The Hellfire Club (31 page)

61

NORA’S BLOOD SEEMED
to slow. “Are you saying that he stole other writers’ work?”

“Oh, they all do that, starting with Shakespeare. I’m talking about
real
theft. Unless you’re saying that Driver actually plagiarized
Night Journey.
But if that was your story, I hardly suppose Chancel would be backing you.” He grinned. “Instead of giving you a contract, they’d be more likely to put one out on you, Merle Marvell or no Merle Marvell.”

Harwich chuckled, and Nora silenced him with a murderous glance. “Are you saying that Creeley Monk saw him steal things from the other guests?”

“Not just Creeley, thank goodness. You’re interested in all of them, aren’t you? In everything that went on that summer?”

She nodded.

“This is what I’m prepared to do.” He gestured with the book. “I’ll describe some of the contents of this journal. You continue your research while Andrew and I are on Cape Cod. When I get back, I’ll talk to Merle Marvell and hear what he has to say about you and your project. I’d do that now, but we have limited time this morning. You have the most—ah, colorful—neurosurgeon in the state vouching for you, so I’m willing to go farther than I normally would, but I want to be as cautious as is reasonably possible. You have no objections, I assume?”

She thought hard for a moment while both men looked at her, Harwich shooting sparks of wrath and indignation, Foil calmly. “Why don’t I send you the chapters after they’re written? If you let me borrow the journal, I could have more time to sort through all the information, and I can get it back to you at the end of the summer.”

He was already shaking his head. “I hold Creeley’s papers in trust.” Seeing that Nora was about to object, he raised an index finger. “However! When Merle tells me that you are indeed what you say you are, as I’m sure he will, I’ll give you a copy of all the relevant pages from this diary. Do we have an agreement?”

Harwich gave her a grim, unhappy glance. Nora said, “I think that will be fine.”

“Okay, then.” A suppressed vitality came into his features, and Nora saw how eager he had been all along to do justice to his dead lover. “Let me tell you something about his background, so you’ll be able to appreciate what sort of person Creeley was.” He paused to gather his thoughts. “He was a year behind me at the Garand Academy, on a scholarship. We were all alike—except Creeley. Creeley was as conspicuous as a peacock in a field of geese.

“Creeley’s father was a bartender, and his mother was an Irish immigrant. They lived in a little apartment above the bar, and he had to take two buses to get to school. Creeley turned up wearing big black work shoes, a hideous striped suit far too big for him, and a Buster Brown collar with a
velvet
bow tie. Of course, the older boys beat him up, and that was that for the Buster Brown collars, but he kept the velvet bow tie. That had been
his
idea. He’d read that poets wore velvet bow ties, and Creeley already knew he was a poet. He also knew, at the advanced age of fourteen, that he was sexually attracted to other males, although he pretended otherwise. In order to survive, he had to. But he didn’t see any point in pretending about anything else.

“By his second year he resembled the rest of us. Because he was absolutely fearless, because he was such a
character
, he already had a place in the school. Everybody cherished him. It was remarkable. Here was this utterly philistine school, and Creeley Monk single-handedly made them—us—respect a literary vocation. In his junior year, he published a few poems in national magazines.

“I went to Harvard, and he came on a full scholarship a year later. It didn’t take us long to become close. Creeley and I lived together while I was at medical school, and he moved to Boston when I had my internship and residency there. He got a job writing catalog copy for a publishing house, and we had separate apartments in the same building, which was his choice. He didn’t want to do anything that might compromise my career. But in every other way we were an established couple, and when I moved back here, he did, too. Again, we had separate apartments, and I went into practice with two older men. During this time, Creeley and I were like people in an open marriage. He was devoted to me, and God knows I was devoted to him, but he was promiscuous by nature, and he was commuting to Boston almost every day, so that was how it was.

“He began publishing in all kinds of journals and magazines, gave readings, won a few prizes. In 1937
The Field Unknown
came out, and I’m happy to say it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Georgina Weatherall invited him to Shorelands for the following July, and we both saw this as a great sign.

