Next Life Might Be Kinder (15 page)

That was the extent of my writing this morning.

Sipping a coffee in the café at Vogler's Cove at eight
A.M.
, I decided to order scrambled eggs with toast and bacon. While I ate breakfast I read the morning
Chronicle-Herald,
which I'd seen delivered to the café by truck a few minutes earlier. At one point, the photographer from the cove entered the café. We acknowledged each other and I turned back to my newspaper. In the left column on page 2, the headline read, “Director of
Next Life
Insults Author of Novel.”

 

Peter Istvakson, director of the movie
Next Life,
now being shot in Halifax, voiced his disappointment in Samuel Lattimore, whose wife Elizabeth's murder in the Essex Hotel inspired Istvakson's screenplay. “I have only asked Sam Lattimore to help me understand things better,” Istvakson said. “But he refuses me. I am only attempting authenticity of feeling. How could Mr. Lattimore not wish for that? He gives and then takes away. When we had cordial discussions about purchasing the rights to Sam and Elizabeth's story, we didn't need Sam's permission, because the murder was in all the newspapers, so it was in the public domain. But we wanted to be ethical and asked Sam Lattimore to give his permission. We met a number of times. He promised to consult during the filming. Now he has become a disappearance.”

The
Chronicle-Herald
has printed a total of eleven articles about the murder of Mrs. Elizabeth Church Lattimore, a graduate student in literature at Dalhousie University, who at the time of her death was writing a dissertation on the little-known British novelist Marghanita Laski. Mrs. Lattimore died of gunshot wounds in March 1972. Alfonse Padgett, a bellman at the Essex Hotel, was convicted of the murder after the jury deliberated for less than an hour. Mr. Padgett is incarcerated in Atlantic Institution in New Brunswick.

The presence of Pentagonal Films' cast and crew has been the talk of the town. Well-known actress Emily Kalman is playing the challenging role of the murdered woman, Elizabeth Church. Many Haligonians have been hired as extras, and according to Mayor Walter Ronald Fitzgerald, “The movie has boosted the economic health of our city.”

Samuel Lattimore, 36, author of the novel
I Apologize for the Late Hour,
which enjoyed modest sales, is reputed to be living under another name somewhere near Lunenburg in Atlantic Canada. He was unavailable for comment.

 

I threw the newspaper on the floor. I looked around the café and saw that the photographer and the waitress were both staring at me. The photographer said, “Mind if I borrow the paper? I see you're finished reading it.”

Embarrassed, I picked up the paper, folded it so the front page was again on top, stretched over to the next table where the photographer sat. She took the paper and said, “Thank you.” I nodded and held my empty cup up in the air, and the waitress said, “Refill coming right up.” She walked over and filled my cup from the glass pot she carried. She returned to behind the counter, put the pot on the warming coils, then started paging through her own copy of the newspaper.

The photographer was maybe fifty, give or take a year or two. She hadn't removed her rain slicker, and mist was still beaded on it. Her tripod camera was laid across two chairs she'd set close together at her table. She wore round, black-rimmed glasses and her gray-flecked black hair was windblown. She had, at first glance, to quote Chekhov, a “distracted beauty.”

She loudly drummed the newspaper with her fingers, and when I looked up, she said, “Did you read the article on that movie being shot in Halifax?”

“I glanced at it,” I said.

“Not that interested?”

“Not in the gossip.”

“I've seen them filming in my neighborhood,” she said, “just up from Historic Properties.”

“Did you come out here to get away from that?”

“No. I often drive out to various landscapes, take my photographs, and generally get back to the city by the dinner hour.”

“Are you a professional photographer?”

“I'm a pediatrician, now retired, actually. I photograph for myself.”

But she changed the subject. “Gossip, sure, of course there's that. But the man whose life—marriage—the movie's based on? The article says he's being a bit difficult, keeping things he knows to himself, not allowing the director to make a movie that might get at the truth. I find something off-tilt in that attitude, personally.”

“You formed an opinion from the one article?”

“Well, the director has been quite outspoken for weeks now.”

