The Lost Chapters

By Lisa Anderson

The discovery of an unfinished novel that survived a house fire compels the author to look into the past to find out why her father, a New York ad man, would self-destruct at the height of his career. What insights could she find in his writing? This provocative memoir invites others seeking the truth about a loss to go the distance. THE LOST CHAPTERS explores class, love, and the legacy of addiction, and delivers a hopeful rendering of a difficult journey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Sep 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9781304440167

Lisa Anderson

Lisa is an Army veteran with a degree in Medical records. She has been writing for most of her life and has always loved to put a bit of morals in the choices. She currently lives in Washington State with her husband and cat. Lisa has a love of Ancient Egypt and blogging.

Book preview

The Lost Chapters

The Lost Chapters

A Daughter’s Hard Questions about an Ad Man’s

Unexpected Death

By

Lisa Anderson

Coveside Books

Copyright © 2013, Lisa Anderson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN 978-1-304-44016-7

Dedication

This book is for Warren, Jordan, and Nathan

and

Olivia, Tom, and Daisy

Epigraph

Is there any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive trees, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take ease in shadows and in coolness? Or are all men’s lives like the lives of us good people – like the lives of the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells, of the Ruffords – broken, tumultuous, agonized, and unromantic lives, periods punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies? Who the devil knows?

—Ford Madox Ford

Part I

Chapter 1

Looking into Closets

I lifted each object carefully and placed them beside me on the floor: a tensor lamp, a glossy pink conch shell, the clay mold of my hand from kindergarten art class (my mother’s prize ash tray for many years), and a brittle photo album. The movement released forty years of dust, soot from the apartment in New York and mold from this dark unused room in our family’s house in Stonington, Connecticut. How long had I been there, cross-legged on the damp floor?

I hadn’t set out to discover anything in particular. This was an act of indulgence. For several hours I had been sitting alone in the room where she died, looking through picture albums. I wanted relief from my longing, to be basted in feelings and reminded of the comfort and security of childhood. The practical side of me meant to look through things, to assess what needed to be sorted. But the other, more needy part had taken over and claimed the afternoon. With no one to care for, no children to mind, I was able to be still and remember.

The midwinter sun cast leaf shadows that trembled on the carpet and the piles around me. It must have been at least four o’clock. From the litter that remained at the back of the dingy cupboard, I pulled some old magazines—two identical copies of the Jester (Columbia University’s humor magazine), dated 1950. Putting them aside, I drew out a large wrinkled manila envelope marked Scripts in my father’s handwriting. It felt soft as suede. I turned it over to look inside but the weight and tired look of the package and a sudden memory caused me to hesitate. Was this it? As I pulled the sheaves of folded, buff-colored papers onto my lap, I appealed to my mother—I spoke aloud quietly, I hope this is OK to do.

I recognized the typeface. I knew the paper as well. He often carried legal-sized pads in his briefcase and gave them to my brother and me to draw on when we were children. In the silence of that airless room, I could hear my heart pulsing in my ears. I had all but forgotten about Dad’s book. I had never asked my mother where it was or looked for it on my own.

It wasn’t like finding a lost object. My thrill was not the kind that makes you want to yelp or shout. This discovery had graver implications. The typed pages were covered with pencil edits, familiar handwriting: his words, his thoughts. To me it was as if the pages were alive, and as if I had crashed into myself, the Nancy Drew-like thrill of finding it gave way to pain—not the simple ache of loss that I had been feeling in the months since my mother died, but a cursed mix of joy and anguish.

Had I expected to find the manuscript? Is it possible that I was called to look there that day? Was I meant to be the one to scrounge through that old cupboard in the backroom of my mother’s house?

