The Woman Who Fell From Grace (2 page)

“And when she dies,” added Frederick, “Shenandoah will pass on to her own first daughter, Mercy. Mave’s husband, Richard, the gallant Lord Lonsdale, gets nothing.”

“What does he do with himself?” I asked.

“Come when Mavis calls him,” Frederick replied drily. “Tail wagging.”

“Do they have any other children?”

“Just Mercy.”

“And you gentlemen?”

“We are both bachelors,” Edward said. “Without issue.”

I drained my martini. Another appeared at my elbow instantly. “Sounds like one big unhappy family.”

“Just like any other,” agreed Edward pleasantly.

“Does your publisher know what’s going on?”

“Only that we’re having a bit of trouble finding a writer,” replied Edward. “Not why. They are, however, getting nervous about our deadline. They expected the book to be well under way by now. They impressed upon us yesterday the amount of pressure they are under. Huge sums of money have been committed. The paperback publisher is waiting impatiently in line, as is the movie studio.”

“They recommended you,” said Frederick. “As a sort of specialist.”

“I suppose that’s one word for what I am.”

“They said there isn’t a celebrity alive, including Mavis, who you can’t lick.”

Edward shuddered. “What a horrible image, Frederick.”

Frederick stared at him a moment. Then turned back to me. “You’re our last and best hope, Hoagy. We’re desperate. Will you fly down to Shenandoah and talk to Mavis?”

I sat back in my chair. “I should warn you there aren’t many people who are good at what I’m good at. It’s a rare talent. In fact, I’m the only one who has it.”

“Not exactly bashful, are you, sir?” said Edward stiffly.

“You want bashful, get J. D. Salinger. He’ll cost you a lot less money than I will.”

“Certainly we can hammer something out,” Frederick ventured. “We’re all reasonable men, aren’t we?”

“You might be. I’m not.”

Frederick cleared his throat. “Frankly, money happens to be the least of our worries right now. Get Mave to stop communicating with the dead. Deliver a novel that Alma Glaze would have been proud to put her name on. Do that and we’ll meet your price, no matter how unreasonable. Satisfied?”

“Every once in a while, if I try real hard.” I sipped my martini. “Okay, we’ll fly down there.”

“Excellent,” exclaimed Frederick, pleased.

Edward frowned. “By ‘we’ I trust you’re not referring to Lulu here.”

A low moan came out from under the table. I asked her to let me handle it.

“I am,” I replied. “I tend to do most of the heavy lifting, but we always work together. We’re a team.”

Edward smiled. “Like Lunt and Fontanne?”

“I was thinking more of Abbott and Costello.”

“I understand,” said Frederick, “but there is the matter of the Shenandoah peacocks. Our trademark. They’ve lived on the north lawn for more than two hundred years. Their wings are clipped to keep them from flying away or —”

“Or crapping on anyone’s head,” Edward broke in.

Frederick lit another cigarette and blew the smoke Edward’s way. Those boys were at it again. “That makes them exceedingly vulnerable to predators — dogs, cats, raccoons, foxes. The grounds are kept carefully guarded, and no animal of any kind, no matter how well trained, is ever allowed on the property. I’m sure you can appreciate that.”

“Gentlemen, the sole predatory act of Lulu’s life was a growling contest she got into in Riverside Park with a eight-month-old Pomeranian named Mr. Fuzzball. She needed eighteen stitches when it was all over.”

They mulled this over a moment, lips pursed. They looked at each other. A silent message passed between them. “We have your word, as a gentleman, that she’ll not harm the peacocks?” asked Edward.

“You have my word, as a gentleman, that she’ll be deathly afraid of them.”

“Very well,” said Frederick reluctantly. “We’ll finesse Mavis on this particular point. Just try to keep Lulu under cover, if you can.”

“That’s no problem. In a rainhat and sunglasses she easily passes for Judd Hirsch. When do we leave?”

W
E LEFT EARLY THE
next week. I had stuff I had to do first. It was nearly April. My Borsalino was due for its 30,000-mile overhaul at Worth and Worth. I had to take the wool liner out of my trench coat and put my winter clothes in storage and fill the prescription for Lulu’s allergy medicine. I had to read the damned book, all 1,032 pages of it.

