“Why, what’s Dior done?”

“Took all the padding off the girls’ shoulders and stuffed it in their brassieres.”

He is thinking of leaving the gallery, the art world altogether. For advertising.

“What, to write jingles? Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco?”

“No, you egg. Art direction. Creating the Look of Tomorrow.”

“I thought the museum was what you loved. Kandinsky and Edward Hopper. Now you want to be Llewelyn Evans in The Hucksters, selling Beautee Soap to unsuspecting housewives?”

“Not soap, glamour. Sex, God and the Pa-tri-ah.” Tommy blew a meticulous smoke ring, watched it rise toward the ceiling. “On the seventh day Tom Cuddy made America. And Tom Cuddy said, Cat, that is good.”

“If I were a religious man I’d get off this bed, before lightning strikes it.”

“One day you will see, Shepherd my friend. The men campaigning for president are going to hire advertisers.”

“Tommy, you’ve lost your marbles.”

“This is no fish. Do you know how many television stations there are now?”

“Six or seven, I guess.”

“Twenty.”

“How’s your friend, by the way? The Latin Romeo with the face for television.”

The question shifted Tom’s mood, turning him petulant. Ramiro is gone, not to Puerto Rico but out of the city, far from the glamorous spotlight. Maybe selling brushes door to door. It was hard to avoid speculating on the clockwork of Tom Cuddy’s universe: Ramiro’s setting sun, the rising star of Harrison Shepherd. The long compromise against loneliness. Tom says he’ll be back here in a month, and probably more times after that. To Casheville, as he calls it. Regular assignations on expense account at the Grove Park, as long as he continues to happify the Vanderbilts as planned.

“You’re lucky you live here,” he said.

“What, in Square-o-lina? Under a quarantine.”

“Well, here, Shep, or any damned place you want. Writing what you want, with nobody watching over your shoulder. In the city we’re like ants under a lens, getting scorched in the sun.”

“Scorched ants. That’s dramatic.” I pushed myself up off the bed. It took some effort, a lot of sloe gin under the bridge, but I needed to pace the little room. Tommy’s energy came off his skin like electricity. I stood by the window, a porthole into the dark.

“I’m dramatic,” he said. “You should hear the real gory. The joes in radio and television. The producers are like those little brutes in grammar school, crowding around to watch the ant fry. Conspiracy indictments, alien hearings. Do you know how many New Yorkers are from someplace? The city’s going to be as empty as this hotel.”

In a rare turn of events, he seemed to have run out of words. I could hear the place breathing: the gasp of roof beams, the slow circulation of water through pipes.

Tommy lit another Camel. “They don’t even have to indict you. One day you just feel the heat and you know they’re up there, kneeling in the circle, watching you writhe. Your name has gone on a list. Everybody stops talking when you come into a room. You think we don’t know about the plague?”

“They’re only television producers, Tommy. Not heads of state, with secret police at their disposal. Just men who get up in the morning, put on Sears Roebuck suits, and go to an office to decide who gets a pie in the face today. It’s hard to feature how they could be so monstrous.”

“‘Hard to feature.’” Tom clucked his tongue, whether at a writer’s prose or his innocence, who could say. “Little shepherd boy. What am I going to do with you?”

September 2

The stars and planets are right again. Mrs. Brown is back, all this week, cheerful as anything today in a new peplum blouse. The Woman’s Club has let her back on the Program Committee, mainly because she kept the club running by telephone and the post during the quarantine. Most of the good ladies were flummoxed by solitude.

We’re on track to complete the novel draft by month’s end. Mrs. Brown says this one is my best, and she hasn’t even seen the ending yet. The title is another go-round, the publisher as usual wants crashing cymbals: The Mighty Fallen, or Ashes of Empire. I’d hoped for a pinch of metaphor. Mrs. Brown sat at her table looking thoughtful, holding a pencil alongside her cheek, and then offered: “Remember at Chichén Itzá on top of the temple, the last day? Everything looked bright, and then the storm came and put it in a different light. It was the same view, all the same things, but suddenly it went fearsome. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Is there a name for that?”

“Yes. J. Edgar Hoover.”

She’s asked permission to leave early tomorrow to see Truman on his whistle-stop for the reelection. He’s coming through Asheville, speaking from a platform on the back of the Ferdinand Magellan. It’s the same train the people here stood waiting for all night, when it carried Roosevelt home. But it never came.

September 15

The Grove Park is a reassuring place, all that squared-off, heavy Mission furniture with its feet firmly on the ground. The giant stone fireplaces, the carpentered grandfather clocks, even the roof, snub and rounded like the thatch of a fairy-tale cottage, with little eyebrow curves above the windows of the top-floor rooms. Tom likes those best, he feels he’s an artist up in a garret. He insists Scott Fitzgerald always took a top-floor room here when he came to visit Zelda. “Just ask the bellhop, I told you so, and I’m right. He might have written Gatsby in the very room where I’m sleeping tonight.”

