News from the World

ALSO BY PAULA FOX

MEMOIRS

Borrowed Finery

The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe

NOVELS

Desperate Characters

The God of Nightmares

Poor George

A Servant's Tale

The Western Coast

The Widow's Children

PAULA FOX

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

NEW YORK
•
LONDON

I thank my husband, Martin Greenberg, not only for his technical help but for his encouragement of my work for forty-eight years.

And to the memory of Pat O'Donnell and Mary King.

CONTENTS

Preface

Cigarette

Clem

Light on the Dark Side

The Tender Night

Frieda in Taos

Franchot Tone at the Paramount

Way Down Yonder

The Broad Estates of Death

Grace

The Stop of Truth

Unquestioned Answers

Other Places

By the Sea

News from the World

Sitting Down and Alone

The Living

Lord Randal

Acknowledgments

PREFACE

M
Y FATHER,
P
AUL
H
ERVEY
F
OX
, was a writer and a drunk. When he was nineteen, he sold his first short story to
Smart Set
. H. L. Mencken, the well-known editor of the magazine, invited him to lunch at a famous restaurant of the period, Delmonico's. My father told me he had been too overwhelmed, too excited, to order anything more elaborate than scrambled eggs.

Paul wrote plays in the 1920s, and one of them,
Soldiers and Women
, ran for just under a year and led to an offer from a Hollywood studio. He went out west to become a screenwriter. He began to drink on the first day of work and continued consuming alcohol for over a year. A fellow screenwriter was concerned; he drove my father, slouched over in an alcoholic stupor in the passenger seat, to the Mojave Desert and left him alone with a table, a typewriter, a cot, and a barrel of drinking water. Paul began his first novel there,
Sailor Town
. A New York publisher took it. After its publication, he left Hollywood and wrote a few more novels with periods of alcoholic indulgence in between the books he produced.

He was married twice, once to my mother, Elsie, and then to Mary with whom he had four children.

On the few occasions I saw my father during my childhood and adolescence, he was drunk most of the time. As a young man he had been handsome. His voice, poetic and slurred, was given over to interminable, stumbling descriptions of the ways in which he and fellow writers tried to elude domesticity and women. All writers, he asserted, were defeated romantics, trying to escape domesticity and females to aspire upward to the mountain heights, only to be dragged down to the lowlands by the female urgencies of breeding and nesting.

I couldn't help myself from imagining mountain slopes covered with writers crawling upward toward the peaks.

When I moved to New Orleans soon after December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor, and the U.S. precipitation into World War II, I found a clerking job in a government office on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain. My first landlady in the French Quarter was a middle-aged actress who was, like my father, an alcoholic. After a few tumultuous weeks with her, I moved into a tiny room over a kitchen in a building owned by two writers, Mary King and Pat O'Donnel.

Pat had been employed by a Biloxi factory making machine parts. Sherwood Anderson, the writer, stopped by one day to be shown around the premises, and Pat was chosen by the management to be his guide. At the end of an hour's tour during which Anderson listened to Pat explaining the functions and products of various machines, Anderson said to him, “You ought to be a writer.”

Pat moved into the Quarter and began his first novel,
Green Margins
, advertising in the local newspaper for a typist. Mary King was about to return to her family in east Texas that very day. At once she was typing away at his novel, which went on to win the Houghton Mifflin award for a first novel. Meanwhile they had fallen in love and moved into a small house on St. Ann Street. Mary was a writer too. Her first novel,
Quincy Bolivar
, won in turn the same Houghton Mifflin award.

Everything about them was contrary to what I had absorbed—as if it had been a religion—from my father. Their goodness, their sobriety, the seriousness with which they worked, their welcoming sweetness of being, their high sense of the comic in life, were in stark contrast to Paul Fox's lack of seriousness.

This collection of stories and essays is dedicated to Pat and Mary, who taught me by example a living interest in all living creatures.

CIGARETTE

W
HEN
I
WAS
eleven, I spent a few autumn months in an old wooden house with flaking yellow interior walls that stood a few hundred feet or so from the shore of the St. John's River in East Jacksonville, Florida.

On weekday mornings, I walked through a small woods of scrubby pine trees to a narrow blacktop road where I was picked up by a bus and, along with other children, driven to the local public school. When I returned home, I was met at the door by an elderly Scot housekeeper, Mrs. Lesser. She was the mother of a college friend of Mary's. Mary, the owner of the house, was a young woman of means who was going to marry my father once his divorce from Elsie, my mother, was final.

