As time passed, though, Pelletier became more embittered and more embattled. He wrote angrily to the New York Times over the review they gave Bleak Land, to the University of Chicago for not keeping him on as a lecturer in the sixties, to his landlord for raising his rent, to the laundry for losing a shirt. Amy and I looked at each other in dismay: What had Marc found in this mass on his first pass through it?
The Herald-Star had given Pelletier a two-column obituary. I read it for biographical information. He’d been born in Lawndale on Chicago’s West Side in 1899, gone to the University of Chicago for a year, volunteered to fight in France in 1917 and had come back to join the radical labor movements sweeping Chicago and the country.
Pelletier made no secret of having been a Communist during the thirties and forties. A Tale of Two Countries was based on his fifteen months in Spain during 1936 and ‘37, where he fought with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish civil war. Supposedly it was filled with thinly disguised references to historical figures, including scathing portraits of Picasso and Hemingway, and it revealed the arguments about the war that took place in a Communist Party cell, each member possibly a real person Pelletier had known in his own Chicago cell.
When called to testify in front of Representative Walker Bushnell and the House Un-American Activities Committee, the committee pressed Pelletier hard to identify the characters in the book, but he refused, claiming that it was a work of fiction, and spent six months in prison for contempt of Congress. Afterward, as a blacklisted writer, he found it difficult to get his work published and wrote romances under the pen name “Rosemary Burke.” He died Thursday of pneumonia exacerbated by malnutrition at the age of seventy-eight.
Pelletier wrote one novel before A Tale of Two Countries and two in the decade after. All four were published to critical and commercial acclaim, although the reviewers all agreed Two Countries was his masterwork. After that, there’d been a gap of over ten years before he finished Bleak Land, which he apparently had shamed Calvin into buying, since Bayard published it in 1960.
We found a 1962 carbon of another letter to Calvin, saying it wasn’t surprising Bayard had sold only eight hundred copies of Bleak Land, since they’d refused to spend a nickel on promotion.
Eight hundred people must have been stumbling around in the dark inner recesses of their local bookstores, trying to avoid hangovers or tax collectors, when they fell down and found themselves clutching a copy of Bleak Land on the way up. What did Olin do to you in that hearing room? Tell you he’d lay off if you’d forever foreswear the friends of your youth?
I rubbed my eyes. “This is more than a day’s work. I almost wish Pelletier had ratted to Bushnell and Taverner-I’d love to know who his Communist cellmates were in the thirties.”
“Does that have anything to do with Marc’s murder?” Amy asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, petulant. “But scanning the reviews, I see Two Countries has an earnest young black photographer who’s a homosexual male-maybe that was meant to be Llewellyn. There’s a crowd of intellec
tuals, and worker wannabes from the university-kind of like the kids in SDS back in the sixties. It would be nice if he’d provided a key.”
Amy grinned. “That’s someone’s doctoral dissertation, not the job of the great writer himself. I read A Tale of Two Countries for a lit class. It’s beautifully written, and more substantial than For Whom the Bell Tolls, but Bleak Land, I think it didn’t sell because it wasn’t a good book. Maybe Pelletier was too angry when he wrote it, or maybe he was out of practice. Even before the blacklist, he’d stopped writing fiction and was doing a lot of work for Hollywood.”
“Did Bleak Land deal with things as autobiographically as Two Countries? I mean, would I learn anything about Calvin and that group from reading it? Because Pelletier only got to be friends with Calvin after Bayard Publishing brought out Two Countries in such a big way.”
“You mean was it another roman a clef? If Bleak Land is, I wouldn’t have known when I read it, because I didn’t know who any of the players were. I guess I could check it out of the library and try to see now if I recognize any of them.”
The librarian looked at us warningly: other people were trying to read in the reading room. We continued in silence for a time, only stopping briefly to eat some odd-looking sandwiches out of a vending machine. While we ate, I told Amy that the police were starting their own investigation into Marc’s death.
“The bad news is, they think he was killed by Benjamin Sadawi, the kid in the Larchmont attic, so they’re not interested in following up on the ideas we’ve been generating. But at least they say they’ll do some digging on how Marc got out to Larchmont. And they’ve ordered a full autopsy from Dr. Vishnikov. Vishnikov has ruled out any external blow or wound to Marc before he went into that pond, but he’s mad at me-he thinks I blindsided him with the cops, so he says he won’t give me the tox screen results when those come in. Can you get Harriet to request them as next of kin? I’d be glad to supply my lawyer to run interference for her.”
Amy scribbled a note in her pocket diary and took Freeman Carter’s information from me. “Harriet’s moving into my place tonight. Her folks are flying back to Atlanta this afternoon-thank the goddess!”
We dusted the crumbs from our fingers and went back to the rare books
room. At two, knowing I had to leave soon, I stopped reading letters in detail and began flipping through the contents of the remaining cartons. In the middle of a set of manuscripts, I found a manila folder labeled “Total Eclipse: Unfinished, unpublished ms., 122 pp.” It was typed on yellowing paper, with Pelletier’s handwritten notes in the margins. The writing itself was shaky; this must have been written at the end of his life, when he was often drunk or ill or both.
They want us to think that when Lazarus rose from the dead, his friends and sisters were beside themselves with joy. But inside the grief when he was buried were the secret thoughts: thank God we got him safely underground, revolting drunkard, couldn’t keep his hands to himself. Thank God he won’t live to tell a soul about that night in Jericho when he caught me with my mother’s maid behind the sheepfold. No more scurrying when we hear him coming in late from tavern or tussle, demanding hot food and wanting it now.
And then he rose again, and behind the joy saw his loved ones’ thoughts writ large: we were just settling down with the new shape to our lives, minus his sharp words and demands, and here he is, raised from the dead.
I know. I was dead, and now that I’ve slunk out of the grave into a corner of the basement, trailing my winding sheets, I can smell the stink of fear rising from my dear ones. Although maybe it’s just the stink of my own rotting flesh.
Gene, who is the most terrified, predictably wept loudest at my grave. The baby, the darling, he used to tag after me when he was five, let me play, Herman, show me how, Herman, following me from sandlot ball to taverns [crossed out; “bar” written in by hand] and then to girls. I should have known from the way he watched me, but that was when he was still my eager golden brother, the one I teased and gave a little careless attention to.
I was the hero back from the war, a hero in some places anyway, with my arm in an interesting sling and my eyes dazed from too much blood, so much blood that I couldn’t drink it away. A hero to my golden brother, who’d spent my war years getting rich. I was fighting, he was taking over the family firm.
No George Bailey role for Gene, nossir. No, Gene had a truly wonderful life. Big brother risking his life on the Ebro, little brother minting the stuff in buckets, turning a sleepy family business into an international power. So that when I came back, although the girls clustered round to hear my battle stories, they slipped out the side door with Gene. He was renting the apartment on Elm Street in those days, just the place to take the girls, where Mother couldn’t see, and then come home for church on Sunday, hair slicked back, bending solicitously over her, butter not melting in his mouth.