Lillian and Dash (22 page)
So there, in a sample day’s story, is X-9, looking dapper in a dark suit, casually stretched on a chair in Mrs. Powers’s boudoir. Mrs. Powers, an enemy superspy, is a very dangerous woman indeed, but not nearly as dangerous as Mr. Big, her boss, the operative Secret Agent X-9 is ultimately after. In the second panel Mrs. Powers is perched on his knee; they are on the bed—a position they would never be permitted in films. Hammett has her say, “Listen to me, you are an attractive man—strong and violent … and I’m an attractive strong and violent woman, so why shouldn’t we …?”
Jump to a bemused X-9 in the next panel: “What is this, a proposal of marriage?”
The strip was not a success. Hammett wrote it for two years, during which time most of his movie work was gone. The comic strip required little work or thought because, as was his tendency, Hammett simply repackaged old stories and crime gimmicks for a new commercial market. His original magazine stories had become his novels; the novels became movie scripts; and those same stories—and much of the original dialogue—found their way into the comic strip.
Now that radio had developed a huge audience, it too demanded storytellers, and the program directors found Hammett. One night he told Lillian, “As long as they keep inventing new bottles for old wine, I can keep my name on the label.” It surprised him that no one seemed to notice he was always using the same stories and essential characters, or if they did, no one seemed to mind very much. He knew, of course, that Lillian did.
Lillian asked to read the new X-9 radio script. Hammett said sure, but managed never to give it to her, and she knew never to ask for it again. Like Sol Gewirtz, however, she did want to know how he came up with the name X-9.
He refused to tell her: “Secret agent … secret name.”
“Why X-9? It could have been B-12.”
“That’s a vitamin.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Our secret? Swear?”
“Our secret. Swear.”
“Look in your bra.”
“What do you mean, ‘Look in my bra’? You didn’t call him 32-C.”
“Not the size. The model. There’s a tag on the strap. X-9.”
“Do you sniff my underwear too?”
“Only when I’m very lonely.” They touched glasses.
Reba was two
YEARS OLDER
than I was, so when she was fourteen, I was not yet twelve. The chronology does not quite capture the difference. She was already a young woman, easily as beautiful as my mother but in a softer, more welcoming way. Boys were always hanging out near the house just for the chance to see her, I believe. They carried her books home from school, they went on walks with her down to the lake. They even followed her to the movies on Saturday afternoon. Robby Burnett appeared to be her favorite; I saw her kiss him more than once in the woods.
Reba was flirtatious in ways I could not then understand. She made herself madly desirable by being impossibly distant and inaccessible. She had a way of turning down boys and still leaving the impression they had an excellent chance at her affection next
time around. Reba could smile in such a way that a boy could …
Hammett stopped cold. Everything was off. Voice and tone and intention. Worst of all, it wasn’t Reba at all. He was writing fearfully again, a problem cropping up more often in his “Tales.” At least he recognized the symptoms and knew to stop. He poured himself a drink, not the red wine. The gin. He watched the sunset beyond Santa Monica for a long while with pleasure. The light from the room behind him touched his page and he began again.
Reba was an unusually beautiful girl. A painting. Raphael in a rare sensual moment. I simply knew that back then without knowing what sensual meant or who Raphael was. She was just my older sister so I didn’t bother to think very much about her at all. I didn’t really think much about any of the members of my family as people in their own right, only as Hammetts, which is to say I thought about them only as their lives affected mine. Doesn’t everyone, I wonder, really think of family members in that way? Deep down, I think so.
Rebecca’s beauty was different from Mama’s. Already tall and shapely, she was precisely what Hollywood would eventually search for, a distinctive American beauty with just the slightest touch of
something unfathomable. She was the blond girl you saw on the billboards, a combination of purity and promise. The boys who buzzed around her weren’t interested in Barbasol or Lifebuoy; it was the presence of true beauty in our distinctly unbeautiful world that drew them. Of course, I had no idea back then of the aesthetic state of Hopewell, Maryland. I barely noticed that my sister attracted so much attention; to me, she was my sister and not the town’s most beautiful young woman.
I was gangly and introverted, neither sensual nor sexual, a boy who did not yet know the first thing about procreation in any life form higher than a house fly. And because I associated sex with house flies, I considered them both pretty awful.
It is only now that I have come to realize that Reba’s particular beauty triggered more love than lust in the local boys. Though I did notice something different in the way the men looked at her when I happened to go to town with her on market days, and even when she was in church with me and Mama and Richard. On the street their narrowed eyes stole glances. There was something sly and mean in the way men went about looking at Reba. I saw in it hunger and desperation. In church, where her beauty darkened a little, men, at least those who weren’t frightened of her aura, treated her like a child; they
patted her head, talked about little-girl things while they sweated profusely. Father Boylan, Mama’s “Priest Charming,” never allowed himself to be alone with my sister. He always called her Little Halo Girl.
All the behavior I noticed without noticing falls under the broad category of desire, which is easy for me to discern now. Back then I understood it, because of my own youthful limitations, as popularity. My sister was pretty and popular.
Dumb and sexless as I was, I nevertheless knew that Reba’s attraction was not that of Hopewell’s two well-known “bad girls,” Nola Harrison, who dropped out of school and worked at the truck stop on Route 7, and Audrey Huff, who worked at the diner across the highway. I didn’t care to know what made them so bad. I knew it wasn’t robbery or murder. It was something darker that couldn’t be talked about. Even my forgiving mother thought their souls were already lost.
