Lillian and Dash (26 page)

He’d made his money—a considerable amount—selling restaurant supplies in Manhattan until a day arrived when he could not stand the sight of another double boiler or a deep fryer and found the selling of water pitchers slightly demeaning. He wanted to grow things. He’d always wanted to grow things. He walked away from the restaurant supply business and bought his farm in Pleasantville six months before the Crash in ’29.

Lillian asked, “Smart or just dumb luck?”

“Neither.” Lillian expected elaboration. There was none, just “Neither.” It was something Hammett might have said.

Childs had never heard of Lillian Hellman and did not resent her purchase of the land. Other neighbors, he told her, were not so generous of spirit. That information merely confirmed the feelings she had when she shopped at the local market or stopped for gas. All the better: If Hardscrabble was going to be an island socially as well as emotionally, wasn’t that what she was looking for all along? She told Childs as she poured a second beer she didn’t give a shit about what her neighbors thought of her. All she really wanted to do was learn how to operate his damn tractor and learn to farm. When Childs tapped her beer glass with his and said, “Then you’ve come to the right guy,” the two had begun a working friendship.

There wasn’t time to waste. If she wanted to get her corn in, the time was now. He proposed to leave his tractor right where it was and walk her land on his way home. Farming
lessons would begin first thing in the morning. He said, “Just please, please, don’t wear fashionable overalls.” Lillian knew that once again she had gotten lucky with a man.

Cedric Childs arrived in a Ford pickup loaded with tools and tall stakes just after seven. They had coffee, toast, and talked a bit. Then Lillian climbed the tractor by herself and Childs took his place behind her seat, his hands resting lightly on her shoulders. Lillian was pleased by his touch. When he touched her right arm, she knew to release the hand brake, put the machine in first gear, and then ease up on the clutch. The tractor rolled forward. Childs said, “Good.” Another soft tap meant second gear, and another third. “Excellent. All right, brake and throw it in neutral.” She did and didn’t remember ever feeling so pleased with herself.

Childs thought that if they worked hard, they could get in ten acres of sweet corn in two weeks. There wasn’t much standing groundwater so the time was now. Normally he didn’t believe in plowing deep for corn—it brought up the weeds and killed the worms—but the land had been fallow, the nutrients had sunk. He drained his coffee and stood: “I’ll be back early afternoon with the plow attached and you can get to real farming.”

“What the hell have we been doing?”

“That’s prefarming.”

When Childs returned that afternoon, two tillers were attached to the tractor. Their mass intimidated Lillian. Childs said, “Don’t give the equipment any thought. Drive
the tractor like you did straight out to the field.” His hands were more comforting than his words and she did exactly as he said.

With Childs’s help Lillian raised her plows at the end of a row, turned the tractor, and dropped them for the return trip. “Overlap about half a foot or so and try to go a little faster.” And she did. The sun, which had been hidden all morning, came through brightly. After two more runs, his hands came off her shoulders. Lillian assumed he had turned the work over to her. She turned back. Childs was not there. He was in fact nowhere to be seen. This was her field now.

The day warmed even more. Lillian opened her blouse and took off her bandana. She looked up momentarily as the tractor rolled forward to see high clouds drawing toward one another and there, off to the west, a flock of Canada geese flying in V formation toward the lake. She was now part of this great mystery.

Lillian looked behind her at the dark earth she had turned—perhaps less than ten percent of her field—with enough satisfaction finally to call it a first day. She wasn’t yet thinking like a farmer; in fact she wasn’t thinking at all: instead of driving the tractor back to the barn shed, she shut it down and started walking back to the house, leaving it out there exposed to the elements, a possible rainstorm. Her body still vibrated as she walked. She was thinking only of a hot bath, a glass of wine, and some caviar. Life did not get better than this.

Cedric Childs was a little older than Hammett, shorter, but better built, rawboned, in fact stronger, more desirable. Lovemaking between farmer and neighbor was inevitable. It would come in its own time. Like the sweet corn.

Whenever Hammett called with Hollywood news and events, Lillian told him of her progress at Hardscrabble. Yes, a crew of men came in and weeded her field—he picked up the her. But she had graded and limed the entire field herself, hooked up and loaded the planter herself. Indeed, she laid in ten acres of sweet corn pretty much by herself. She spoke excitedly about choosing a four-inch depth and two-and-a-half-foot rows. “It rained today, isn’t it great?”

“You know, Lilly, they got you all wrong. You’re not Kassandra the oracle. You’re Demeter the harvest goddess.”

Being apart suited them both. Hammett was drinking, screwing, and pissing away his money. Hellman was farming, starting to write again, and getting ready to invite Cedric to stay the night. Lillian never mentioned Childs to Hammett. Hammett simply imagined there was someone like Childs.

Hellman’s father and aunts didn’t like the idea of her living alone in the country, so Hannah recommended a niece of Sophronia, her New Orleans nursemaid, a reliable young woman named Zenia Jackson who lived in New York and was looking for work. Lillian met her and liked her immediately. Zenia moved in with her boy Gilbert.

When the time came Lillian discovered that Cedric Childs was a surprisingly good lover, certainly as compared
to Hammett. He was strong but gentle, thoughtful and insistent, pleasant and durable, and, important for Lillian, very well endowed. They made love in bed, on the floor, against the wall, on the stairs, and in front of the fireplace. After Childs left in the morning, Lillian slept until early afternoon.

Pleasant and satisfying as their liaisons were for each of them, Childs’s stayovers never became expectations or demands for either of them. Their nights together came easily and naturally. There seemed to be an unspoken rightness about them.