My father, Dick Anderson, died August 5, 1974, when I was fifteen years old, and a lot about him went missing that year. Three months later—the Sunday night after Thanksgiving weekend—a fire destroyed my parents’ house in Stonington, along with everything in it. A storm had roiled the seaweed in the harbor so when the volunteer firemen ran the hoses down the hill to pump more water, the hoses clogged. Mum awoke in the middle of the night to thick smoke. She stumbled downstairs and opened the sliding glass doors for air. Suddenly the flames appeared. The heat of the glass burned her face and arm. Young friends of my brother’s had seen the fire from the village. They found her in the bushes crying.

Lost were Mum’s Lilly Pulitzer summer dresses; her mountain of 1960s costume jewelry; Dad’s collection of V records (live jazz recordings from Germany); the orange enamel pot in which he cooked his famous spaghetti sauce; our black and white cat, Fred; my type-writer, my guitar, and letters—letters I had received my first year at boarding school, letters from Dad, and the condolence letters that came after he died. The fire blazed all night despite the cold rain. The next morning a singed Pucci blouse and torn bed sheets fluttered from bare tree limbs, and the blackened debris of my mother’s married life lay scattered across the grass.

She was able to rebuild and furnish the new house with things from the apartment she still had in New York. For years afterwards, when we were looking for some New York things, like those mittens my aunt had given me or books forgotten or left in Stonington one weekend, we had to shrug and assume they had perished in the fire.

I knew Dad had started a novel in the late 60s. I saw it once in Stonington, so I had long presumed it had burned as well. As I sat there, I recalled one of his wisecracks: that he was going to write a best seller and retire on the proceeds. But others have told me that at one time he had been serious about writing fiction. Perhaps he wrote as a diversion, a creative outlet, as with the delicate watercolor landscapes of coastal Connecticut he painted. Did he enjoy writing for its own sake? Why didn’t this fit with my memories of him? I suspected he had a goal in mind—writers get published and there is glory in that. On the other hand, maybe he needed a chance to vent. Maybe he saw it as a way out, a way out of the advertising business. I heard something once about his novel getting rebuffed. Whether from hurt pride or whatever, he put it away. Maybe he stopped writing because he couldn’t anymore. I wondered as I sat there on the floor in the back room looking at the soft typewriter print, would he have kept at it if other life events hadn’t catapulted him forward?

I turned on a table lamp, flattened out the pages, and began to read. But after only a page, my cousin Amanda arrived from her house next door. There was work to do sorting clothes for the thrift shop and she was leaving at five for New York. She stood over me for a moment, taking in the mess and tuning into my rapt absorption, my discovery. We have been best friends since we were toddlers, so she experienced the same events I did, albeit from a different vantage point. She knew the significance of my afternoon in the back room.

I showed her the manuscript. I had to. It was like unearthing a bit of family archeology. A clue. A message.

Mum died in the fall of 2000 late on a blustery October night, the same night we turned the clocks back. She was sixty-nine. She hated the darkness of northern winters. The day before, although weak and emaciated from stomach cancer, she had lain outside on a chaise, elegant as a movie actress, enjoying her last warm autumn sun. In the years since I had had children, she was my best friend and greatest support.

My brother, Bruce, and I put her house on the market after Christmas, and that winter while we waited for a buyer, we each left our families behind to make solo trips home to Stonington. I had come to sleep in my old bed, to sit by the fire and memorize the view before the press of dividing and moving my mother’s things. I needed a quiet weekend alone with her to ask forgiveness for the inevitable sale of the family place.

I missed her. I yearned to hear her deep wooly smoker’s voice, yet I kept expecting her to appear and dreaded our encounter. Sleeping in the house without her, using her things, looking through her closets without her permission, I felt like an intruder. Thankfully, I wasn’t alone on this trip. My aunt and my cousins were next door at their house.

When she was alive, there were places in Mum’s house where one had to be invited if one wanted to look. Bruce and I were both well familiar with the atmosphere that resulted from our going into certain corners. The backroom cupboard, unpainted since its arrival from our New York apartment in 1975, was such a place. I had rarely if ever opened it before that solitary afternoon in February 2001 when I looked there for photo albums and found the manuscript. No one had. I once fantasized that if I ever went through it I would find the trolls and doll dresses that I had misplaced as a kid and the cupboard would exhale the sweet humid New York air trapped inside, and for a moment I would hear the tired, secretly longed for sounds of sirens and screeching bus brakes.

