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the wife should forgive him and not care as long as she had him himself and his love. That was truly the perfect happy-American-family.
    And of course, Harry was working on scripts for most of these girls; and in his favor it had to be admitted that they all certainly made themselves exceedingly available. Whether it was simply their supreme availability, or whether something deeply important inside Harry had been torn apart by the ignominy of his forced flight from Hollywood, I would not presume to judge.
    But now suddenly in my apartment it all came out. Louisa did care. She had only been putting up a front. The story I had heard was substantially the story Louisa unfolded to me that day in September of ’59 in my apartment. And not only that, the same thing had been going on a long time before, even out on the Coast, long before Harry fled Hollywood and the Un-American Activities Committee for France. And now the crowning indignity had come.
    Harry had been writing a screenplay for a French producer which was designed to hit the American market with a new young French male star, and for it two beautiful American actresses had been imported. One of these was very young and beautiful, and in fact would soon marry the French producer and go on to become a big international sex-star. And the other, while older, was still not anything to be sneezed at. Well, each girl had (individually and privately, of course) invited Harry down to Cannes to visit her, where each hoped he would be able to enhance and expand her role in the film. Each girl felt that her role was not quite up to snuff and needed expanded characterization, particularly when confronted with the role of the other girl. Each had written a warm letter to Harry, after her private dinner conference with Harry and the producer. And Harry had gone, Louisa said. Of course, he had had to go anyway, to work on the script with the producer. But both ladies had written him very warm thank-you letters to his Paris address after his return from Cannes, each saying how much she had enjoyed working with a writer of his understanding, of his sensibilities and discernment about roles and characterization.
    “And he didn’t even bother to hide the damned letters!” Louisa said, red-faced, and blew her damp hair back off her forehead. She was 31 then in 1959, and exceedingly attractive. “Neither the first ones, nor the thank-you letters that came after!”
    Insensitive as it was, I had to fight down a grin, and swallow to keep from laughing: thinking of Harry down there in Cannes, slyly doing both of these girls, these ladies, turn and turn about every other night apparently, and paying them for their favors by working secretly on each’s role against the other’s in their greedy competition.
    But there was nothing funny at all about it to Louisa. “Maybe he didn’t think you would stoop to going through his mail?” I suggested gently.
    “Well, I did,” Louisa said, totally without guilt here. Her guilts all seemed reserved to pulling down her skirt, which she suddenly and primly did. “And my family is perfectly willing and capable of taking care of us, of Hill and me.”
    That, they certainly were. Unlike Harry, whose wealthy, conservative Boston-Irish background did not go back much beyond 1880, when the first of his Irish forebears broke out upward from the Irish working class via banking, Louisa’s intellectual heritage, unhampered by the need to earn a living, went in unbroken line back to Emerson and far beyond. She was even a distant cousin of the Jameses. They certainly could take care of her. Particularly they could, mélanged as they were of equal parts iron self-restraint and strict New England Puritanism.
    “Well, what are you coming here telling me all this for?” I asked. For a moment I thought she would cry. But of course New England would not let her.
    “I just had to talk to somebody about it, Jack,” she said. “I had to.”
    “You’re not even