“More likely The Crack-Up. If he was here in town for the reason you say.”

Tommy rolled his head in a circle. “Oh, The Crack-Up, well done!” He moves like an actor, physically earnest, aware of his better angles. Today he had a better audience: the terrace was jammed, people out enjoying the autumn sun. The tourist trade is back, all those postponed vacations must be had before cold weather hits, it’s like a rush on the bank. Tommy was playing dissect-the-guests.

“That one over there has got clocks on his socks. I’ll lay a fiver on it. Go over and ask him to raise up his pants leg.”

“I don’t know what that means. Clocks on his socks.”

“It means,” he leaned forward, sotto voce, “the car he left with the valet has a fox tail attached to the antenna. Hubba hubba. You don’t know these college boys. I can see them in the dark.” Sloe gin was not fast enough for Tommy today, so we drank “Seabreezes,” a concoction he’d explained to the bartender. Complicated instructions for what amounted to gin and orange juice.

“Over there, the couple. Parisians, a jasper and his zazz girl, très vout-o-reenee.”

“Really.” There was no learning Tommy’s language, I’d given up on trying.

“In Paris I can always pick out the Americans like anything, ping, ping!” One eye closed, he feigned using a pistol. “A Frenchman’s like this”—he pulled his shoulders toward his ears—“like someone’s put ice down his collar. And a Brit’s just the opposite, shoulders back. ‘I say, a spot of ice down the old neck! Not a problem, by Jove.’”

“And the American?”

Tommy flung himself back in his chair, knees spread wide, hands clasped behind his golden head, vowels flat: “‘Ice, what’s the big idea? I take mine straight up.’”

And the Mexican: I carried the ice here on my back, I chopped it with a machete, and probably it still isn’t right. Tommy lifted two fingers to signal the next round.

“No more for me,” I said. “I’m nursing a ridiculous hope that I’m still going to get some work done this evening. Coca-Cola, please.”

The waiter nodded. Every waiter in the place was dark-skinned, and all the guests white. It felt like an occupied zone after ceasefire, two distinct factions inhabiting the same place: the one tribe relaxed and garrulous, draped unguarded on the chairs in colorful clothes, while the other stood wordless in starched coats, white collars sharp against black skin. In Mexico when we served a table it was normally the guests in starched collars, the servants in floral tapestries.

Tommy informed me that Coca-Cola sells fifty million bottles a day.

“Who are you, Elmo Roper?”

“It’s enough to float a battleship. I mean, literally it is, if you think about it. The French National Assembly just voted to nix Coca-Cola, no buy no sell, anywhere in their empire. What’s the static?”

“Maybe they don’t want it poured down their backs.”

“You’re going home and working tonight?” His eyes are so pale and clear, his whole complexion really, he seems to give off light rather than absorb it. Moths must fly into his flame and perish gladly.

“I can stay the afternoon. But I’m so near the end of the book. It’s hard to think of much else.”

“Oh, Jack will be a dull boy.”

“Or my meat will go to gristle, if my stenographer is to be believed.”

He leaned forward, pinched the flesh of my upper arm, clucked his tongue. Then fell back in his chair. He had a way of looking tossed around, like one half of a prizefight. “And what’s the buzz on your cooper?”

I pondered this. “I give up.”

“Your moving picture.”

“Oh. I’m not sure. The Hollywood winds blow hot and cold.”

“Listen, I could sell it. Make your picture the talk of the season.”

“I thought you wanted a look at Robert Taylor. Now you’re selling him?”

“Cat, you don’t listen to me. I am going to be an ad man. I interviewed with a firm last week.”

“I do listen. You’re going to sell presidential candidates. You know what, they need you right now. All four of them.”

“You said it! Four men running, and not one winner I can see. Lord and butler, spare me that cold cut Tom Dewey and his toothbrush moustache.”

“You may not be spared. The newspapers say it’s already over. With the Democrats split three ways, Dewey’s just waiting to be confirmed. The editorial this morning said Truman’s cabinet should resign now and get out of the way.”

“It can’t be. Dewey doesn’t even look like a proper Republican. He looks like a magazine salesman.”

“Some salesman, he’s not even campaigning. ‘America the Beautiful’ is not exactly a platform. I suppose he doesn’t want to lower himself to Truman’s level, it would show lack of confidence.”

Tommy put his face in his hands. “Not Tom Dewey the toothbrush moustache! Please not that mug in all the photos for the next four years.”

“Would you rather look at Strom Thurmond for four years?”

“What a drizzle bag.”