Then my mother discovered that there were some people in town, led by Mrs. Laxalt and Miz Quintin, who spread rumors about Reba also being one of the bad girls. So one Monday morning she marched us all up to Miz Quintin’s vegetable stall right next to the town fountain, pointed straight at the deformed old lady and announced loudly, “This woman does the Devil’s work!” The entire market quieted and turned to take notice. “Yes, indeed, this woman does
the Devil’s work.” I slipped behind the fountain. “She spreads malicious talk about good girls. She is the Devil’s defamer.” Mama stretched out her arms in a public embrace. “We all know in our hearts it is a sin to steal someone’s good name. This girl …,” holding an embarrassed Reba by the shoulders, Mama showed her daughter to the town. “This is a good girl. You know her, a pure child. Do not take her young goodness from her.”
Then, more quietly to Miz Quintin, a threat: “If you do not stop maligning this child, you will put your soul in peril.” It was the only threat I ever heard from my mother’s lips, and it evoked a breathless sigh from the crowd.
I looked mostly at Reba the whole time. Her face was pink and utterly impassive. There was then a prolonged silence. Her purpose at the marketplace done, Mama gathered us up and we set off on the road home.
Hammett knew when he began where this memory of Reba was going. He also knew he had the option of writing two distinct Rebecca Hammett tales. He drained his gin and poured himself another.
Being as bookish as I was made me seem even more the lonely boy. Miss Gaffer, the librarian, chose my
books based on the solid nineteenth-century belief that a boy’s character could be shaped by the biographies of great men. She gave me Eli Whitney, Ben Franklin, Lord Nelson, Napoleon Bonaparte, Commodore Vanderbilt, Abraham Lincoln. When it looked like I would tear through every biography in the library, she said, “Don’t you worry, Sam, I’ll make sure you run out of time before I run out of books for you.”
All my reading made me seem silly in Reba’s eyes. She teased me about reading such foolishness. She wanted me to read adventure stories and then tell her about faraway places in the world.
I liked Reba well enough, I guess. I think I might have liked her more if she hadn’t teased me so much. If I had perceived her teasing as a form of affection, which I now believe it was, it might have changed things a bit between us.
One midsummer night and very warm, I was reading
The Life and Times of Young Andrew Carnegie
at the kitchen table beneath the old oil lamp. My mother set a time limit on my reading at table in order to save oil money. Young Carnegie himself was sitting in semidarkness at a kitchen table studying Morse code so he could apply for a job as a telegrapher on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. My mama called out to me to finish up and go to bed.
“Five minutes, please, Mama.”
Reba said, “I’ll make sure of it, Mama.” Shortly thereafter she damped the wick and I was in darkness. No point in complaining, I closed my book. Reba whispered to me, “Sam, I need you for something.” She put her finger to her lips for silence. “Follow.”
She tiptoed out of the house into the yard. I followed. There was only a sliver of moon. I couldn’t exactly find her. “Sammy,” she called. I traced her voice. She was sitting on Papa’s woodpile at the edge of the trees. Reba wanted me to sit on the chopping block opposite her.
“I like you, Sammy.” I knew Reba wanted me to say I liked her back. I couldn’t because she wanted me to. “Do you ever wonder what will happen to us all?”
The truth was that I didn’t because my books gave me a sense of a personal destiny that I had to shape and follow; in so doing it was clear I would have a good and eventful life. That took a lot of the guesswork out of an entire existence spent passing between home and school in Hopewell. It never occurred to me that because she was a girl, Reba did not have a destiny as fortunate as my own. I said, “I think I’ll invent something and become famous.”
“No one here ever becomes famous.”
Hammett put down his pen and rubbed his eyes. Did he want to finish this story now? Did he want to finish it ever?
He decided it had to be written, perhaps not shown to anyone but certainly written.
Reba reached out with both hands and touched my cheeks. “I’m so proud of you, Sammy. You’re different from any one else I know in the whole world. And you’re my own brother.” My sister had never touched me like that before, deliberately and with affection. Her hands were cool and stayed on my cheeks. “Promise to think about me when you are gone away from here.” I said nothing. “Sam. Promise.”
“Promise.”
We sat quietly. I would have gotten up but my sister began to hum and sing “After the Ball Is Over.” I forgot to mention that Reba had the sweetest voice I’ve ever heard. And so we stayed there. Quietly. I had never shared such a moment with another person. Reba sang low there in the dark. She whispered, “Sam, scratch my back, please.” And then she sang some more.
She was wearing a dress Mama made. Mama made most of our clothing on a sewing machine her family had got her. My father disparaged her sewing as well as her machine.
Reba’s summer dress was pale yellow. It had no arms and wide straps over her shoulders.
“Don’t be afraid to touch me, Sam. Nothing bad will happen.” As she said this, she reached behind her back and opened the top and second buttons. It turned out as I put my fingertips to her back that there was something to be afraid of. I didn’t know what it was but the tightness in my stomach and chest, the near paralysis in my arms and fingers was as close to fearfulness as I’d experienced since I saw Mr. Freeman hanging from the tree beyond the lake. Reba’s hair was down and smelled clean and felt soft when I bent my cheek to it.
“Scratch in circles, Sam. Slower. That’s right. Oh.”
I did only what Reba said to do, but the combination of my fingertips on her cool skin, the smell of her, her cooing and humming voice was so dizzying I closed my eyes and allowed a strange mixture of pleasure and fear to take me away. I became dizzy and then excited in a way that worried me.
“That feels so good. Don’t stop please.”
Reba leaned forward and pulled the straps of her dress off her shoulders. She rocked slightly backward so that my hands edged toward her sides. When she leaned back toward me finally, I had her breasts, soft flesh I had no right ever to touch, one breast in each hand. This was thrilling beyond imagining. And sinful without my knowing sin. My chest was on her back, my cheek and lips upon her neck.
Mama called out to Reba from the house.
“Yes, Mama. Be right there.”
Reba leaned back slowly and buttoned her dress. She said, “Thank you, Sam,” without looking back at me.
It was the first great confusion of my life and it never went away completely.
End