On hot afternoons I would go for a swim in the St. John's River. My jumping-off place was one side of a decayed gray dock that rested on splintery posts. I would jump up and down on the rotting planks until four or five water moccasins, poisonous snakes, slithered down the posts and dropped in thick tangles into the river. Mattie, a boy my age and a friend who lived nearby on the river, instructed me in how to do this.

At the beginning of my stay in the old house, a variety of people, mostly relatives, came to occupy its barely furnished rooms: my father alone for a few days, then my mother for a few days, then her mother—my Spanish grandmother—for a week, then Mary, whom I met there for the first time. She didn't look at me as she pushed a book in my direction. I took it because I had to. It was a collection of short stories by Katherine Mansfield. There was a moment of uncertainty between us. “Keep it . . . ,” she muttered faintly.

I didn't know my parents well at all. I had not lived with them. But what I did know was that all the adults who stayed so briefly in the old house were lying to each other as well as to me—except for old Mrs. Lesser, who didn't say much of anything.

As I jumped up and down on the planks of the dock, I found it a relief, a scary relief, to watch the snakes slide down the posts and into floating patches of water hyacinths, their mottled, gray, warty heads poking out from amid the delicate white blossoms and thick green leaves—so substantial, so plainly what they were.

My father spoke in elaborate metaphors to convey, or conceal, what he meant. I couldn't tell the difference. Or else he talked with comic exaggeration; just underneath his words I heard a note of melancholy.

Halfway between the wooden house and the shores of the river ran an embankment about thirty feet high. On a pebble-strewn path stood several iron benches. My father asked me to meet him there one afternoon. I was relieved it was a Saturday. He might have seen my going to school as an evasion.

We had eaten a late lunch prepared by Mrs. Lesser. I was aware that my mother, Elsie, kept her face turned away from me as a I cast frequent, fearful glances at her.

Daddy was waiting for me on the path, sitting on one of the benches, his long legs stretched out in front of him, his hands in his pockets. In the second before I called out to him, I looked openly at his face. There was no expression on it. It was as though he was waiting for someone to come along to bring him into life.

As soon as he saw me, he sat up and seized me by the shoulders. “I know you're smoking behind my back, you little rat! I smelled tobacco on your breath! Here! Take these!” And he thrust an open pack of cigarettes into my right hand.

After so many decades, I can still see the bench, the path, the broad river below, the yellow camel depicted on the pack.

He forced my fingers to close on the pack. “Now you'll be honest!” he said. “Now you'll smoke in front of me!”

In his hand he held a bent cigarette. Suddenly, he grabbed my head with one hand, at the same time pushing the cigarette between my lips. “There!” he exclaimed triumphantly. “Smoke it while we have an erudite conversation!”

He clasped his hands behind his head as he leaned back against the bench. He said, “Amuse me, my child . . .” But, I couldn't answer him; I was choking on the first drag of the cigarette he had lit with a blue-tipped match.

I smoked for decades, through marriages, the births of my children, the writing of my books.

One day, after years of warning about the dangers of tobacco, I joined, halfheartedly, an anti-smoking group, then another and then another. The lecturers who exhorted us to stop were similar in their approach to the problems of quitting, no matter what their age or gender. Often, they clasped their hands in front of them and smiled knowingly as they spoke with professional enthusiasm of the benefits and blessings of quitting.

In one of the groups I especially noticed a woman in a wheelchair, an oxygen tube clamped to one arm, smoking avidly with her free hand, a doomed expression on her face.

Once I was able to stop for almost a year. Then I won a literary prize and had to travel from Manhattan, where I lived, to Chicago, to receive it. I stayed at a posh hotel on the shores of Lake Michigan in a large room that came with the prize.

I wondered if there was someone I knew in that city. I opened the desk drawer to search for a telephone directory that I assumed was there. Instead, I found a narrow, elongated box.

I opened it. Lying side by side were three long thin cigarettes, my name printed on them in gold letters.

I smoked them all. I was off again. I gave up giving up.

In 1996, my husband, Martin, and I flew to Israel to spend a month in Jerusalem where we both had fellowships at a scholars' and artists' residence. Our plane landed at Ben Gurion Airport, where we took a taxi to Jerusalem and the residence.

It was a Friday, a day of religious observance. There was no one at the desk of the residence to summon a porter for our luggage. After a while a man, who looked like a janitor in a New York City housing project, appeared. He duly checked our passports and carried our bags up to our quarters, to our surprise a handsome duplex looking across a valley down to the great white wall girdling the Old City.

