Dead Letters: The Drawer

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent

I went up to the Bronx to give Dorothy Parker the last word, and could not find a place to leave it.

I make a practice of the last word. It is the one advantage the living hold over the famous dead, and I have collected it my whole career, standing at this grave and that one with something prepared, saying over a stone the thing the person never let me say to their face. Parker never let anyone say anything to her face. She held court at a hotel on West Forty-Fourth Street with a half-dozen others whose lines got repeated across town by nightfall, and I sat at the edge of it once or twice, close enough to watch her take a man apart in eight words and never close enough to be worth her turning her head. She wrote her own epitaph on a dare, decades early: Excuse my dust. Everyone laughed, because it was funny, and because the dust was always somebody else's problem.

She died in 1967, in a residential hotel on East Seventy-Fourth Street, her heart simply stopping. I let the piece sit. I went years later, with it half-written in my head, to say it at last over her, where she could not walk away from it.

Her people were at Woodlawn. Her father had bought ground there long before and kept a space for her, paid, reserved, waiting her whole life. I stood at that space on a cold afternoon. The grass over the plot was unbroken. No stone. No urn. No mark at all. A man from the cemetery office checked his book twice and told me she had never come. The space was still hers. Nothing had ever been put into it.

So I went looking for where she had gone instead.

The trail ran through her will. She had left everything to Martin Luther King, a man she never met, and after him to the association he died for, and the friend she named to manage it took the arrangement as an insult and went to law over it and lost. While the estate was in dispute the body went to a crematory up in Westchester, and the ashes sat there unclaimed, the storage billed to no one who would pay, until the crematory ran out of patience and did the only thing left to do with a box nobody wanted. They put it in the mail.

They sent it to the last address anyone had for her, her lawyer's office down on Wall Street. The lawyer who drew the will had retired. His partner took delivery of the parcel, opened it, understood what it was, had nowhere to put it, and put it in a filing cabinet.

I found the office. I found the man. He had said it before, he told me, to a woman writing a book, who had telephoned to ask where she might go to pay her respects. He had answered her honestly. He said, I'm looking right at her.

Then he crossed the room and pulled open a drawer in a grey steel cabinet, the kind that stands in every office in that part of the city, and among the hanging folders was a small box, and he did not lift it out, only turned it a little so I could see the side of it, the way you angle a thing on a shelf to be admired. Filed under nothing. Between the closed matters and the pending ones.

I had brought my pages to read to her. I lifted them. The man waited with the mild patience of someone who has all afternoon, and the drawer stayed open, and the box sat turned to face the room. I looked at the first line of what I had written. I did not read it aloud. I looked at it a while longer, and still I did not put it away, and the man went on waiting, and my hand stayed where it was, holding the pages up in front of an open drawer, and I could not make it come down.

— F.M.

Fletcher Moody is a literary correspondent. His column, "Dead Letters," covers the stranger truths of literary history. It appears when it appears.