Matecumbe (26 page)

About three months after they were married, Melissa and Joe scheduled an appointment with Wilton Butler, the lawyer who was handling Uncle Steve’s estate. They had been told earlier by attorney Butler that Uncle Steve had willed his house to them. And after only a brief discussion between themselves, Melissa and Joe decided that Uncle Steve’s old house would be a perfect spot to live.

On its own merits, the place appealed to them. Also, they realized that living in southern New Jersey, a bit closer to Atlantic City, would facilitate Joe’s daily commute.

“This lawyer, Butler, was a friend of Uncle Steve’s for over sixty years,” Joe told Melissa. “Steve spoke to me more than once about the times he and Wilt Butler used to swim together in the Delaware River when they were kids, jumping off the tall cargo ships that had berthed at the old sugar factory in South Philly. Butler’s a good guy. He’ll make sure everything goes smoothly.”

Wilton Butler, although born in the same year as Uncle Steve, Joe had recalled, always looked to be considerably older. This wizened, almost bald barrister sported an oblong, clean-shaven head, save only for a few remaining clumps of white, bushy hair—all centered in front of his ears.

“Truncated sideburns,” Butler called them.

He was a smallish man, still thin, and had a calculating appearance that belied the friendliness of the greeting.

“Welcome, newlyweds,” he bellowed, in a voice that was a reminder, decibel-wise, of Uncle Steve’s. “And pardon me if I ask you to repeat yourselves now and then. My hearing isn’t what it used to be.”

After Butler handed over the pile of documents, Joe noticed that they appeared to be in order—and surprisingly free of legalese.

And while her husband flipped through the pages, scanning paragraph after paragraph, Melissa could concentrate only on the little house in New Jersey that she would soon call home.

Melissa had liked Uncle Steve’s rancher from the first time she saw it. In a pleasant, older neighborhood, it was fronted by large sycamores at curbside and was only a five-minute walk from a nearby shopping center.

“The backyard is beautiful,” she remembered. “Joe told me that the giant oak tree in the middle of the lawn is almost forty years old. Uncle Steve transplanted it himself from the adjacent woods right after he first moved in. He was careful to remember which branches faced the sun in the tree’s previous location, and he even used a compass to ensure that the replanting was exactly right. He was determined that the north side of that tree would still be facing north in its new home.”

Another attraction at Uncle Steve’s house was the large cultivated area where he had planted summer crops of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and Brussels sprouts. There was even a small group of blueberry bushes that bore fruit every June.

“I think I signed my name everywhere that I was supposed to—on the correct dotted lines,” Joe told the lawyer. “But don’t ask me if I understood anything.”

Butler flipped through the papers quickly, then he peered directly at Joe—from over the top of his half-circle reading glasses.

“I’ll need Melissa’s signature, too,” he explained, mysteriously. And when he had finished speaking these words, Butler couldn’t help but notice the surprised look on the faces of his visitors.

“While the remainder of Steve’s estate was willed just to you, Joe,” Butler continued, “he left the house to both you and Melissa, jointly.

“Even though, as we are all aware, Steve died before the date of your wedding, his will states: ‘To Joseph Carlton and his wife, the former Melissa Pienta Tomlinson.’

“So, I’ll need your name right next to Joe’s,” he instructed, now directing his eyes and his voice toward a slightly bewildered Melissa. “In the same eight places, I believe.”

Melissa always had a great deal more respect for those businessmen who talked directly to her while she was in Joe’s company. Too many others seemed to think, chauvinistically, that Joe’s consent was needed before a decision by her became final. Almost immediately, Butler grew in her esteem.

“You see,” Butler continued, almost as an afterthought, “Steve changed this will of his not too long ago. It was strange that he wanted to make this one, small addition—leaving the house to Joe and Melissa instead of just to Joe.

“I told him it wouldn’t be necessary. After all, he had informed me long ago that you two were going to get married. Either way, the house would be community property. So I didn’t see what difference it would make. However, Steve insisted. And even though, technically, you two weren’t married at the time he changed his will, Steve assured me that your marriage was inevitable.”

“Tell me,” Melissa interjected. “When exactly was it that Uncle Steve decided to change this will?”

“The date was March the twenty-first.”

Melissa and Joe looked into each other’s eyes right away, as if on cue. March the twenty-first was smack in the middle of the period during which they’d had no intention of getting married. At about that time, they were semi-officially an estranged couple. In fact, one day earlier, on March the twentieth, Melissa had visited Uncle Steve for lunch. That was the occasion when he had given her his advice to “go down to Islamorada and claim your man.”

Obviously, with this will of his as a vehicle, Uncle Steve was playing his own brand of a sure thing. For if Melissa and Joe had drifted apart, Uncle Steve’s ultimate death might eventually have served to bring them back together.

In effect, how could a separated Melissa and Joe fail to consider the prospect of meeting with each other at least once, socially, to discuss how they would approach their dilemma?

After all, a house left jointly to two unmarried people who are supposed to be married is not an everyday problem that can be solved by a solitary phone call.

The will would demand that they meet, and Uncle Steve knew all too well the power that could explode from one spark of a renewed relationship between two former lovers.

“He was playing his last card,” Joe commented. “It was an ace that he never needed.”

“That was him, all right,” Melissa concluded, her eyes meeting Joe’s knowing smile. “Good old Uncle Steve. If things went wrong, you could always depend on him to produce a winning move.”

I worked for James A. Michener during a five-year period in the 1970s. Thirty years after that I was outed as one of his ghostwriters—in Stephen J. May’s 2005 biography of Michener, titled
Michener: A Writer’s Journey
.