A stout woman in a scant bandeau and espadrilles minced across the terrace. In Mexico she would have been a beauty of a certain type, but not here, I gathered. Tommy’s eyes tracked her too dramatically, like Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush.

“Maybe Scarlett O’Hara will come out and stump for Strom,” I suggested. “And Rhett Butler, whistling Dixiecrat to call out the segregationists.”

Tom looked up, eyes wide. “Now that is a campaign image. You’ve got the gift! And on the other team, Henry Wallace as the Pied Piper, with the liberals skipping off behind him.”

“Poor Truman, he’s got nobody left. I read he’s asked a dozen men to run as his vice president, and they all turned him down. Do you think that’s true?”

“He can’t get reelected, why should they waste the time?”

A young couple slid into the next table, inciting Tom to announce: “Hardware and headlights, call the nabs.” The fellow was an Adonis, more or less Tommy in a younger model. The girl wore a tennis dress and diamond bracelets.

“My stenographer went out to see Truman at his whistle stop here, just a couple of weeks ago. She’s League of Women Voters. So there’s one he can count on.”

“Oh, gee. Little man with high voice makes barnyard jokes from back of train.”

“She said he turned out quite a crowd.”

“Natch. The first thing he’s accomplished in the last two years.”

“That’s not fair. The Republicans kill every one of his bills in Congress. They can’t be bothered with the minimum wage or housing starts, they’re all crowding into the communism hearings to see Alger Hiss charged with espionage.”

Tommy vamped a few bars of “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” with jazz hands.

“It’s true, Tommy. If you read something besides the Echo, you’d know that.”

“Fine, down with it. Harry Truman gets two votes.”

“I don’t vote. I never have.”

“Really? Conk me. I had you down for a Henry Wallace type. The rise of the common man and all that. All the reviewers say so.”

“Politics in this country are never quite what they seem. I don’t quite feel…what? Entitled.”

He looked genuinely amazed. “Entitled. Cat, this is America, they let anybody vote. Crooks, wigs, even cookies like us. Dogs and cats, probably. Don’t take Fido to the polls, he might cancel you out.”

“Well, that’s the thing, it’s all too much. Too fast. I need to brood on things.”

He cocked his head in a sympathetic pout. “Sad stranger in the happy land.”

 

The New York Times, September 26, 1948

 

Truman Is Linked by Scott to Reds

 

Special to The New York Times

November 1

This strange day. Early snow, and a visit from the FBI.

The snow fell in huge, leisurely flakes, piling itself carefully on everything, even twigs and telephone wires. Putting white caps on the hydrants, covering the mud puddles and buckled sidewalks. A Benediction for the Day of the Dead. Or perhaps last rites, this weary world with all its faults consenting to lie down with a sigh and be covered up with a sheet. “Holy is the day”—I had just thought those words when he came tramping tiredly up the walk, leaving behind a trail, the impressions of his leather shoes. At the curb he’d hesitated, turning this way and that before coming up my walk. It looked like an Arthur Murray dance diagram.

Myers is the name. I made sure to get it this time, Melvin C. Myers, special agent from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Not the same man who was here before, right away I knew it was a different voice. This Myers is a man of rank, evidently, but he seemed almost apologetic. Too old for a fight, sorry that life has come to this.

I could hardly let him stand out there getting a snowdrift on his hat. I had a fire on the hearth and coffee made, prepared for a solitary day. Mrs. Brown is kept home by the weather, her bus line canceled. So I brought Myers his coffee on the sofa and poked up the fire, to all appearances entertaining a guest. We joked about the elections coming up, how Truman will soon be looking for a new job. Three magazines lay on the coffee table, the week’s editions I’d purchased from the newsstand, all of them with President Dewey on their covers, his bold new plan for the nation outlined inside. Chisme and Chispa weren’t fooled by the friendly patter, they rose from their pool of warmth by the hearth, hissed inaudibly, and slunk away. I should have done the same.

He believes I have a very large problem, does Mr. Myers. Things really do not look good regarding my position with the State Department. I’m about to be in the same boat with Truman, he said. Hunting a new job.

“Oh, well, it’s too bad. A lot of it going around.” I decided to play it contrite, to satisfy this fellow. No need to tell him I hadn’t worked for the State Department in years, and had no intention of ever doing so again.

“Except for us gumshoes,” he said with a chuckle. “Our job security is A-okay.”

“I’ve heard that. Snakes out of Ireland, and so forth.”

He was eager to show me his portfolio of evidence against me, and I was curious, especially about the photograph. Harrison Shepherd and wife, Communist party meeting 1930. It was a puzzling disappointment, not one thing in the picture I could recognize. No person I’d ever known, no place I had been.

