“Well, well, well!” he burst out, after shaking hands with me. “I guess we found out, didn’t we? Whose number was up? Who was on that hook? I’m so proud of her I could dance the Sailor’s Hornpipe.”
“Look,” she cut in. “I can do without stuff that’s going to make me seasick. I’m not proud at all, in inny way, shape, or form. If it had to be done it had to be, but let’s us not talk about it.”
“Okay, but I’m proud. See?”
“Louis, that’ll do,” said Mrs. Lang.
But it cleared the air, and the rest of their visit was mostly pleasant, but he kept talking about “that stuff in the papers,” and how people felt about it. “It was in there about the rape,” he said, “but nobody seems to mind. Now that she killed him, that makes it okay.”
“Oh, how wonderful,” said Sonya.
They left, finally, and then I asked her about the papers, which until then I hadn’t thought about. “I saved them for you,” she said, kind of grim.
She disappeared, then came back with a whole stack, the Washington Post, the Washington Star, the Prince Georges Post, the Prince Georges Sentinel, and maybe one or two others. And there it was, smeared all over the Washington Post:
There were columns about it, and also about Dale Morgan, the peculiar way she had died, and the insurance money Burl collected — even a lot about Jane, and the will she had drawn in his favor and then revoked. All kinds of stuff was there, true as far as it went, but leaving out most of what mattered, at least as I thought, reading it.
It turned out she thought so too. She said: “Gramie, if you’re stuck with it, if you have to stay here for those tests, couldn’t you put the time to some use? I mean, let Helen Musick bring the recorder, the tape recorder you have, and then dictate how it was, the true account of what happened, so it goes together to make some sense, ’stead of this mixed-up account in the papers. Then she could transcribe it for you, and who knows? Some paper might print it, just so the truth gets told.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I’ll give it a whirl.”
So that’s what I’m doing now — of course one or two names have been changed, as they used to say on Dragnet, “to protect the innocent” — but not many, and none of the main ones.
The tests went on, all favorable, and then one day, while Mother was there with Sonya, the door opened, and who should come in but Jane. She was in black too, but barely glanced at me. She went straight to Sonya, sat down beside her, and took her hand. “I just wanted to say,” she whispered, “I know now you were telling the truth.” Then she came over, picked up my hand and patted it, and took a chair that Sonya brought for her, from the hall.
“Jane,” said Mother, “something occurs to me. If you’d stop trying to be the femme fatale of the Senior Citizen set, if you’d be your age, and deed that land to Gramie, so he can start his development now, taking you in as a partner, you’d be living, when he remodels it, in the prettiest house in the county, in the middle of the swankiest suburb, and have more money to spend than you ever had in your life. All it needs is that you stop being a goof.”
“Yes, Edith, I already have.”
“You already have — what?”
“Had the papers drawn — I couldn’t sign them, however, until... until...”
She stopped and Mother seemed annoyed. “Until...?” she snapped. “What are you talking about?”
“Till she knew he wouldn’t die,” said Sonya.
“Yes, Edith — I couldn’t be sure.”
She came over, put her hand on my head, which was big from the bandages on it, said: “My little boy” — and kissed me.
That night, when Mother had gone and Jane had gone and Helen Musick had gone and the Langs had gone, Sonya leaned down to me. “I haven’t told you yet,” she whispered, “about me and the room they gave me — it’s really a little office, but they put a cot in I can sleep on. And now you’ve passed your tests, now you’ve proved you can walk, you’ve also proved something else — you can play hookey if you try. My place is two doors down the hall, and I can have a nice cloud moved in, all scrubbed up and pink. And soon as the night nurse leaves, if you’d slip out in the hall and slip into my little room, there’d be someone waiting for you, and you could lie on the cloud with her, admiring the beautiful view, of moonlight and shells and cotton, in balls like little rabbits—”
The night nurse just left.
Afterword
In 1948, James M. Cain, at 56, was, without any doubt, the most famous author in the country: he had just published two best selling novels, Past All Dishonor and The Butterfly; paperback editions of his earlier bestsellers (The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Serenade and Mildred Pierce) were still selling hundreds of thousands of copies every year, and no wonder: his themes included adultery, murder, prostitution, latent homosexuality and incest. Despite this, Paramount, Warner Bros, and MGM had finally succeeded in producing scripts that passed the Hays Office for three big movies based on Cain’s novels which revived, enhanced or gave new directions to the careers of nearly a dozen actors and actresses: “Double Indemnity,” 1944 (Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck and Edward G. Robinson), “Mildred Pierce,” 1945 (Joan Crawford, who won an Academy Award for her performance as Mildred, Zachary Scott, Jack Carson, Eve Arden and Ann Blyth), and “The Postman,” 1946 (Lana Turner, John Garfield and Hume Cronyn). In addition, he had spent most of 1947 in a running battle with both the New York Literary Establishment and the Hollywood Studios, attempting to establish his controversial American Authors Authority, which would have created a national writers’ union. And in 1948, he had been involved in the Screen writers Guild’s successful efforts to remove the Communists from their entrenched position in the Guild. His name, of course, constantly turned up in the Hollywood and national gossip columns, in part because of his literary notoriety but also because of a messy divorce from his second wife, Elina Tysencka, marriage to the ex-silent movie star Aileen Pringle, a divorce from her a year later and then marriage to the former opera star Florence Macbeth. He also consumed his share of alcohol, but the big movies based on his novels had made him “hot,” as Cain put it, in Hollywood, and, after an otherwise unsuccessful scriptwriting career, he could still command $2,500 a week when he took an assignment to work on a film.
Then, abruptly, Cain left Hollywood, “for no apparent reason,” as Harlan Ellison wrote in his Introduction to Hard Cain, a collection of Cain’s short novels. And to this day, veteran Hollywood hands still ask: whatever happened to James M. Cain? He was an ex-New York newspaperman and failed screenwriter who had come out of obscurity in 1934 with the publication of The Postman, and now, suddenly, he faded into obscurity again. Why?
What happened to James M. Cain after he reached the pinnacle of fame in 1948 is rooted in the two most important things in Cain’s life — a novel and a woman. The novel was written after World War II, when suddenly Cain discovered that editors and studio heads were no longer interested in the typical Cain stories of lust, murder and corruption, which tended to paint America in unflattering colors at a time when the desired hues were red, white and blue. Frustrated and irritated, Cain decided to try a period novel, and the result was his story of a young ex-Confederate spy who falls in love with, and is loved by, a Virginia City prostitute who can, for $10, be had by any man in town — except our hero. Past All Dishonor was Cain’s biggest hardcover success, selling 55,000 copies and bringing him praise from the critics, who applauded his fictional approach to American history. At a time when Gone With the Wind was the model for historical fiction, many people encouraged Cain to write more stories about the Old South and the West; “the period needs the sort of realistic treatment you can give it,” one writer told him. His old friend from the World, the historian Alan Nevins, also chimed in, urging him to write a historical war novel. “You have all the gifts and you could be both fascinating and convincing,” Nevins wrote Cain.