Of course I hadn’t found any of my toys. But that afternoon I had indeed unburdened the cupboard of treasures. A small housekeeping project that was intended to be about sorting things, portended to be something of bigger proportions. When Amanda found me among the yearbooks and unfortunate-looking photo albums piled on the moldy carpet, she comprehended my accomplishment—the opening up had begun, and on my lap lay the prize.

After talking it over with her, I decided to take the manuscript out of the house, back to Michigan with me. It was after all, ours now, mine and Bruce’s; I could read it and not have to have any conversation. Yet it felt forbidden, like I was taking Mum’s journals and reading them in the room next to where she was sitting. I thought about it all afternoon. Technically, I wasn’t prying; it wasn’t about her anyway. If I had questions, she wouldn’t have to endure them, she wouldn’t have to explain anything. I couldn’t ask.

My flight out that weekend was cancelled so I stayed over with Amanda’s sister, Tory, conveniently domiciled close to the airport in a century-old sea captain’s house in Providence, Rhode Island. That night, beneath a fringed lampshade in her Victorian living room, I took out the manuscript again. Except for about twenty regular-sized pages that seemed to have been retyped, none of the folded legal-sized pages were in order.

I speculated to Tory, and thereafter to my then husband, Bob, and friends, as I worked over the next seven months to assemble them, that it was almost as if someone had thrown the thing against a wall and the pages had fallen willy-nilly. Picked up in haste, someone had stuffed them into the envelope along with my father’s notes and a page of old advertising agency letterhead with lists of plot ideas. On one side of a wrinkled business-size envelope, he had jotted the chapter order. Scrawled on the back were the words, I love you, in my mother’s loopy hand.

All the drafts were typewritten in the familiar, uneven lettering of Dad’s Japanese-manufactured Brother Industries portable typewriter. Some pages had sharper, cleaner print. Most were marked up with pencil. Some pages had OK in the corner. Others said, rewrite from the top.

I worked on sorting the pages at night, looking forward to it like a rendezvous, and relishing every moment I spent. I would put my kids to bed, do most of the dishes, glance at the supplies for school lunches the next day, and then bolt to the room I shared with Bob, pulling out the manuscript and spreading it on the bed (or the living room floor or the dining room table). Unfolding the pages, I made piles, read and re-read tops and bottoms of pages, discovered a page that began with the words Santa Monica, and taa daa—found the one that ended, were driving to…

I asked myself, had he mentioned me? It was a silly wish, yet he had—a minor reference about the daughter taking riding lessons. Even that sentence—alluding to something I had long ago forgotten, a funny arrangement with the horse barn where I rode—comforted me. I had so little from him. Any tangible connection, especially new, after so long, was like a charm.

By the following November, I had finally read every page, almost 150. Would I call it a collection of chapters? Not exactly. They seemed more like vignettes, most of them rough, unfinished. I guessed he had made some false starts; they read like individual short pieces. They didn’t quite go together, but did. I could guess at the narrative from his notes, and he had written the ending so I knew where he wanted it to go. The voice was sharp, bitter in places, disdainful, yet often tongue-in-cheek. The writing, quick, laconic, staccato, and well, dated. The manuscript read like a journal—a satisfying purging—but to me obviously fictionalized.

Seventy-fifth Street between Madison and Fifth Avenue in New York City looks like most Upper East Side streets in that part of Manhattan. There are rows of scrubbed brick townhouses with burglar warning signs on the windows and doors. Other townhouses bear the marks of dismemberment into apartments, two to the floor, with the characteristically messy finger-marked mailboxes.

One of those sub-divided townhouses was home to one of New York’s most beautiful women. Beautiful, rich, and sought-after because she was New York’s top fashion model.