“Is this the noose around my neck? I can’t even guess which one of those men is supposed to be me. I was fourteen that year, living in Mexico.” I handed back the photograph, and he took a great deal of care to put it inside a folder and settle it in the correct compartment of his briefcase.

Then said, “That photograph is a piece of garbage. I realize that.”

The man was so shabby and earnest, I almost hated to let him down. Probably people habitually responded this way—shop clerks slipped back his change, the butcher put an extra ounce of chuck on the scales. Probably I’d let him in the door because of some vague sense he was a man of Artie’s ilk. A short, bald, gentile Arthur Gold. A widower, judging from his clothes, and the long, scant hair combed over his bald head, no one to tell him that was a bad idea. He had none of Artie’s cleverness but seemed to carry the same torch. Searching for an honest man and fed up with the whole shmear.

“I know that you were in Mexico,” he said. “We have this information. You worked for a painter in Mexico City, a very well-known Red. I can’t recall his name, but it’s in the files. I came here today to question you about this. In all of this mess, this kind of weather, in North Carolina. I don’t even have chains on the tires.” He sighed.

“To question me about working for a painter in Mexico?”

“That’s about the extent of it. You could deny it, most of them deny. To begin with. But I’ll be honest with you, it doesn’t usually help.”

“Why would I deny it?”

“This information alone is reason for dismissing you from your government post. That’s what happens now, if you choose not to deny the associations. In time there may be more. I think you’re probably going to get a McFarland letter.”

“Who is McFarland?”

“McFarland is nobody. But this letter is bad news, it would contain the actual charges. The higher-ups have intimated they are accumulating some pretty shocking evidence against you.”

“I see. Who is supplying this shocking evidence?”

“Mr. Shepherd, be reasonable. You know we can’t tell you that. If we allowed all the accused to confront their accusers, we would have no informants left. It would infringe on our ability to investigate.”

“Your ability to investigate. That’s the important thing.”

“Correct. In this day and age, we have a duty to protect the citizen. It’s a precarious business. People have no idea, they should be very grateful. You should be grateful, Mr. Shepherd.”

“It’s a difficult point you make, Mr. Myers. I felt pretty cozy here today, before you came knocking.” I got up to put more wood on the fire, a piece of cedar shingle that sent a little shower of sparks onto the floor. I dusted up the ash, no harm done. But I seemed to have gotten up the dander of Myers, as far as it went.

“The mental world of the Communist is secretive,” he said. “The Soviet Fatherland has to be preserved at any cost, and its enemies confounded.” He seemed to be quoting a handbook, speaking in the general direction of the bookcase. Maybe he was trying to read titles: Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Dreiser, the suspect will alphabetize his books at any cost. Mrs. Brown, largely to blame.

“I wouldn’t know,” I said. I stayed where I was, feet to the fire. This was some sort of Jacson Mornard who’d arrived at my door, hat in hand, blade beneath the coat. I had let him in, brought the coffee. As Lev always said, you won’t see it coming.

He shifted himself around to face me. “The thinking of the Communist is that no one who opposes him can possibly have any merit whatsoever. It’s a psychological illness. The Communist cannot adjust himself to logic.”

“That’s a point of view. But I was thinking of what you said about confronting my accuser. I thought the Constitution gave me the right to know the charges against me. And who was bringing them.”

Myers drained his coffee cup and leaned forward with a little grunt to set the cup on the table. We were nearly finished, I could tell.

“Whenever I hear this kind of thing,” he said, “a person speaking about constitutional rights, free speech, and so forth, I think, ‘How can he be such a sap? Now I can be sure that man is a Red.’ A word to the wise, Mr. Shepherd. We just do not hear a real American speaking in that manner.”

November 2

Mrs. Brown left early to go to the polls. She says the Elementary down the block would be my voting place, if I could be troubled to use it. I have promised her I’ll get my voting card before the next go-round. Meanwhile the neighborhood children are having the day off, out fighting their snow wars, building forts and goggle-eyed men. The one in the next yard looks like Agent Myers, rotund and slump-shouldered, a potato for his nose, peering at my window wearing the old fedora I gave Romulus.

November 3

She came in at nine with the mail and daily papers, all claiming Dewey had won the presidency, in the largest typeface imaginable. Poor Tommy: that toothbrush moustache does loom large, above the fold. But Mrs. Brown’s eyes were ablaze. She did a little dance stomping the snow off her boots in the doorway, unwinding her scarf. I haven’t seen such fire in her since Mexico.

“You look like you’ve had the canary for breakfast.”

“Here it is, Mr. Shepherd. Dewey hasn’t won it. Turn on the radio.”

At first the news was about airlifts into Berlin, those desperate people now six months under siege. The American flyers are getting in more food than ever, thousands of tons, and now also coal so the Berliners won’t freeze. The interview was an air force man who said next month they plan to drop candy and toys from the planes, with little parachutes. “Those German kiddies will have Santa Claus, whether Joe Stalin wants them to or not,” he vowed.