“In the end, he was disappointed. None of the writers he most admired were present, and two people there had not even published books—Hugo Driver and Katherine Mannheim. He had seen one story by Katherine Mannheim in a literary magazine, and rather liked it, but she had published a fair amount of poetry, which he liked a lot more. In person, she turned out to be a very pleasant surprise. He had imagined her as a kind of a lost, waif-like little thing, and her sharpness and tough-mindedness came as a surprise. There was something else he liked about her, too. I’ll read you some of that from the diary. Hugo Driver was another matter. Creeley had read some of his stories in little magazines and thought they were weak tea. Even before Creeley became aware of his thieving, Driver made him uncomfortable. In his first letter back to me, he said Driver was ‘dank and desperate,’ which turned into a running joke. After a while, he was referring to Driver as ‘D&D’ in the diary, and then that became ‘DD,’ which became ‘DeDe,’ like the girl’s name.

“The others were a mixed bag. Austryn Fain struck him as a clever nonentity, a sort of literary hustler who spent most of his time trying to charm Lincoln Chancel into giving him a lot of money for his next book. Then there was Bill Tidy. Creeley respected Tidy, and he loved his book,
Our Skillets.
They had a lot in common. So he went to Shorelands anticipating a kind of meeting of minds, but Tidy put up a rough-spoken, workingman front and refused to talk to him.

“And then there was the rising star of the gathering, Merrick Favor. Creeley was instantly attracted to him, but it was hopeless. I could see what was coming when he wrote that the first time he went to dinner in Main House and saw Favor talking to Katherine Mannheim in a corner, he thought he was seeing me!”

Suddenly Nora realized that the reason Mark Foil had seemed like a known quantity to her was that he was an older version of the handsome young writer in the famous photograph. She managed to say, “Yes.”

“I suppose he really did look like me, but that was all we had in common. Favor was straight as a die and a compulsive womanizer to boot. He and Austryn Fain both flirted with Katherine Mannheim, but she wouldn’t have either one of them. She made fun of them. Even Lincoln Chancel made some kind of crude pass at her, and she demolished him with a joke. But you know the lure of what you can’t get. Creeley developed a hopeless crush on Favor. It drove him crazy, and he enjoyed every frustrating second of it.”

“You didn’t mind?” Nora asked.

“If I’d minded that sort of thing, I couldn’t have put up with Creeley for a week, much less all those years. He wasn’t designed to be celibate. Do you know how the place was set up, how they lived, what their days were like?”

“Not in much detail,” Nora said. “They lived in different houses, didn’t they, and they had dinner together every night?”

Foil nodded. “Georgina Weatherall lived in Main House, and the guests were assigned to cottages scattered through the woods around the gardens. These were one- and two-story affairs originally built for the staff, back when the family who owned the place had an army of servants. Creeley was in Honey House, one of the smallest cottages, all by itself on the far side of the pond. He had only two tiny rooms and a saggy single bed, which made him very grumpy. As the only woman guest, Katherine Mannheim was put by herself in the next-largest guest house, Gingerbread, stuck back in the woods past the gardens. Austryn Fain and Merrick Favor shared Pepper Pot, and Lincoln Chancel and Dank and Desperate were installed in the biggest cottage, Rapunzel, which had a stone tower on one side and was halfway between Gingerbread and Main House. Chancel had the tower for himself. I suppose he commandeered it.”

“I still don’t really understand why Lincoln Chancel wanted to go there in the first place,” Nora said, having just realized this. “He had his businesses to take care of, and he hardly had to spend a month in a kind of literary colony for the sake of Chancel House.”

Foil started to answer and checked himself. “I always took his being there for granted, but he didn’t have to subject himself to Georgina’s selection of writers, did he? He wasn’t there for the entire month, though, he showed up only for the last two weeks.”

“The answer’s obvious,” Harwich said. The other two waited. “Money.”

“Money?” Nora said.

“What else? The Weatheralls owned half of Boston. Lincoln Chancel was supposed to be richer than God, but didn’t his whole empire turn belly-up pretty soon after all this? He was looking for cash to start up his publishing company.”

“Anyhow,” Foil said, “to get back to Shorelands, even the normal guests had no formal daily schedule. During the day they could do as they pleased as long as they stayed on the estate. If they wanted to work, the maids carried box lunches to the cottages. If they wanted to socialize, Georgina held court on the terrace. You could swim in the pond or play tennis on the courts. The gardens were famous. Guests wandered around the different areas, or sat on the benches and read. At six everyone gathered in Main House for drinks, and at seven, they went into the dining room. Let me read you something. This is what Creeley wrote when he got back to Honey House on his first night.”

He opened the red book and flipped through pages until he found the entry he wanted.

