Sara Paretsky - Blacklist

“Cute,” I muttered, showing the paragraph to Amy. “Couldn’t he operate a mangle himself?”

“Don’t get so exercised. It’s only a novel, and anyway, the guy is dead. And for heaven’s sake, don’t mark on it!”

Shamefaced, I put my pencil down and turned back to Pelletier’s words. I loved leaving my own scent on her. She was too fastidious to wash in the communal bathroom, rich little Communist girl, and when I’d licked

her nipples into red cherries against her whipped cream body, I’d ask what Ken would think when she raced home to undress and bathe. “Won’t he lean over you and wonder who or what he’s smelling over the bath salts.” At first she would laugh it away, but one day she explained the sad truth, that Ken was impotent, that he’d long since stopped leaning over her in the bath or bed or any other place.

It was Dryden who said that pity melts the mind to love, and maybe that’s when I started to love her, when I started to pity her. Maybe if she’d whined about it the first time she unbuttoned her white silk blouse, “I only fuck strange men because my husband’s impotent,” I would have despised her, but it was four months before I learned the truth, and then she never mentioned it again.

And Gene, who never missed anything, saw the pity and the love, and began coming to the apartment, where he pantomimed dismay at the rat droppings in the hall and uncurtained cracked windows in the front room. But it didn’t stop him hanging about after meetings. “I can run Rhona home and come back to finish discussing business with you, Herman. Do you need a buck for the laundry? Those sheets are going to get up and walk off that bed on their own pretty soon.”

Disgust didn’t keep him from lying in those sheets. It was the day after I’d found her there with him, the day I beat her (long red fingers on the whipped cream skin, red fingers from her red lover, red fingers turning to blue, blue blood of the master class, it would rule her in the end) the day she left and didn’t come back, the day I started to die.

The next twenty pages dealt with his dying: “Every man imagines he’s Jesus, or at least Trotsky, important enough for execution. That’s what I thought for the first five years I lay in the ground. Finally, I realized selfpity and booze were what really did me in.” He compared himself to Lulu: “… she was in the same boat as me, unloved, unwanted, but she didn’t turn her face to the wall. Instead she turned her back on all of us, went to Africa, painted her giant canvases whether anyone bought them or not.”

If Pelletier’s works were all-what had been Amy’s phrase? A something of clay-Lulu definitely stood in for Kylie Ballantine. Kylie continued her

work, she went to Gabon, she refused to be bowed down by Taverner’s spite in getting her fired.

And Gene stood for Calvin, the Boy Wonder. And Rhona… and Ken. MacKenzie Graham. He’d been impotent, so Geraldine turned elsewhere for love? Was that what she meant, when she said she and MacKenzie had so little in common?

I drew circles on my notepaper. Edwards Bayard had overheard talk as an adolescent about someone who looked just like his mother, and so didn’t seem to realize who his father was. Adolescent self-absorption, a fantasy yearning for the perfect father, made Edwards assume the neighbors were gossiping about him. And then his hurt and bitterness with Calvin kept him clinging to this adolescent version of events. Funny to see someone with so much education, and with the power of his personal wealth and his position in the Spadona Foundation, unable to let go of his adolescent view of the world.

I listed all the Bayards in one of the circles I’d drawn. In another, I put Darraugh’s family, starting with Laura Taverner Drummond, then Geraldine and MacKenzie, whose father connived with Laura to marry the two wild children. Their daughter Laura, named after the formidable grandmother. Darraugh, born in 1943. Darraugh’s son, young MacKenzie.

I slowly added a line joining the Grahams to the Bayards. Darraugh looked exactly like his mother. Everyone said Geraldine Graham had been a wild young woman. In his current illness, Calvin Bayard wandered to Larchmont in the dark. He had kept a key to the house. He had clutched me, crying, “Deenie.” Geral-deeme. She had spilled coffee all over herself when I reported it. Whatever Pelletier had thought about Calvin, the Boy Wonder, Calvin had loved Geraldine Graham.

I again imagined Darraugh as a boy-not galloping around the fields on his horse, but kneeling in bed in the middle of the night, head cupped in his hands, watching Calvin Bayard appear through the woods and let himself into Larchmont after the servants had locked the place up. He had stood up fiercely for MacKenzie Graham; he had weathered his grandmother’s fury by naming his son MacKenzie. Whether Calvin Bayard, MacKenzie Graham, or, for that matter, Armand Pelletier had been his birth father, MacKenzie was the man Darraugh loved. No wonder he hated Larchmont Hall.

I skimmed the rest of the manuscript. Armand’s sense of personal grievance ran too deep for him to record a little thing like “Rhona’s” pregnancy, so he didn’t leave any hint about whether he or Calvin might have been Darraugh’s father. On the other hand, he heaped a lot of scorn on Toffee Noble-an offensive name for anyone, even someone totally imaginary. If Noble was supposed to be Augustus Llewellyn-and it sounded like him, with his basement printing press-Pelletier must have really hated him.

Llewellyn was a prominent Republican donor these days, but in the forties he’d hung out with Calvin and Pelletier and Kylie Ballantine at the bar where lodal leftists and labor organizers congregated.

Marc had read this manuscript. What if he’d gone to see Llewellyn after all: “I’m troubled, sir, by a manuscript Armand Pelletier wrote. It suggests you were some kind of fellow traveler in the forties.” Maybe Llewellyn wouldn’t want his-Republican pals, or his sailing friends, to know this. If he’d asked Marc to meet him after hours-“Come with me to New Solway, I’ll show. you what that setup, what those people were really like”Marc would have gone with him readily. Llewellyn did know all those New Solway people, after all. He was the one black member of the Anodyne Park Golf Course. Julius Arnoff was his registered agent as well as Geraldine Graham’s and Calvin Bayard’s-in his casual gossip with his clients, Arnoff had probably told Llewellyn about the nounous abandoning Larchmont Hall; what a shame it’s standing empty-the ornamental pool is filling up with dead carp…

“VI.! Wake up-you’ve gone catatonic on me.” Amy was shaking my arm. “Didn’t you say you had an appointment at four? It’s three-forty, and you’ve been blanked out for the last ten minutes.”

I blinked at her, trying to feel some urgency about my appointment. “Twenty to four? Yes, I guess I need to get going.”

I started to put the manuscript into my briefcase, but remembered it was the library’s a second before Amy squawked at me. “Sorry. Look, they’ll be closing the reading room in an hour. Do you think you could read this by then? Or get a copy made? If it’s a thingamajig, a clay something-“

“Roman a clef,” Amy interrupted, spelling it for me. “A novel with a key. I can read it and tell you what I think, and get a copy made, but it’s still a novel, even if it’s a novel with a key, and I don’t think you can rely on it for evidence.”

The librarian came over to ask if we would carry on our conversation outside; other patrons were complaining about our noise. Amy walked out with me.

“Not as evidence,” I said. “But come on: the article on ComThought you found said it started at an integrated bar on the West Side called Flora’s, where left-leaning intellectuals and labor organizers met. Pelletier’s manuscript talks about a West Side bar called Goldie’s where artists and labor organizers met. This manuscript casts light on all these people. Even if Armand is distorting what happened for the sake of his story, or because he saw himself as a victim at Calvin’s hands, or even at Augustus Llewellyn’s, the manuscript suggests that Llewellyn and Ballantine and Geraldine all hung out together with Pelletier and Calvin Bayard back before the McCarthy hearings. They all dabbled in Communism. Which might be the secret Taverner sat on for fifty years. Although it doesn’t explain why Taverner kept quiet until the night Marc came to see him.