“Mr. Shepherd, how be ye?” she asked suddenly. I must have looked unwell.

I blew my nose to preserve dignity. I’d been close to tears, for the most ridiculous reason. “I was thinking of my old boss, Lev Trotsky,” I confessed. “He would have loved that report. The triumph of compassion over Stalin’s iron fist. The people prevail, with candy and parachutes.”

“It’s our boys helping them do it,” she said, and I said yes, it is, and wanted to dance with Mrs. Brown, stomp my feet at the doorsill. My country ‘tis of thee.

At half past, the election news came back. Truman had been awakened and rolled out of bed in Missouri, informed he might not be on vacation yet. He didn’t stay up last night to listen to the returns; the Democratic campaign had not rented a suite or organized any party for that. They saw no need. While Dewey’s men popped the champagne in New York, Harry put on his pajamas, ate a ham sandwich, and went to bed early.

Now the race was neck and neck, with many states still counting. By mid-morning it was Harry ahead by a nose. We didn’t move from the radio.

Shortly before noon they called it. Harry Truman won.

“Oh, Mr. Shepherd, it’s a day to remember. Those news men could not make a thing true just by saying so. It’s only living makes life.”

I knew what she meant. The cold spell on us is deep, but however bitter the day might appear, winter will pass. I made a fire for us in the living room. A neighbor across the way has torn down his old carriage house and piled the scrap wood by the street.

Mrs. Brown rolled up the Washington Post like a log and waved it high, her eyes alight with mischief. “Here’s something to fuel the flames,” she suggested. Before long we’d cast in every one, the magazines too, warming our hands over those trumpeting false prophecies. The magazines with color in them curled in a blue-green blaze. By afternoon the house was so warm Mrs. Brown took off her gloves.

“You can’t give up,” she kept repeating. “You think you know it’s all hopeless but you do not, Mr. Shepherd. You know not.”

December 10

The United Nations have adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was all on the radio today, and even the howlers achieved a tone of deference. Eighteen articles, establishing every person on earth to be born free and equal, endowed with conscience to act toward every other in a spirit of brotherhood. Maybe Mrs. Brown is right, and we know not where a little raft of hope could carry us. Article 18 states: All persons have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion or belief.

The Raleigh Spectator, December 16, 1948

 

Communist Writer Fired for Misdeeds

 

The Associated Press

December 18

They seem so thrilled to pounce, these press men. Not before, when I was nobody of consequence, only now. Mrs. Brown says envy plays into it. “There are some who’d hardly lift a finger for kindness, but they would haul up a load of rock to dump on some soul they think’s been too lucky. They take it as duty, to equal out life’s misery.”

“They think I’ve been too lucky?”

She sighed. “Mr. Shepherd, it’s what you’ve said a hundred times, they don’t know a person’s whole story. They think you just sit in your little room making up tales and getting bags of money for it, while they have to go out rain or shine and talk to Mrs. Smith on Charlotte Street about a pie contest. They’re put out with you for having an easier life.”

“Mrs. Brown, who in this world has an easier life?”

“I wonder that too.”

January 26, 1949

An assignation. First of the new year. Tommy’s attention seems to be wearing thin. Lying on his back blowing smoke rings, his eyes kept going to the window like a bird trapped indoors, wanting out. Rather than gazing upon the spectacle of me, sitting in the Morris chair all bundled up in my long knitted scarf. Mrs. Brown’s Christmas present. If I can keep her long enough I shall be warm as a lamb, head to toe. I thought of getting out last year’s gloves and putting those on too; the little room was freezing.

Maybe I’m only imagining Tommy has gone cool. What do I know of hearts in winter? He’s tired, I know that much. And disappointed. No job in advertising yet, still a traveling salesman for Art, in Washington all last week before coming here. Something at the National Gallery.

“It must have been a hubbub in D.C., with the inauguration.”

“Hubbub” he said. “Cat, what language do you speak? My grandmother said ‘hubbub.’ Harry Truman says ‘hubbub.’ I believe it was the theme of his inaugural speech. ‘My fellow Americans, we face a great hubbub.’”

“Actually his theme was the false philosophy of communism. We will roll up our sleeves and defeat it.”

“That sounds like a variety of hubbub.”

“It’s not all that funny, Tommy. Not to me. I was hoping for a new theme.”

“Oh, cheer up. You’ll never get to move Winslow Homers for the Department again, poor you. Maybe this solid gold little writing hobby will pan out instead.”

“Because I still have money, I have no problems. Is that what you think?”

“It will get you through times with no friends, my friend.”

“So they say.”