I said, “My guess is, the writer signed away the rights to the story, but not the right to his privacy.”

“Wants to have his cake and eat it too. I'm not so sure.”

She went back to reading. I'd hoped the conversation had ended. The waitress stepped up to the photographer's table and said, “Ma'am, do you want to order anything to eat, or is more coffee just the thing?”

“Wheat toast, please, jam, but no butter.”

As the waitress stood writing this down on the order pad, the photographer said to her, “Will you go see this movie when it comes out?”

“Oh, Jesus, yes,” she said. “Yes, I will see it. It sounds so romantic from the little I've read. Me and my fiancé will go see it. Joseph—Joe. By the time it comes out, he'll be my husband.”

“Congratulations,” the photographer said.

“June twenty-sixth next, we get hitched.”

“Oh, how lovely.”

“Right out there near the water.” The waitress nodded out the window at the cove.

“Beautiful spot for a wedding,” the photographer said.

The waitress went back to clip the order to the metal stand. The burly cook, in his spattered apron, reached through the small window and snapped off the sheet and read it.

“Wheat toast next up.”

A duet from
Madame Butterfly
was playing on the radio. What I most wanted was to sit in the kitchen and listen to it. But I knew that wasn't going to happen.

“By the way, I'm Ann Stewart,” the photographer said. She waited a few seconds for me to offer my name, and when I didn't, she scrunched up her face, pursed her lips, and said, “Well,
ahem
—anyway, me too, I'll go see this movie soon as it comes to town. Yes, perhaps such stories set up anticipation differently in women than men. I'm probably just spouting nonsense, but anyway. Anyway, as I understand it, the story is about newlyweds madly in love, and then the wife is murdered in a hotel. Did you know it's based on that murder in the Essex Hotel? Haligonians aren't used to that sort of thing. Halifax is not New York. As far as murders go.”

The waitress delivered her toast and said, “Want to know something? Me and my fiancé have—how to say it?—we practiced our honeymoon night at that same hotel. That was about three months after the sadness happened. That's how I generally refer to such things, the sadness, because if I think too detailed about them, I tend not to leave my house.”

“Do you see a lot of people coming here to photograph birds?” Ann Stewart asked.

“Mainly people set up easels and paint,” the waitress said.

“Well, nice to meet you”—she read the name tag clipped below the left shoulder of the waitress's button-down sweater—“Sarah. Perhaps I'll see you at the movies.”

“You just might. Me and my fiancé go to Halifax once every two months to the movies and dinner.”

“Yes,” Ann Stewart said, “and to practice your honeymoon night.”

“My fiancé says I can't keep a secret, so for me, then, there's no such thing as one.”

“I'll have to think about that,” Ann Stewart said, more or less dismissing Sarah, who picked right up on it and returned to the counter.

Now addressing me, Ann Stewart said, “What do you suppose is indicated by the title
Next Life
? Hmmm, I wonder. It can't refer to some sort of afterlife, God forbid. Let's hope not at least. That would be too sentimental, in my opinion.”

“The title is an abbreviation of
Next Life Might Be Kinder,
” I said. “There's a photographer, Robert Frank—”

“Yes, I saw his exhibit in Halifax.”

“Well, had you looked closely at his photographs—”

“I did look closely, I beg your pardon.”

“Had you looked
closely,
you would've seen that he wrote
Next Life Might Be Kinder
along the bottom of most of the photographs in that exhibit.”

“For someone who seems not to care about that movie, you know quite a bit. And, sir, you've taken a very rude tone.”

She set down some money on the table, picked up her camera, and left the café.

When Sarah delivered my bill, she smiled broadly and said, “Yeah, sure. I bet you go see that movie. It's a movie about true love, it sounds like. You'll go see it. All gruff on the outside, but inside, a beating heart. You can't fool me. I'm a student of people.”