May revealed my role as a ghostwriter for sections of Michener’s books
Sports in America
and
Chesapeake
.

I also found that I wasn’t alone. May likewise highlighted the ghostwriting of Errol Uys, who wrote a good deal of Michener’s
The Covenant
and other works. I never knew of Uys’s existence until May interviewed me for his biography in 2003. Uys and I have since compared notes, and it is highly likely that there was at least one other ghostwriter who assisted Michener prior to our involvement and perhaps yet a fourth ghostwriter in the 1980s.

When I became aware of Michener’s hiring of Uys, and considering the feature articles that I ghosted under Michener’s name, it was then clear to me how Michener was able to “write” 70 mostly lengthy books and 398 magazine articles during his lifetime.

I first met Michener in 1973. Michener and his free-spending friend from Philadelphia, Edward Piszek, co-founder of Mrs. Paul’s Kitchens, were looking for someone with knowledge of sports to assist Michener with the forthcoming
Sports in America
. Piszek’s hefty wallet had bankrolled a number of Michener projects.

Michener knew he would need help because of his lack of knowledge about a number of sports, particularly football, golf, and track and field. The background I possessed as a newspaper sportswriter and columnist sealed our deal.

My first duties were to begin research for
Sports in America
and also to read the proof pages for Michener’s novel
Centennial
, which he had just finished writing.

After completing the bulk of the sports research, I then wrote the first draft for most of the
Sports in America
chapters, save those few that were mostly Michener’s recollections, theories, and recommendations. While Michener edited my first draft, I ghostwrote several magazine articles that appeared under his name in
The Saturday Evening Post
and in
Reader’s Digest
.

After we finished
Sports in America
, I continued to work for Michener on his next book,
Chesapeake
. The work varied slightly on this project. Michener and I spent several months in St. Michaels, Maryland, trying to outline the work, selecting fictional names, and smoothing the plot. I then completed the detailed outline while Michener traveled about Maryland researching the sections that needed shoring up.

During my time in his employ, Michener and I would travel together throughout the United States, to Europe, and to the Middle East. Michener also visited me in Islamorada, the Florida Keys, where I introduced him to Melissa (Missy) DeMaio, an always-cheerful businesswoman who had no idea of his background and who had never read any of his books. Michener and DeMaio soon began a love affair—with Michener’s visits to the Keys then increasing exponentially.

I left Michener’s employ in 1978 for other interests, but we remained friends for the next 19 years, until Michener died in October of 1997.

Michener’s relationship with DeMaio inspired him to write
Matecumbe
(the word “Matecumbe” refers to two of the four islands that comprise Islamorada: Upper Matecumbe and Lower Matecumbe). He first showed me a rough draft sometime in the late 1970s, asking me for an opinion. Michener’s first version of
Matecumbe
had a single female lead by the name of Melissa and was in the form of a three-act play, something he had never before attempted. He told me he had always admired playwright Arthur Miller and was also intrigued by the fact that Ernest Hemingway wrote only one play during his lifetime,
The Fifth Column
.

In the second version of
Matecumbe
that Michener showed me, about a year later, he had transformed it into a novella. I told him, frankly, that the longish dialogue gave it the feeling of a play but that it still worked as a novella.

Michener wanted Random House, his publisher, to print
Matecumbe
. But Michener’s Random House editor, Albert Erskine, did not. Erskine told Michener he feared that
Matecumbe
was “just a love story,” much like Michener’s earlier novella,
Sayonara
, and that Michener shouldn’t compromise his burgeoning reputation as a historical novelist.

Erskine told Michener that Random House CEO Tony Wimpfheimer also disliked the prospect of publishing
Matecumbe
and that Michener should stick with those long, thoroughly researched books that dealt with the history of Hawaii, Spain, Colorado, and the like. (A number of years later, I tracked down Wimpfheimer, who had retired and was living in Purchase, New York. Wimpfheimer told me that the decision to scuttle
Matecumbe
was entirely Erskine’s decision.)

Amazingly, Erskine also tried to steer Michener away from writing any more small books similar to
Tales of the South Pacific
, which won Michener a Pulitzer Prize and was the basis for the long-running musical “South Pacific.”

“Erskine forced me to look at the bottom line,” Michener remembered. “Heavyweight books like
Hawaii
and
Centennial
made chunks of money.”

Although he relented to Erskine, Michener still held hope that Random House would one day consent to publish
Matecumbe
. He was convinced that this novella was even better than
Sayonara
, also a story of two love affairs, which had become a best-seller as well as an Academy Award winning motion picture starring Marlon Brando.

I met with Michener sporadically through the early 1980s. And even though he and DeMaio had then split, he was still reworking
Matecumbe
.

Michener told me that he had been on the peer review list in the early 1950s for Ernest Hemingway’s novella,
The Old Man and the Sea
, which later won Hemingway both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature (1954). This peer review is described by Michener in a 38-page introduction he wrote for a later edition of Hemingway’s
The Dangerous Summer
.

After reading the proofs, Michener was overwhelmed with the allegories and symbolism of
The Old Man and the Sea
. He would try, Michener said, to put the same elements into
Matecumbe
.

“Hemingway told a simple story of a fisherman that seemed to be a saccharine treatment at first reading,” Michener said. “Instead of a fisherman, I finally found my vehicle—two divorced women. In
Matecumbe
, I want to hide the deeper thoughts between the lines of the two love stories. I need
Matecumbe
to exhale slowly all of the symbols and allegories.”