As we were putting our clothes away, Ilana, Irving Howe's widow and an Israeli citizen, knocked on the door. We were happy to see her, swept aside her excuses for not meeting our plane as had been planned. We had a great deal to talk about and there was the fruit from the large basket she bore to taste. We sat around the living room table until dark. I turned on a lamp and we all talked some more.

It was late by the time we left the residence. Ilana recalled a non-kosher restaurant in the vicinity. The streets were empty, strange. The restaurant was beneath the street level, a kind of cave with many stone steps leading down to it. The place was crowded and noisy. You could walk out of it straight into a connecting movie house. I ordered something. It was revolting, a mess with slices of potato, dressed in a sauce made of axle grease, or so I imagined.

We climbed up the steps and began to walk along a bush-backed stony path that led to the residence. I paused to look some distance down at the brilliantly lit wall of David. Every building around it was bathed in a golden light like ships on a dark sea.

As I turned back to the path, Martin and Ilana talking animatedly a few steps behind me, a hunched figure on a shadowy bench suddenly unwound its length and sprang at me, knocked me to the ground as he wrenched out of my hands my beige canvas bag that held credit cards, passport and dollars, and made off into the darkness.

I vanished into unconsciousness, into nowhere, nothingness. I learned long after that Martin had started after the attacker, then turned back to me. Ilana had run frantically down the path, soon finding a couple with a cell phone who at once called the police.

I was taken by ambulance to the Hadassah Hospital. I had regained consciousness. After an examination the doctor in charge of the emergency room decided that I should be kept overnight. Martin and Ilana returned to the residence. The next morning Ilana phoned the hospital and was told that my condition had unexpectedly worsened in the night. I was diagnosed as having intracranial bleeding and removed, unconscious, to Intensive Care.

A hard spray of water directed at me by a nurse as I slumped on a closed toilet seat in a bathroom with a tiled floor was my awakening into limited consciousness. I appreciated the unorthodox bath but not much else. I didn't know what day it was. I was paralyzed on my right side and speechless. I tried to speak but dribbled meaningless sounds.

I learned subsequently that Martin and Professor Umansky, the chief of Neurology, had stepped aside into a corner where the professor said, “No surgery. It's worse than the wound.” Martin, shocked that there had been such a possibility, was silent with relief. All about the Neurology section were patients with lumpy, large, cruel-looking bandages on their heads.

Meanwhile, my two sons and daughter had come to Jerusalem from the different parts of the United States where they lived. I had lost so much weight so quickly, so much color, that they walked right past me without recognition, as I was huddled in a wheelchair.

Gradually, thoughts, feelings, words leaked drop by drop into my brain. I smiled at nurses, doctors, other patients as an infant smiles, making no distinction. A middle-aged woman, a patient, was being discharged to go home. Martin said she had invited me to visit her when I got out of the hospital. I nodded at her, smiling.

I was wheeled to a window that looked out on the Judean Hills. A light sparkled far off in the ancient, ancient hills. I imagined it was Ali Baba's cave. A nurse told me it was a pane of glass in a garage door.

I wasn't in pain. I gradually learned to say Thank You. Yes. No.

On the first day that I was allowed to go outside, my eldest son, Adam, wheeled me into the elevator and through the lobby, where we passed what seemed a crowd of people but was a large Arab family pressed close together, their bodies massive looking because of their tribal dress. The men were in deep conversation, the women silent, their heads up and waiting like birds in a nest.

Our objective—not mine, really, for I was living in a present free of all objectives—was the Marc Chagall Hospital chapel, whose windows had been painted by the master.

I stared at the world around me: the high vertical walls of the hospital that seemed to rise up before us as we progressed, the petal-flecked beds of flowers growing in irregular patches all around the cement path we followed, the smell of the flowers in the air, an enormous garage beneath the ground nearby where I saw ambulances parked, the swinging doors of the hospital when we returned.

I was started on therapy. I only half-comprehended why I was made to contend with a huge refractory rubber ball among other perverse contraptions. Once Martin was wheeling me to the therapy room when we came to an abrupt halt at the intersection of two corridors. Three doctors were bent over an Israeli soldier still in uniform on a gurney, his face and torso shielded by basket-like metal contrivances. One naked foot hung lifelessly from the end of the gurney. He had died at the intersection. I knew in a single swoop of awareness that I was in Israel.