F
OR WEEKS AFTER
Elizabeth was murdered, I felt, to put it bluntly, I had little to live for. I was all bleakness. One bath in two weeks, the next one not for another week, and so on. Hapless at feeling anything but Lizzy's absence. I thought about suicide. I definitely considered it. I may as well admit it. I may as well say what really happened. Naturally, as soon as I could reach them after Elizabeth's death—less than two hours, as it turned out—I spoke to her parents (Mr. Isherwood allowed me to use his private line). There were immediate gasps. After the initial shock, they said they wanted Lizzy to be buried in Wales, and I accompanied her body on a flight to London, then in a hearse to Hay-on-Wye, which Elizabeth's father had arranged.

Elizabeth was buried in the family plot not more than half a mile from town. I noticed some grave markers as old as the fourteenth century. There were at least a hundred people in attendance; it was pouring rain and black umbrellas bloomed everywhere. Devon and Mary Church, whom I was meeting for the first time (to meet one's wife's parents for the first time under such circumstances is something I would not wish on the devil, as they say in Nova Scotia), were as kind to me as could possibly be imagined. A few days later, a memorial service was held in the dining room of the Swan Hotel, and many people related their memories of Elizabeth as a child—retired constable Elias Teachout himself, quite old now, told of delivering the summons, putting it in bittersweet, humorous relief—right up to when she went to Canada to attend Dalhousie. As part of her remembrance, Mary Church said, “Our love and sorrow and prayers we share with Samuel, with us here. Devon and I always knew that our Elizabeth intended to bring you back here to live.” In fact, on more than one occasion, sitting in Cyrano's Last Night, Lizzy would say, “I'm homesick. Someday we have to go to Wales to live, okay? We'll make ends meet somehow.” Then we'd shake hands on the deal.

After the memorial, the Churches insisted that I stay with them, in the house where Elizabeth was raised, for as long as I wished. I ended up staying for six weeks, unable to do much more than eat and sleep. During that time the Churches scarcely slept, and Lizzy's father wept openly, her mother in the more private precincts of the house and down near the trout stream.

I was in Wales during the trial of Alfonse Padgett, a blessing considering that it had been all over the papers and on radio and television. When I returned to Halifax it was still in the papers. And one night, I heard on the radio, “. . . the widower Sam Lattimore has stayed on in the Essex Hotel.” I realized that in a city where violent crimes are not everyday events, a murder can linger a long time in the public consciousness. A long, long time. Personally, I was experiencing sheer stunned bewilderment, not to mention inconsolable sadness, not to mention blinding anger toward Alfonse Padgett. It all contributed to a kind of agoraphobia, and I didn't leave the apartment for nearly a month. Mr. Isherwood kindly had food sent up from the kitchen; the hotel never billed me for it.

I'd submitted a statement for the trial, but neither the prosecution nor the defense had required me to appear as a witness. My understanding is that the case was pretty cut-and-dried. Twenty minutes after shooting Elizabeth to death, Alfonse Padgett was found in his room in the hotel. Two policemen, guns drawn, rushed through Padgett's open door and discovered Derek Budnick beating Padgett about the back and shoulders with a nightstick. The officers hauled the bellman down to the police station, where he immediately admitted committing the crime. The investigating detectives told Padgett to write it all down, and he signed a confession. Still, a defense attorney was assigned to Padgett, and he presented an insanity defense, which, according to Derek, was practically laughed out of court. “The trial date was expedited to address the brutality of the act,” the
Chronicle-Herald
reported.

Derek looked in on me regularly, as did Mr. Isherwood, who slid a note under my door: “Dear Sam: We, the entire administration and staff of the Essex Hotel, are all in mourning. Please don't worry about the rent for six months, it's the least we can do. All heartfelt wishes to you in your time of sorrow.—Mr. Alfred Isherwood, Manager.”

Since various radio stations had broadcast my address, upward of ten law firms and a dozen independent attorneys offered to represent me in a civil suit charging the Essex Hotel with negligence. They left business cards and messages at the front desk. One attorney actually telephoned up from the lobby. “Look,” I said, “fuck off. Alfonse Padgett murdered my wife, the hotel didn't. The other bellmen and Mr. Isherwood, they're my friends. So fuck off to fuck-off land and leave me alone.”