Tommy was carefully studying the palm of his hand, for some reason.

“My motion-picture agreement is off, by the way. No reason given. They’re getting ever so touchy out there about the color red.”

“Stark! There goes my chance to meet Robert Taylor.”

“You could probably arrange it. If you wanted to help him testify against someone. The money’s fantastic, I hear.”

Cold was literally leaking into the room. I could feel it pour in like water around the edges of the window. I had a strange vision of the whole hotel sunk like a ship beneath the sea, entering the world of the fishes.

“Do you know what, Tommy? Next month we should get together at my house. Honestly, it would be nice. I’ll make a lomo adobado. You’ve never seen my house.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Oh, but what will the neighbors think.”

“They’ll think I have a friend. One person knocking on my door who’s not in the pay of myself or the FBI. You hear about it all the time.”

He didn’t answer. Finished with the hand inspection, he wound his watch.

“Aren’t you sick of hotels?”

“Fed up to the blinkers, if you want to know. Let’s go down to the bar.”

“We should get dinner. Some nice oxtail soup and Horlick’s, that’s what you need. You’ve let yourself get run down.”

“Oxtail soup and Horlick’s. Cat, you are off the cob.”

“Corny, that would mean. Sorry. I guess I’ll go.”

He rolled himself upright, facing me, black socks on the floor. “Sorry me, chum, I’m just whammed. Sick of hotels, you said it. What is this furniture, all these bars on everything? It gives me the heebies, like I’m in the pen.”

“It’s a style. Mission.”

“Mission. Do they send up a preacher with the room service?” He lay back down on the bed, reached overhead to grasp the upright slats on the headboard, and briefly rattled them like a prisoner. “The hotel in D.C. had a lousy bar, the place was gestanko in general. Did I tell you there was a big scene?”

“No.”

“Last night. No, night before. I get back to my hotel after a whole day of meetings with the drizzle bags, I’m beat to the socks, and I can’t even get to the elevator. There’s a scene in the lobby. This huge colored cat, he’s got on a nice overcoat, hat, briefcase, everything, but he’s flailing. Football with the bellhops. I mean he’s down on the floor, they tackled him when he came in I guess. He’s a Negro, see. The hotel doesn’t have Negro guests.”

“What happened?”

“Well, dig this. It turns out he’s an ambassador from some African country. Ethiopia, I want to say. They got it sorted out. It’s all right because he was foreign, not an American Negro. What do you make of that?”

“Good God. I hate to contemplate. That foreigners aren’t even worth the full measure of American contempt?”

“Could be. But he seemed decent. A nice accent, like a Brit. We rode the elevator together, he was on my floor. He said he hoped I didn’t mind. He’s stayed there loads of times before, and they still make the same mistake.”

“Mind what? You said he hoped you didn’t mind.”

“I’m sure I don’t know.”

“How did you feel, Tommy?”

He rolled over onto one elbow, narrowing his eyes. “Feel?”

“In the elevator, with that poor man.”

He fell back again, staring at the ceiling. “I felt I was going up.”

February 11

“There was a poke on your mailbox,” Mrs. Brown announced this morning as she came in the door. After these years it still takes me by surprise, though I should have known, she stood there holding it. A poke is a sack. A mesh bag in this case, the type the neighbor uses for carrying home her groceries. Today it contained sundry fountain pens, a fedora, things I’ve given Romulus over several years. Including the rubber atl-atl brought from Mexico, his reward for feeding the cats.

“Here’s a note,” Mrs. Brown said, puzzling over it. “Romulus isn’t to visit here any more.” Please keep away from my boy was the nature of her explanation. Agent Myers had advised her they should not keep any objects given him by a Communist.

“Take a letter, Mrs. Brown. Tell the lady she needs to get in touch with General Eisenhower right away, because he too is in possession of a Communist Object.”

Mrs. Brown sat at the typewriter, hands poised, waiting for the cue that my words were going to make some kind of sense. Sometimes she waits all day.

“What did they call it? Oh, yes!” I said, snapping my fingers. My memory is fine, thank you. “The Order of Victory. It was in Life Magazine years ago, they had a full-page photo. A platinum star set with diamonds. Stalin gave it to him at Yalta. Tell her the next time Agent Myers comes around, she’d better tell him to go see Eisenhower. Make sure the general puts that thing in a poke and sends it right back to Stalin.”

March 4

I grew cross with Mrs. Brown today. It shouldn’t have happened, she is as good as gold. She did the shopping for me, I’m losing the nerve for going out, and it’s only March. She tolerates, as usual. Returned with change and receipts, plus cheerful news of spring, crocuses in the yards on Montford, tennis shoes on sale. A 12-pack of pencils is now 29 cents. The Zippo lighter went up to $6, so she went against orders and bought matches, more economical. I scolded her for it, telling her matches don’t work worth a damn in the bathtub. I’ve never sworn at her before. It made her go pale and sit down, like a telegram bearing bad news. It took her half an hour to respond.

