Maybe he went back alone because it annoyed him that somebody had killed a lady old enough to die without any outside help. Or maybe he went back alone because while he was reading Martha Coleridge’s play he’d fallen half in love with the farm girl who’d migrated to America from England’s East Midlands. Maybe her play had given him a little insight into age and aging, death and dying. Looking down at the fragile old lady with the broken neck, he’d never once considered that once, a long time ago, she might have been a spirited and beautiful nineteen-year-old who’d come to this city and discovered a world beyond her bedroom window. For a long time now, a corpse had been only a dead body to Bryan Shanahan. All at once, reading Martha’s play, a corpse became a human being.
So he went through the apartment yet another time, alone this time, savoring his aloneness, searching for the young girl in the old lady’s belongings, hunting for brown photographs or handkerchiefs lined with lace, mementos from Brighton or Battersea Park. On a shelf at the back of her closet, he found a satin-covered box that once might have contained sachets, the fabric faded and threadbare, the little knob on the lid dangerously loose to the touch. There were letters in the box, all tied with a faded red ribbon.
He loosened the bow and began reading.
The letters had been written by someone named Louis Aronowitz. The ink had turned brown over the years, and the writing paper was brittle.
Shanahan almost feared turning pages, lest they would snap as easily as had the old lady’s neck. The letters had all been written in 1921, two years after Louis returned to New York from the war, a year after Martha sailed from Southampton to America. The letters chronicled a love affair that started in April of that year and ended in December, just before Christmas. It was Martha who’d ended it. Quoting her in a letter dated December 21, Aronowitz wrote, “How can you say you see no future in a relationship between a Christian girl and a Jew? I love you! That is the future, my darling!” His last letter was written on New Year’s Eve. It told her that he was going back to Berlin, where his parents had been born, and where “a Jew can call himself a Jew without fear of being judged different from any other man. I will love you always, my Martha. I will love you to my very death.”
Clearly, the letters formed the basis of the love story Martha used in her play the following year. But juxtaposed to her heart-wrenching tale of a doomed love was the contrapuntal story of a young girl finding a new life in a rich and vibrant city: the world beyond the windows in her room.
Shanahan gently closed the lid on the brittle, fading box. There had been nothing in it that told him who might have killed the old lady.
But there was another letter.
He found it in a folder of paid bills. The letter was typewritten.
Shanahan sat in an easy chair under a lamp with a fringed shade, and read it in the fading light of the afternoon.
My name is Martha Coleridge, author of a play titled My Room, which I wrote in 1922, and which was performed for one week only at the Little Theater Playhouse on Randall Square in September of that year.
I am enclosing a copy of the program. I am also enclosing a copy of the play itself for your perusal. I do not know your separate personal addresses, so I am sending all of this to Mr Norman Zimmer’s office for forwarding.
I recently learned from an article in Daily Variety, the theatrical and motion picture journal, that a musical based on a play titled Jenny’s Room is being readied for production next season. Your name was listed among the others involved in one way or another with the pending production.
I wish you to know that in 1923, when the play Jenny’s Room opened to spectacular success, I wrote to its alleged author, a Miss Jessica Miles, and warned her that I would bring suit against her on charges of plagiarism unless I was substantially rewarded for the work from which her play had derived, namely my play, enclosed. She never replied to my letter and I did not have the means at that time to pursue the matter further.
However, since reading the Variety piece, I have contacted several lawyers who seem interested in taking the case on a contingency basis, and I am writing to all of you now in the hope that together or separately you will wish to make appropriate compensation to the true creator of the work that will be engaging you all in the weeks and months to come. Otherwise, I shall be forced to initiate litigation.
I close in the spirit of artistic endeavor that embraces us all.
Cordially,