In late spring the orchard’s apple trees got trimmed and sprayed. During the summer the corn came in fully. Lillian found she had time to write most days and entirely on Sunday. One dramatic idea—perhaps better called commercial—attracted her strongly because of the pleasure she would have in writing it. A generational continuation of
The Little Foxes
. It had been great fun to recount and invent all those betrayals, even more fun to root them in her own family history; and very satisfying to collect the royalties that followed. Perhaps it was a little too soon for a sequel, but Lilly began to develop the idea in pencil on a steno pad near her bed.

Hammett called late one night while she was in bed scribbling away. He didn’t sound too drunk; in fact, he seemed intently curious about Lillian’s well-being, so she decided to get his opinion on the timing of a
Foxes
sequel. Previously when she went to Hammett for advice it had been from a position of an uncertain child asking for permission. This was no
longer the case. After all, she was about to bring in ten acres of sweet corn for which she already had a buyer.

She told him her idea with tight lips. He made the sound of a cash register.

W
HEN
H
AMMETT ARRIVED
in November, all the farmwork—or most of it—had been done. Zenia Jackson and her eight-year-old were well established in a small apartment Lillian had restored downstairs. Lillian used to say proudly that she integrated the Pleasantville educational system since a yellow public school bus picked up Gilbert at Hardscrabble Farm each morning and brought him to Harding Elementary.

Lillian allowed it to become clear to Hammett that Childs was more than a neighbor, a friend, a farm mentor, so when she got around to telling him of her plan to build Hammett a cottage on the rise behind the farmhouse, there was no way for it not to sound—sincere as the offer was—like a gold watch offered to a valued retiree. He could not possibly accept. The two weeks he stayed at Hardscrabble were awkward in the extreme.

Hammett actually had some work. Sam Spade was becoming a weekly radio star. The format for the show wasn’t so different really from writing a comic strip. Three panels, seven minutes each: the setup in Sam’s office—a desperate client enters and tells Sam and his secretary, Effie Perrine, the reason for her—it was usually a her—desperation clarified
with flashbacks, Sam takes case, client leaves, Sam and Effie banter, organ music, commercial for Wildroot Cream Oil. Panel Two: Sam goes to scene of the crime, tracks down and questions suspects, usually three of them, occasionally four if the show is short, next commercial. Panel Three: Sam lays a trap to catch the murderer and said murderer is indeed trapped and confesses or has to be shot, a drink back at the office and some light sexual banter with Effie. Last commercial and hook for next week’s show. Then, regularly each week, a check from his agent for two hundred and a quarter.

By then Hammett was living in nearby Katonah, New York, cranking out his “Spades,” drinking, reading, sometimes adding to his collection of “Tales.” Once a week and soon after once a month, Hammett took the train to Pleasantville where Lillian met him at the station in the Town and Country. They embraced like an old married couple separated too long. When she didn’t see him too often, Lillian felt very comfortable in his arms. Hammett felt less incomplete in hers. These conjugal visits suited them well; they continued into early spring, a new planting season, when Cedric Childs was often in Lillian’s bed. Hammett knew this. He bit his lip and turned away.

D
URING AN EXTENDED VISIT
to Hardscrabble in early ’42 with the newly declared war going very badly, talk in the
kitchen turned to finances. He was doing fine, he said. Not much income, less expenses, more time.

Lillian said, “Fewer.”

“What?”

“Not less, fewer.”

“Of course it’s
fewer
. I chose to say
less
. Have we gotten so out of touch?’

Lillian said she had plenty of money saved and offered some to Hammett. He scowled. Other than her royalties, she wasn’t making any; and that troubled her a little.

“The
Foxes
sequel, how’s that going?”

“Stop and go. I worry it’s still too soon.”

“It’s a sequel, for Christ’s sake. You strike while the iron—”

“Look at the fucking world. Doesn’t a play have to mean something?”

“It will mean something. It will mean money coming in.” He dropped onions in a hot buttered pan and produced a sizzle for emphasis.

Lillian said she’d really rather do something about the war, something inspiring. He groaned. She asked him how he thought the war would go. “Fortunately the bastards are overplaying their hand. They can’t handle both Russia and us. Finally, a good thing for our side. Your man—the cynical bastard—would have temporized till the cows came home doing the goose step.” The cynical bastard was FDR.

“His hands were tied.”

“Funny, they weren’t tied when he stepped in and saved the banking system for the very thieves who brought it all down.”

“In order to save the American people.”

“And saving Jews in Germany?”

“What about saving Jews …?” She turned to him, ready to fight.

There was a metallic edge to their voices now.

At the heart of the Roosevelt conflict was their judgment about America itself. For Lillian America always meant hope—struggle, of course, but a winning struggle. At the heart of her hopefulness was the country’s willingness—albeit reluctant—to make Americans out of not-Americans—her own family story of Marxes and Hellmans, the
others
overcoming all obstacles and becoming the
us
faster than you might imagine. She had traveled far more of the world than Hammett and knew there was no such comparable place. Most important, materialistic and infantile as Americans were, they weren’t fascists. FDR wouldn’t allow them to become that. For her America was the Americans.

For Hammett, America was its culture, or its significant lack thereof. No one’s fault, he always pointed out, just bad timing and bad luck. There simply hadn’t been time for a nourishing culture to take root. America became a country while Indians were being killed, plantations were slave-driven, and industry was gearing up to outproduce and outprofit the rest of the world. There was no quiet, growing-up time. Too much hubbub; too much moving about; too much polyglot babble.
To drop all this confusion into the richest land on the face of the earth and then allow capitalists to be completely in charge was the recipe for disaster—or hilarity. Hammett called America the Greatest Show on Earth. For him FDR was the latest, most seductive ringmaster.

They were both Marxists, but Hammett was a Communist—the real thing. Hellman was not. Hammett knew there was absolutely no chance for a revolution being ignited on these shores. There were no revolutions at the circus.