“The gods in charge of railways having seen to my arriving at this longed-for destination five hours late, thereby postponing the death of my illusions, I was escorted in haste by the alarming Miss W., an apparition in blazing, ill-assorted colors (purple, red, orange, and pastel blue) distributed among layers of scarves, shawls, gown, stockings, and shoes, also in a not-to-be-ignored profusion of monstrous jewels, also in ditto face paint, down a narrow path through the gardens—all splendid so far—to a narrower path leading at weary length to my abode, Honey House, a name which had implied rustic charm to susceptible me. In reality, rustic Hovel House is charmless. Miss W. pointed with a ring-encrusted finger to a tiny prison bedroom, a squalid kitchen alcove, a clunky desk where I am to Create! Create! Cawing, she ‘left me to my devices.’

“Whom do I see upon first entering the Baghdad of the Main House lounge but, sensibly engaged with a pretty boy, my life’s ever-sensible companion? Salvation! He had arrived to rescue me from the Hovel! Down flaps Milady, attired in even gaudier rags, face a-glow with fresh paint, to screech introductions to my own, yet not my own MF but his virtual doppelgänger, MF2, who in fact is last year’s literary darling, Merrick Favor, and the boy, an actually not-terribly-androgynous young woman revealed to be Katherine Mannheim, whose work appeals to me. As does Katherine herself, due to her prickly unsentimental good nature, her stylish unstylishness, her caus-tic wit, and, not least, her readiness to admit dismay at our hostess and her realm. And also, alas, to the Favored one, due no doubt to all of the above save the last, Well-Favored being too polite for words, but more than these to her physical attractions. MF2 tolerates my intrusion, and we three discuss our current projects, I already in thrall to 2, he eyeing the girl. 2 at work on a novel, of course, at which KM declares herself ‘unwriting’ a novel. I ask about unwriting, and she replies, ‘Just like writing, only in reverse.’ We murmur admirations of Georgina, which 2 sweetly takes at face value. Among the others I recognize Bill Tidy from publicity photos—awkward, shy, and out of sorts, I must make common cause with him soon—and a bearded string bean who must be Austryn Fain. (At dinner I will be across from him, and yep, he is, fain would I lament he is a talentless lunkhead intent on buttering up Milady, even unto exclaiming over her tacky collection of ‘art,’ which consists of a jumbled crowd of earnest daubs all but obliterating her prize, a fine Mary Cassatt, and her only other decent piece, a moody Redon vastly preferred by me.) 2 shares lodgings with Lunk-head and pretends not to be displeased, and Lunkhead, as misguided as his roommate, shares 2’s yearnings for KM. In a corner lurks a bedraggled soul later revealed to be one Hugo Driver, of whom the better must remain less said. Invited to drink, I strike a blow for the proletariat by requesting an un-posh Wine Spo-dee-o-dee, half red wine, half gin, oft served at the paternal inn, and KM delights by putting down her bubbly and asking for a lethal Top-and-Bottom, equal parts port and gin. These are wincingly delivered.

“Dinner likewise consists of sweet and raw in equal portions, for while KM coruscates and gorgeous 2 is resolutely amiable, our hostess utters dilations upon the Germanic Soul. I deflect attention to the paintings. Mary Cassatt receives her due, and the earnest daubers are praised to the skies, creepy Fain chiming in. I remark upon the little Redon, which displeased Milady screeches she installed only because of its name. What does Miss Mannheim think of the wondrous Lockesly portrait of yon peasant before his sheepfold? enquires Georgina, seeking to restore the proper moral tone. ‘I think,’ said KM, ‘of Aristotle Contemplating the Home of Buster.’ ‘Oh my dear,’ smirks Georgina, ‘you mean, you surely intend to say . . .’ ‘That bellwether is a Buster if I ever saw one,’ said KM, and sharply we returned to the magnificence of all things Teutonic.”

Mark Foil looked up from the diary and gave Nora an almost apologetic glance. “Creeley fell into this tone when he was rattled or insecure, and alcohol always encouraged his showy side. He mentions only one Wine Spo-dee-o-dee, something he only drank when he wanted to offend people he thought were being pretentious, but I’m pretty sure he had at least three of them. Of course he loved the girl’s ordering a Top-and-Bottom, it proved they were two of a mind. They used to talk about their ‘outsider drinks.’ ”