“You shouldn’t be smoking in the bath, Mr. Shepherd.”

“Why, because I’ll burn down the house?”

This afternoon she brought letters up to my study for signature, and I noticed her nails looked ragged. She is on edge too; we both jump when the telephone rings, like schoolgirls, waiting for Lincoln Barnes to ring up. It’s been months that they’ve had the manuscript, and now the corrected galleys. A title, jacket art, everything you might want to have on hand for a publication. Except a publication date.

“Your stories are all about Mexico,” Mrs. Brown posed today, with forceful cheer. “Have you ever thought about writing them for Mexicans?”

“Where in the world did that come from?”

“I only ask.”

“I don’t write in Spanish. I write in English, about Mexicans. If I wrote in Spanish, I suppose I’d have to write about Americans.”

“I know you speak Spanish perfectly well. I’ve heard you.”

“Ordering a plate of fish is not writing a novel. I don’t even dream in Spanish. I can’t seem to invent anything in that language. Don’t expect me to explain.”

She should have said Yes sir, and turned on her Kerrybrooke heels. That’s how Gal Friday does it in the movies. Yet there she stood, wearing that look: Hell or High Water. “You might could learn,” she said. “If you stayed there awhile longer.”

“Living there from the ’20s until 1940 wasn’t enough? You think a few more decades of practice might do the trick?”

“I mean living there as a man. A writer. You’d get used to it.”

“Is this a suggestion?”

She didn’t answer. I laid down my book and glared.

“Look, I don’t have the temperament. Mexican writers are all depressives.”

 

She has been hiding mail. Filing it in the boxes for the attic without letting me see it all first, as is the custom. I caught her out and made her show what she’d been holding back. She insists nearly all the mail is the same as ever, it’s only a handful that are “not very nice.”

“We say onions to H. W. Shepherd!” is the general sentiment. Shepherd the squealing pathetic traitorous free speecher, the Communist.

“You have to forgive hateful people, for what a man hates, he knows not.”

“Who said that, Jesus Christ?”

“Mr. Shepherd, there’s still a good deal of nice mail here, and some hateful. The good are from people who’ve read a book of yours or more, and glad of it. And the hateful ones are from people who know nothing of you. That’s all I’m saying. Look if you’re going to look. See if they mention a word you ever wrote.”

She was right, they didn’t. They addressed a creature they had learned about through some other means. The news, presumably.

“I can see how you’d get your feelings hurt,” she said. “As a man. But not as a writer, for they’ve not read your books. From the look of it, I’d say they’ve read nary a book at all.”

Still, it was hard to put the things down. Like a gruesome potboiler. You know how it will finish, you know it will turn your stomach, you go on reading. There were a dozen or more. “Your treacherous behavior in the Department of State is nothing but slings and arrows aimed at Old Glory. It is hard for us Americans to know how self-hating Communists can live with your grotesque deeds.”

“If the majority felt as you do, we would all be in chains. Freedom is what our country is based on. If you won’t stand up for our country, you deserve no freedom.”

“I and my friends will certainly do all we can to spread the word about your disgusting hatred for our country, and make you even more a footnote of litery history than already.”

“It sickens me to think you and your old haggard wife might raise another America-hating child. I hope she is barren.”

“Go back to your own filthy country. When we need Mexican’s opinion of America we’ll ask.”

“I’m proud to say I don’t own your book, if I did it would go in the fireplace.”

Well, naturally I felt a twinge at that one. After our newspaper-burning party. But Mrs. Brown said fiddlesticks, it’s usual to start the fire with a newspaper when it’s no longer of any use. “This is something different. It’s not civilized. Imagine saying any such things to a human person.”

“No, you’re right. They’re an angry bunch.”

She took the pages out of my hands. “Angry is not the word for it. These folk don’t even ken you to be a real man. They give you no benefit of a doubt. I expect they’d be kinder to a neighbor’s dog that bit them.”

“Well, that’s true. My neighbor here at least sent a note about Romulus. She said ‘please,’ and sent the gifts back. I’ll give her that.”

“They are just so happy to see the mighty fallen,” was her verdict. She tore the letters to pieces and threw them in the bin, then sat down to the day’s typing. Even from upstairs, her Royal sounded like a Browning machine gun.

April 7

Infuriating telephone conversation with Lincoln Barnes.

Say, did you ever think of doing short pieces? The kind of thing they run in the Popular Fiction Group?

Pulp stories. I asked him why.

“Oh, just wondering.”

My opinion of those stories, which I shared with Lincoln Barnes, is that they are all written by one person using a hundred different pseudonyms. Her real name might be Harriet Wheeler. She eats nothing but chocolates and lives in one of the upstairs rooms at the Grove Park.

It should have been a good day. With Tommy coming tomorrow. Not on the Vandy-wagon either, he just wants to visit. Passing through on his way to see some sculpture in Chattanooga. He’ll stay here, he wants to see my cave he says, the pork roast is already marinating. Mrs. Brown left early, I was boiling chiles and garlic in water to mix with the vinegar and oregano when the phone rang. Months without a call, waiting for Tommy and for Lincoln Barnes, and now they both turn up.

Barnes didn’t want to talk to me directly, I could tell. He’d hoped to leave a message with Mrs. Brown. I usually don’t answer in the afternoons. What he seems to be saying is they are uncertain about publishing the book. At all. With the Communist Business starting to tie their hands.

“I could see that, if I were a Communist. Luckily for you, I am not.”

“Look, I know you’re not a Communist. Everybody here knows that. We know you’re loyal to the U.S. Your name doesn’t even sound all that Mexican.”

I had to go in the kitchen and turn off the pot, it was boiling over.

“What you are,” he said when I came back, “is controversial. The fellows running the show here are not very keen on controversial, because it stirs people up. For most readers out there, controversial means exactly the same thing as anti-American.”

“Barnes. You’re a man of words, they matter to you. Why would you say this? You don’t like controversy because it stirs people up. Controversy means stirring up.”

He didn’t respond.

“You could say you don’t like an eggshell, because it has egg in it. Why not go ahead and say you don’t like eggs?”

He sighed into the phone. “I’m on your side, Shepherd. Believe me. I didn’t call you up to play games. The suggestion that has been made here is that we publish the book under a pseudonym.”

Good idea. How about Harriet Wheeler? This is madness. The novel is set in Mexico, written in the same style as two previous books, which have been read by practically everyone in the nation, schoolchildren included. Does he think they’ll believe this is some other writer’s work?

He said every publisher in New York is now scrambling to publish books set in ancient Mexico.

“Are you serious?”

“Oh, yes. You’re going to have fifty imitators soon. Why not get in line? You could be among the first.”

The thing was boggling. He mentioned other possibilities. Using a ghostwriter. Not exactly that, but a real person, I would pay him a fee to use his name. In case I am worried about the press uncovering that the book was actually written by me.

Uncovering. My words, me, how could there be any difference?

“You’re an editor, Mr. Barnes. Your stock-in-trade is the handiwork of other people. So this could be Stanback Powders we’re discussing, or fine leather shoes, as far as you’re concerned. I don’t know, I’m only guessing. But for me it is different. I am the tongue of the shoe. If you pull me out of it, the whole thing falls apart.”

April 8

A day could be perfect. You could forget fear altogether. Or fear might no longer make any difference, because it is the whole ocean and you’re in it. You hold your breath, swim for light.

Tommy found it hilarious that Barnes had to be talked into putting my name on my book. Or that he would at least “pitch that idea to marketing.” A freaking gasser. Somehow I was persuaded to agree. Tommy is persuasive.

“Oh my God, pitch that to marketing. Author’s name on the author’s book, what next?”

God has no better card to play than an April day, a well-tuned car, a world with nothing so wrong in it really, if a lomo adobado could still be cooked to such perfection, consumed to excess, distributed thereafter between a working Philco refrigerator and two happy, useless cats. And all of it left behind, dishes still in the sink. The mountain parkway is open to the west now, a skyline viaduct to the Great Smokies, they finished it just for us. Tommy and me. We were quite sure of that. The tunnels are no longer blind, they all go somewhere. You arrive at the other side.

“Mr. Barnes seemed to think he was taking a terrible risk on me. I’m a regular Moriarty, my menace looms large. He said, ‘I just hope I won’t be sorry about this.’”

“Oh, you devil,” Tommy said. “Wanting your name on your book. Next thing you know they’ll be calling a spade a spade.”

“Calling a rake a rake,” I proposed, opening the Roadster full throttle on the parkway, letting the curves pull us, feeling their outbound gravity. The world blurred, the April trees lit up with pale green flames, scenes flashed by, falling water, swinging bridges strung across rocky ravines. Windows wide open, the full breath of spring of dirt of new life stirring in the breast of whatever was left for dead, all that rushed at us now. Tommy’s hair shuddered golden in the wind. He is a rake, a rake, the blinding shine of him reflected in the windscreen, Tommy’s glint and glory. Tommy’s hand laid here and there as if it hardly mattered, making me want to wreck the car. To find speed, drive myself deep into it.

“You and me, cat, this is the life,” he said, and with Tommy that’s as near as it gets to the terms of affection. “This is the life and you know it.”