Lillian and Dash (27 page)

He picked up the argument by mocking her statement. “ ‘In order to save the American people’? Are you delirious? What I don’t understand is how you have seen through every bullshitter who has come along ever since I met you, but not him. Does your new farmer friend think he’s the savior too?”

“We don’t talk politics. We talk sweet corn. So how will it go now?”

“The Rooshkies will save our asses, but what a gigantic effort it will have to be for everyone. And at what a cost.”

“How long?”

“Five years, maybe six or seven.” But Hammett wasn’t done with Roosevelt: “I’ve got a particular ring of hell reserved just for him. What he’s done to the Japanese in California, I suppose that’s all right with you too.”

“It’s temporary.”

“Tem-por-ary?” He touched her shoulder. Probably he shouldn’t have touched her. “They’ve got them living in the stables at Santa Anita.”

“It’s terrible. It really is. But it’s an emergency … They bombed—”

Of course his anger had been mounting ever since he stepped off the train, ever since he saw her washing her tractor. Hammett swung the back of his hand up from the frying pan into Lillian’s face. His father’s abrupt motion at the Bog Hill. He felt her nose push into her cheek. She gasped. Blood spurted everywhere until Lillian buried her face in a dish towel, which muffled her voice: “You fucking bastard … you spineless prick … you …”

He reached to help her. She smacked his hands away. “Get out … just get out …”

Still he tried to help her.

“Get the fuck out. Go! Go!”

Hammett took his coat off the rack and prepared to walk to the train station without his valise.

Lillian shouted from the open doorway, “Get as far away from me as you can, you … Anywhere …” She was sobbing now and said but did not shout, “Wherever it is, make believe you’re still a writer …”

T
HREE WEEKS AFTER HIS ASSAULT
on Hellman, Hammett wrote this:

no, not Lilly or My Dear Lillushka or even Lilly Anna, none of these, simply Lillian:

Where the fuck, Lillian wondered, where was this crazy religious hogwash going? She went back to the top of page two and reread until she caught up.

Even while reading the letter, Lillian did not feel it apologetic enough. When she scanned it afterward, she confirmed the fact that it did not contain the word
sorry
or the word
please
. Nowhere did she find the word
love
, but she already knew it would not be there. He does say he is “apologetic” and “remorseful,” even “contrite,” but those are descriptions once removed from feeling and as such as unsatisfying as the confessional he claimed the letter to be.

That wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was that this was a crazy letter. Hammett had never been this crazy before.

It was still Hammett all right, a man with holes in his heart so large love blew right through them. Still, a rare man,
a man unlike any she’d ever known, a man she had loved for a long time, a man who worked ceaselessly at making himself unlovable. Lillian read the letter again slowly while seated at the kitchen table. She touched the bridge of her nose, which he had not broken but was now almost pleasantly sore. The eyes he had blackened with his blow were still discolored.

The next time through his letter she found the tone, which he acknowledged to be a problem, his problem, to be truly offensive. She said to the pages, “It’s all about you, for Christ’s sake. What fucking gall. Break my nose and it’s your problem.”

Now, there was nothing in his apology that did not offend and worry her further. And that goddamned theology lesson … that patronizing your put-upon people bullshit … the lie about harsh Jewish justice being superior to God’s love … especially when he can’t even come to use the word himself. And then trying to turn me into his all-forgiving confessor … Sister Lillian of the Broken Nose. Nothing but bullshit piled on more bullshit. This wasn’t even the Hammett she loved to hate.

Two things he wrote required her attention. He was correct: she could never, never, not see him again. She did not have to be with him. But of course she must see him again.

Then there was that army nutiness.
Can’t believe the melodramatic bastard is trying to impress me by threatening to join the army. Brave knight going off to slay the dragon to prove worthy. He’s what? Forty-seven, forty-eight? Jesus. Delusional, absolutely delusional
.