She was five feet ten, half German, half Swedish, with hair the color and shine of caramel. Her gray-blue eyes seemed to be brightened by a suntan from travel that took her, for picture assignments, to all the sun paradises in the world. She had the high cheekbones and the flat chest of an Eileen Ford model.

Her name was Kikki von Stade. She was nineteen, a baroness by birth, and at six thirty in the evening, on June 23, 1967, she was in the kitchen of Apartment 2-F arranging cold, raw fish on a plate next to a bottle of Polish vodka.

In the tiny living room, the gray shag rug was splattered with the jackets of Gerry Mulligan and Gary McFarland records. A KLH Model 20 and a white telephone with thirty feet of wire perched side by side on a black wrought iron table under the bay window facing the street. A dusty palm tree in a huge wicker flowerpot and a bleached, wooden, high-back chair of Scandinavian design framed the table.

Kikki came into the living room and put the tray of raw fish, two glasses, and the bottle of vodka on the floor near the table. She lifted a record from the rug and slipped it over the spindle of the KLH and snapped the auto switch. The record shivered down the shaft of the turntable, the tone arm snapped and fell slowly into position, and Gerry Mulligan and the Concert Jazz Band started to play My Kinda Love.

At that moment, a tall man with a crew cut, dressed in a cotton seersucker suit with slightly baggy trousers from sitting at a big desk in a smart midtown office, turned west on 75th Street and walked into the late afternoon sunlight that shone across Central Park. He was on his way to Apartment 2-F, 11 East 75th Street, and he was smiling.

Twelve hours later he would leave Kikki asleep, warm and exhausted, and head home, ten blocks north on Park Avenue.

Alan Robinson didn’t do this sort of thing all the time, only between Memorial Day and Labor Day. The rest of the year he was happily married and the proud father of two.

Chapter 2

The Summer Bachelor

He called it The Summer Bachelor, a tell-all of what went on when businessmen were left alone in the city for the summer while their families escaped to the shore. It is hard to imagine these days, with most women employed in equally demanding jobs, but it was a common enough practice back then. I recognized several caricatures of people in the advertising business, bits about the conflicts at work, their trips to the coast, and their so-called extra-curricular activities. It was a rather shocking yet fun read for a daughter. My first impressions: not a publishable novel, but maybe the vignettes might stand on their own. I felt in my gut that I had to do something with it.

I clipped together over twenty of these bits—some were only a page—in my own attempt to establish a plot order. Early on I had worried about reordering the pages themselves—could the way they were folded together have some significance? Following his scribbled notes, I began assembling and reassembling the pieces, trying to figure out the puzzle. Those summer nights when I laid the pages out on the bed, I became swept up in seeing how the story developed, how far he got. While there may have been some historical, psychological, or astrological significance to the folded papers in that suede-like thirty-year-old manila folder, it was lost now.

Finally I made a photocopy of the ordered document (a hefty single-spaced 150 pages) and put up help-wanted flyers for a typist around the building where I worked at the University of Michigan. My part-time student research assistant saw the flyers and offered to do the typing for some extra cash over the Christmas holiday. I fretted at the prospect of giving the work to someone, as up until then I was the only one to have read it.

Part of me felt like I was stealing when I first read the retyped words on the screen. They looked so different. They were no longer unique and no longer private. The same feeling of violation crept over me that I had had when I removed the folder from Mum’s house twelve months earlier. Reading the now familiar paragraphs, I worried that Dad may not have wanted anyone to see his writing. He may have been embarrassed or ashamed by it, scared of how people would react. In my mind, I bargained with the voice that objected to light being shed on his draft novel. He wanted to tell a story, and he did want people to read it.

The world of 1960s advertising he described captured my imagination, but at the same time made me uncomfortable. I was attracted to the guys in the office and on the train, pencil sketched as he observed them, particularly to their who-gives-a-shit attitude. All the fun poking reminded me of him. On the other hand, I found his characters’ preoccupations—rating sex