Partly,
Oh
,
Shenandoah
was the story of how the American Revolution shattered forever the privileged lives of colonial Virginia’s landed British gentry. But mostly it was a love triangle, heavy on the violins. Flaming-haired Evangeline Grace, the beautiful, headstrong young daughter of a wealthy tobacco planter, was torn by her love for two men. John Raymond, handsome son of the colonial governor in Williamsburg, was a brilliant law student, a sensitive poet, a budding statesman. The other, a dashing, hot-blooded Frenchman named Guy De Cheverier, was a fearless adventurer, a ruthless brigand reviled by polite society. It was their story. It was the story of the great Virginia plantations — of colorful horse races and grand balls, of velvet waistcoats and powdered wigs, and smiling, happy slaves. And it was the story of the Revolution. De Cheverier would become a daring war hero who time and again led his brave, loyal men into victorious battle against the Redcoats. Raymond would break with his English father to become an architect of the Revolution at the side of his William and Mary law classmate Tom Jefferson. Real figures from American history were sprinkled throughout the novel — George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, James Monroe, James Madison. Alma Glaze did her homework. She drew her portrait of Shenandoah Valley plantation life from local historical records and supposedly, her own family’s illustrious past. Still, it was the love triangle, the battle between Raymond and De Cheverier for Vangie’s hand that carried the reader’s interest across so many pages. Which one would she marry? In the end, she couldn’t decide, and since neither was willing to bow out gracefully, the two of them fought a duel for her hand, Vangie to marry the winner. Who won? Alma Glaze never told us. All she left us with was that famous closing line: “As one man fell, Evangeline stepped forward, eyes abrim, breast heaving, to embrace both the victor and the new life that surely promised to be her grandest adventure.” For fifty years, readers had been arguing over what the hell that meant. That’s why there was so much interest in the sequel.

Naturally, it’s hard to read it nowadays without seeing the faces of the actors who played the roles in the lavish Sam Goldwyn production, the only movie in Hollywood history ever to sweep Best Picture, Best Director (William Wyler), Best Screenplay (Robert Sherwood), as well as Best Actor and Actress. Warner Brothers loaned Goldwyn Errol Flynn to play De Cheverier. For the coveted roles of Evangeline Grace and John Raymond, Goldwyn cast the gifted young British stage performers Sterling Sloan and Laurel Barrett, who also happened to be husband and wife in so-called real life. Neither had appeared in an American film before. Sloan was fresh off his acclaimed Hamlet in London’s West End and bing touted as the new Olivier. The fragile, achingly beautiful Barrett, the woman who beat out every top actress in Hollywood to play Vangie, was a complete unknown. Both won Oscars for
Oh
,
Shenandoah
. Sloan’s, of course, was awarded posthumously. He dropped dead of a ruptured brain aneurysm only hours after wrapping the film on location in Virginia. His death at age thirty-two destroyed Barrett. She suffered a nervous breakdown soon afterward. She was in and out of institutions for depression right up until she died in 1965 at the age of fifty-two, her life made, and seemingly unmade, by her
Oh
,
Shenandoah
triumph. She wasn’t alone in that.

Alma Glaze herself encountered outrageous swings of fortune, good and bad. A small, rather flinty woman given to wearing orthopedic shoes and severe hats, she was the only child of the Shenandoah Valley’s most distinguished old family, and wife to a successful local banker. She began work on her first and only novel one summer while she was recovering from pneumonia. She spent seven years on it. When she finally finished it, she gave it to a childhood friend who taught literature at Mary Baldwin, a small, proper nearby women’s college. The friend sent it on to his brother, an editor for a New York publishing house. The rest is publishing history.
Oh
,
Shenandoah
sold an incredible one million copies in its first six months, sometimes as many as sixty thousand copies in one day. Still, Alma Glaze wasn’t able to savor its success for long. The day she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for literature was the same day her husband died of tuberculosis, leaving her a forty-two-year-old widow with three children. She sold the film rights to Sam Goldwyn for the then-whopping sum of $100,000. And though the movies success would surpass even that of the book, she was again unable to enjoy it. The week after it premiered, she was run over by a hit-and-run driver while she was crossing a street in Staunton, Virginia, her hometown. She died instantly.

And now it was a raw March morning fifty years later, and I was squeezed into a tiny, stuffy De Havilland Dash four-prop that was riding the turbulence on down to Charlottesville from New York, by way of Baltimore. My complimentary honey-roasted peanuts and plastic cup of warm orange juice were bouncing around on the tray before me. Lulu was on the floor under me, making unhappy noises. My mind was on how I never expected things to turn out this way. This wasn’t me. This was someone else sitting here getting airsick. Not me. Never me.

If you’re a serious fan of the gossip columns, and of American literary trivia, you may remember me. It’s okay if you don’t. It has been a while since the
New York Times
, upon reading my first novel,
Our Family Enterprise
, labeled me “the first major new literary voice of the ’80s.” Ah, how sweet it had been. The best-seller list. The awards. Fame. Marriage to Merilee Nash, Joe Papp’s hottest and loveliest young leading lady. The eight art-deco rooms overlooking Central Park. The red 1958 Jaguar XK150 convertible. The gaudy contract for book two. But then there was this problem with my juices. They dried up. The creative kind. All kinds. Merilee got the apartment and the Jag, the Tony for the Mamet play, the Oscar for the Woody Allen movie. Briefly, another husband, too, that fabulously successful playwright Zack something. I got Lulu, my drafty old fifth-floor walk-up on West Ninety-third Street, and my ego, which recently applied to Congress for statehood.

My juices did come back. Somewhat. There was a slim second novel,
Such Sweet Sorrow
, which managed to become as great a commercial and critical flop as my first was a success. Merilee came back, too. Somewhat. These days we’re two intelligent semiadults who are content not to ask questions anymore and to just go ahead and make each other miserable. Actually, we get along fine as long as we’re not together. I still had my apartment. She still had her eight rooms on Central Park West and her eighteen acres in Hadlyme, Connecticut, where right now she was busy playing in the mud while the offers rolled in. No plans for a merger. We know better than that.

I’d just spent the last three months in a small boat on the Aegean, subsisting on grilled fish and iced retsina and fasting from the neck up — no books, no magazines, no newspapers. No ideas, except my own. Slowly, a third novel had begun to take shape. But it would take me a good three years to write, and I had no publisher for it and no money left. That meant I had to fall back on my second, decidedly less distinguished calling — pen for hire. I’ve ghosted three celebrity memoirs so far. Each has been a best-seller. My background as a writer of fiction certainly helps. Good anecdotes are vital to the success of any memoir. The best way to make sure they’re good is to make them up. It also helps that I used to be a celebrity myself. I know how to handle them. The lunch-pail ghosts don’t. That’s why the Glaze brothers had turned to me.

On the downside, ghosting has proven hazardous to my health. Not to mention the health of others. People have this way of dropping dead around me. Consider yourself warned. Also consider this before you get any ideas: If you’re in trouble, if you need help, if you don’t know who to call, don’t call me. I’m not a hero. Besides, you can’t afford me.

We left the storm behind as we flew further south. There was nothing but blue skies over Virginia. I was one of four men who got off at Charlottesville, and the only one who wasn’t wearing mint-green golf slacks. The air was softer and more fragrant than in the North, the sun bright and hot. I was halfway to the small cinder-block terminal when I suddenly realized I was alone. Back across the runway I went and up the steps into the plane.

She was still under the seat, trembling as badly as she does when she’s about to get a s-h-o-t. She flat out didn’t want to get off the plane. She does like to fly. In fact, she’s already amassed enough frequent-flyer miles to qualify for a free coach flight all the way from New York City to Lansing, Michigan. This, however, was a little much. I asked her what the problem was. All I got in response was whimpering. I told her to come. She refused. I’m bigger. I dragged her out from under the seat, hoisted her up, and carried her, thrashing and moaning in protest, out the cabin door.

“Terrible twos,” I explained to the stewardess.

My rented Chevy Nova smelled as if somebody had once stuffed it full of Styrofoam peanuts. I stowed my gear in the trunk, tossed my trench and Borsalino in the backseat, and took off the jacket of the gray cheviot-wool suit I’d had made for me in London at Strickland’s. I shoved the driver’s seat back to accommodate my legs and rolled down the windows so Lulu could stick her large, black nose out and wail unhappily at the parking lot. I reminded her I’d gone to a lot of trouble to get her invited along, and if she wasn’t going to behave, “she could spend the next three months in a kennel with a lot of strange, mean pit bulls. She shut up.