Lillian had not the least inclination to forgive Hammett; even less than least. She did, however, feel obliged to take care of him. Before he hit her she sent Zenia and her son over to Katonah every Saturday morning to do the week’s cooking and cleaning. Since the attack, she kept Zenia back in Pleasantville. Now seemed the time to send them again; it would be exactly the message she intended—
I can’t allow you to live in filth, or to starve, but that’s the extent of my concern
.

Hammett was surprised and pleased to see Miss Jackson and Gilbert at his door the following Saturday morning. He asked if there was any message from Miss Hellman, a letter, any word. No, there was not.

Zenia looked around the place and said, “Where you been keeping the pigs?” She put her smock on and started throwing things in the trash. She refused to let her son touch any of the whiskey, beer, or gin bottles. In fact, she told Gilbert to open all the windows wide and then to pick up as many rugs as he could and take them outside. The boy somehow managed to get them on a clothesline and began beating them fiercely. For the first and only time since Zenia and her son started coming over, Hammett helped with the cleaning.

When Zenia saw how inept he was, she gave him simple and specific tasks: dust all the light shades; move the couch and chairs to the center of the room; fill two large pots with very hot water; shake the dust rags outside—busywork essentially, but things he couldn’t mess up. Zenia could not
imagine how a man could grow so old and not have sense enough to do for himself what her own nine-year-old had already done for years. Good thing she didn’t know what a Marxist was or she’d have disliked him for being a hypocrite instead of only pitying him as an incompetent.

T
HIS WAS HIS FOURTH VISIT
to the enlistment center on Whitehall Street, the day he expected a final decision. Hammett would be forty-eight in three weeks.

When he had been in California it seemed as though a glamour route to military service might be open to him. The War Department deemed Hollywood propaganda so essential to the war effort that many of the people who made movies were offered military commissions. The heads of all the major studios received significant army commissions. Warner and Mayer became U.S. Army colonels and were issued braided uniforms with epaulets and an honorary ribbon or two. Studio tailors then made the fit stylish. They were assigned to help the war effort in any way they could, which meant making some of the political movies Lillian had been asking them to make for years. Most of the time they remained in civilian garb, but for public events, which meant whenever photographers were present, they were U.S. Army colonels.

Hammett only got to see L.B. in uniform once, in a Movietone newsreel announcing the mobilization of the Hollywood film industry. There he was looking spiffy in his costume amidst a phalanx of Hollywood stars in their uniforms—Jimmy Stewart, Robert Montgomery, Clark Gable, Tyrone Power, Wayne Morris—actual patriots who had signed up for a real war. Hammett smiled at the sight and the thought that the junkman from Minsk had finally become the American of his dreams, Lieutenant Colonel Louis B. Mayer.

The army needed training and morale films of its own, and lots of them. It recruited and commissioned film directors, most notably Frank Capra, Howard Hawkes, George Stevens, and Lillian’s good friend William Wyler, among many others. Hammett contacted each of them, Wyler repeatedly, asking how he could be hired on. They all encouraged him to wait a bit and then wait just a bit more. While waiting he realized he’d prefer to lead the life of an enlisted man, rather do some actual fighting than supply the motivation for it. As preposterous as the idea was, he took himself down to the Whitehall Street recruitment station in New York and attempted to sign up.

It was unheard of, yes, but Hammett discovered that if the examining doctor attested that the candidate was in excellent health and would be a material asset to the service so named, it was possible for such a man to be accepted. Since he was much too old to be drafted, Hammett’s task was to
convince that doctor, in this case Major Marvin Gold, he was precisely such a rare specimen. A man with previous military training from the First World War who had unique communication skills the U.S. Army Signal Corps required. A selling job was necessary.

Major Gold met Hammett on his first visit. After filling out a very long enlistment form, Hammett waited on a bench near a large window overlooking Bowling Green. The Statue of Liberty was visible in the gloom of the harbor, faintly green and indistinct; it was not her best day. Ships’ foghorns sounded unhappily. Hammett finished three crosswords while he waited for the interview. He jotted down an idea for a Spade radio script on the margin of his newspaper: