Lillian and Dash (37 page)

She cut up the chicken expertly, dipped each piece, and deep-fried them in cooking oil. She watched them turn golden
in the oil as she rolled them with a long fork. Not so quietly she began to sing. “
I’ve got a crush on you, Sweetie Pie
 …”

The chicken cooled on a plate as she prepared the potato salad he loved. Dill was her secret there. For the coleslaw she whipped up her own mayonnaise; she squeezed a lemon flat to give it the bite that pleased Hammett. Her happiness, rare as it was, began to feel comfortable again.

She packed the dinner in a picnic basket even though it was too cold and too late for a picnic. She took two bottles of champagne out of the closet but put one back before she left. Where were the car keys?

As she drove upstate via the Triborough, the sunset to her left begged attention; orange clouds piled on flaming coals. The world became beautiful again, at least for this evening. The aroma of the fried chicken, her fried chicken,
their
fried chicken, created just the right amount of expectation.

Katonah was almost dark as she drove through cautiously—the town was a well-known speed trap; she’d been ticketed there once. Lillian welcomed expectation’s last obstacle. She remembered the turnoff to his cottage, which she used to miss as often as not. His place was at the end of the road.

All the lights were on in the cottage, a welcoming sign. The front door was open wide. That made her smile. She carried the dinner inside, expecting some sort of surprise.

The front room was a mess, wherever she looked disorder. He did not jump out and shout
Surprise
. He did not walk up
behind her and tap her on one shoulder and duck the other way for an embrace. Lillian said, “Okay, where are you? Let’s clean up this place.” She cleared some used plates from the table and put down her basket.

Hammett wasn’t there. The back door was also wide open and Lillian’s long shadow led her outside to look toward the woods that encroached. She saw a something, a looming shadow, or thought she did. She heard a something, a barking, or thought she did. The moon had risen. The night was clear.

“Hammett. Don’t fool around. I’m serious.”

She saw movement now, in the trees, out beyond the trees. “Damn you, Hammett, don’t ruin this.” As Lillian stepped out toward the first stand of trees she almost tripped over something. It was a pair of pants. She instinctively picked them up and began folding. Then a pair of white shorts. Those she left.

She stopped abruptly and caught her breath, striking a pose she’d have thought silly in one of her actresses, one hand on her chest, mouth agape, the other hand to her forehead.

Hammett was naked in the moonlight, a long gray man bent backward like a birch. He was holding a bottle low at his side. He dropped his head and raised it up to the moon and howled, a sound so mournful, so unhuman, so wolflike. It was Lillian, not Hammett, who fell to her knees and closed her eyes.

Lillian heard the howling continue and realized she had to go toward him, help him come back to something. She suspected it would be dangerous. He would flail at her touch.

She came up behind him saying his name, calling him
Samuel
, loudly yet comfortingly. Howl still followed howl. A man, a drunken, broken man, a man she loved, baying at the moon. She sensed that only her touch could make him stop.

Lillian wrapped her arms strongly around his waist—my god he was thin—and continued to call his name. Hammett tried to throw her off at first; his efforts flagged but he ended his howling. He tried to pull away from her and stumbled; she hung on dearly and they fell in a tangle on wet grass. His attempt to howl when he was grounded produced only gutturals and then coughs. At no point did he attempt to attack or even repel her. Still she clung to him. It almost became an embrace. She was stronger, finally, than he.

Hammett quieted in time.

“Think I can get you up?”

“Not. Yet.”

“You tell me when.” The ground was very cold and very wet; still they remained.

“Now?”

“Okay.”

Lillian Hellman helped Dashiell Hammett off the ground, to his feet. She offered him his pants. He required help putting them on.

They were near the back door when he said, “D.T.’s. All ruined. D.T.’s.”

He was shivering.

She gave him a long hot shower—at least until the hot water gave out—dried and dressed him, and put on the tea water. He remained cold and silent for a very long while.

Hammett sat wrapped in Lillian’s arms, a quilt covering him from his neck to the floor. She patted his head with a towel as though he were a child. For some reason she said, “You’re not supposed to know you’re having the D.T.’s when you’re having the D.T.’s.”

“If I can say it, it means I’m away from them.”

“So say it to me again.”

“I don’t have to now. I’m back. Thank you.”

“So say
thank you
again.”

“Sorry, only one per customer.”

S
HE SOBERED HIM UP
at the end.

She got some color back in his cheeks; in fact, she even managed to give him those cheeks by putting some weight on him. She had the cottage neatened up by a cleaning service and retaught a sober Hammett how to live in it. She visited once a week whenever possible. Even more often, he stayed with her in Manhattan.

Little by little her career returned. Money—not big money but steady money—was finding its way to her bank account and through her to him. She brought her interpretation of Jean Anouilh’s
L’Alouette—The Lark
—to Broadway. It was about Joan of Arc. In this version of the tale, Joan lives. As Hammett had been urging for years, she directed the play herself and realized she was good at it.

Leonard Bernstein, her political fellow traveler, did some incidental music for the play and afterward Lillian asked him to consider a musical version of Voltaire’s
Candide.
She told Lenny at one of his lavish East Side soirees, “Look around. If this isn’t the best of all possible worlds, what the fuck is?”

No one saw through American naïveté in 1956 more clearly than Lillian Hellman. Richard Milhous Nixon was a heartbeat away from the presidency, and what could be more dangerously or darkly comic than that? If America needed anything right now, Lillian decided, it was a strong dose of someone like Voltaire. But America did not have a Voltaire; it only had Hellman and Bernstein to invite him over.

The night Hammett was to accompany her to the Broadway Theatre for the premiere of
Candide
, the sudden pain in that gun shoulder almost doubled him over in the limo. She told the driver to return to the apartment. Hammett insisted they go on. “I’m a selfish bastard, there’s no doubt, but I don’t upstage a coronation. I’m fine. I’ll be fine.”

“Good. Because I was just about to call Sigmund and tell him I’ve discovered the first confirmed case of unambiguous vagina envy.”

Throughout the performance she couldn’t help notice him wincing or biting his lip. He could not applaud but instead blew kisses to her. Lillian held his left hand throughout. When they got back to the apartment, he took two more painkillers and went to bed.

Lillian Hellman had indeed come all the way back. For her, New York really had become the best of all possible worlds. Briefly.

Hammett’s ailing gun shoulder perplexed two highly regarded Park Avenue doctors, and since they were perplexed they settled on a particularly painful “rheumatoid arthritic condition,” a diagnosis as vague as a wish but certainly nothing life-threatening. It was a diagnosis a stoical Hammett was glad to try to soldier his way through. He called it his “shootin’ ” pain.

Lilly and Dash did not socialize a great deal thereafter. He did some of the cooking when he could; she most other times. A relative of Zenia, a cousin she said, stayed over on weekends, and then more often, to take care of Hammett’s increasing needs and later to cook and clean full-time.

Hammett read books on Asian art and philosophy mostly but also the works of the English Romantic poets. When he found one he admired, Coleridge for example, he read the autobiography and then collections of his correspondence as follow-ups. As far as Lillian was concerned Hammett was living well and thoughtfully through other writers’ lives.

In the evening they spoke about her work. Lillian said she wanted to write another family drama and direct it herself. She had been dreaming a great deal about her father Max and his two sisters, all now deceased. An incident she observed as a girl in the rooming house had begun to emerge more and more clearly as she drifted off and then woke from sleep. Max had come down the back stairs looking strangely confused and upset; Hannah followed, her arms forward, either beseeching or accusing, Lillian then couldn’t be sure,
but something had occurred on the stairs. Whatever it might have been struck Lillian now as extremely important. The stuff of drama.

Just as they had done all those years ago with the Drumsheugh story, so now they began to suppose dramatic relationships among the Hellmans, as they had among the Marxes.

“Sexual?” Lillian wondered.

“Ever see them kiss?”

“I can’t honestly remember. Why?”

“Just fomenting.”

T
HE DOCTOR WHO FINALLY
conjectured accurately about the gun shoulder had a practice in Katonah, not on Park Avenue. His name was Feldman. The nature of the pain, Dr. Feldman believed, indicated that it was referred, probably from the chest area.

Lung X-rays at Lenox Hill Hospital revealed cancer. Advanced. Inoperable.

They would share the time left as they had since Lillian’s return from England. A hospital bed was installed in the West Side apartment. Hammett avoided it by making very bad old vaudeville jokes: “Oy, Doctor, Doctor, do you know I’ve got a bed cough? So get out of bed. No, no, it’s not a bed cough, it’s a bed cough … a very bed cough.”

Lillian invited him back into her bed. He couldn’t do very much, but he felt as though he had come home.

Lillian hired a nurse to take care of him, mostly to administer his pain medication. She stayed in the guest room.

One day after Hammett found it necessary finally to take to the hospital bed for reading comfort, Lillian entered the room and saw that he had his hand on the nurse’s ass. The young woman was turned away from him preparing his medication. His hand on her ass meant absolutely nothing to her. It seemed to mean the world to Hammett, which the nurse apparently understood. Lillian smiled. Hammett was being Hammett in a world that no longer minded a great deal.

Lillian was willing to carry him to the very end even though that might take many months.

She thought the end had come when his breathing became so shallow, so labored he lay on his bed like a bird fallen to the pavement. The doctor ordered an ambulance that brought him again to Lenox Hill. Lillian waited patiently in the hallway. This was the very end. She imagined the situation reversed and wondered what she would want Hammett to do for her. Only to have him tell her he loved her. Only that.

She then realized the reverse gift—her declaration of love past and future—was something he already had. She further realized that dying was so fucking hard to do it didn’t really matter what anyone else thought about it.

But dying wasn’t only for the dying. It was as much for who got left behind. The perfect gift for him came to her then. A priest. She’d give him a priest.

The hospital provided Lillian with a name and a parish. She sent a cab to St. Stephen’s. It took the old man an hour to come down from the Bronx. Father Gerrity it was, who told Lillian with a brogue that there was no such thing as a lapsed Catholic, only comatose ones. Lillian was in the room as Gerrity administered last rites. She believed Hammett rolled his eyes in her direction.
Oy, Doctor, Doctor
.

The next morning his breathing deepened. His face took on a weak expression, an almost smile, a faint thoughtfulness, faint disapproval. The doctor was hopeful. Hammett was beginning to come back and Lillian welcomed the reprieve. She still wanted a Hammett, any Hammett, in her life. It looked as though she would have him. But no.

D
ASHIELL
H
AMMETT ALWAYS ASSUMED
he’d be buried at the Arlington National Cemetery. It fell to Lillian to see to an interment befitting the man who had been a U.S. Army sergeant in two world wars.

There was a concerted campaign by Hammett’s implacable political enemies to deny him such a burial. A sample editorial in the
Journal American
ended as follows: “A soldier, yes, certainly. An honorable American, not by a long stretch. Mr. Hammett was an enemy of the United States as we know and love it, a man convicted of traitorous un-American principles and activities. To allow him to lie in such hallowed ground, next to true American heroes,
would be an affront and an insult to the service of loyal and true Americans.”

There were many such pieces in many such places.

Lillian prevailed in the legal and public battle to have Sergeant Samuel Dashiell Hammett buried with full military honors at Arlington. Afterward, on the Dick Cavett television show, Lillian said, “You know, it’s beautiful in Washington this time of year. Cherry blossoms fill the air. You can come and read the Constitution for yourself—not some tortured Supreme Court interpretation. In the evening you might want to take in a new play,
Toys in the Attic
. It’s by some bright young thing, named Lillian, who …” The
APPLAUSE
sign flashed on. “… and … and I’d strongly recommend you take a cab ride across the Potomac to Arlington National Cemetery. Standing there you will have some sense of how much our freedom actually costs …” She swallowed. “I have a friend buried there. Dashiell Hammett. The writer. He is in section 12, site 508.” She repeated the site for emphasis. “I really don’t want him to be alone for too long. So please stop by and introduce yourself. He’s a good listener.”