Farewell, Dorothy Parker Read Online Free PDF Page A

about the wealthy people Dorothy Parker had known—old-money types with sprawling estates and servants’ quarters. “At least not in the sense you’re imagining. My dad was in manufacturing and did pretty well, but wasn’t rich. Not
Gatsby
rich, anyway.”
    Mrs. Parker stroked her little poodle. “So you’ve read Scott.”
    “Scott,” Violet repeated, smiling. “Of course. I mean, everyone has. You knew him, right? What was he like?”
    “Handsome, bright. Charming when he wanted to be. I was never crazy about the wife.”
    “Zelda,” Violet offered. “They say she was beautiful.”
    “In a vapid and petulant way, I suppose.”
    “What about Hemingway?”
    “What about him?” Mrs. Parker asked.
    “One of your biographers implied that you might have had a crush on him.”
    “Everyone had a crush on Hemingway,” Mrs. Parker said. “He was a brute, but he had magnetism. And he could
write.
”
    “One of the truly great American novelists,” Violet added.
    “His novels were fine. But he could write the fucking bejeezus out of a short story.”
    Goose bumps. Her idol was talking about Ernest Hemingway…and cursing like a sailor, as she was known to do. People of every generation seemed to think their contemporaries practically invented swear words, but Dorothy Parker and her friends were dropping the f-bomb way back in the 1920s.
    “What about the other members of the Algonquin Round Table?” Violet said. “Robert Benchley and George S. Kaufman and—”
    “I believe it’s my turn,” Mrs. Parker said.
    “Yes, of course. I’m sorry.”
    Mrs. Parker sighed. “Your apologies are starting to give me a headache.”
    “I’m—” Violet said, and caught herself. She remembered a conversation she had with Ivy a number of years ago. Her sister had suggested she try channeling a strong female movie character when she was feeling timid, but Violet had just reviewed
Kill Bill,
and all she could picture was Uma Thurman ripping out Daryl Hannah’s eyeball with her fingers. That was a bit stronger than what she aspired to.
    “You’re right,” she said to Dorothy Parker. “I have to work on that.”
    “Never mind,” her guest said. “Tell me what you’ve made such a big mess of.”
    “That’s a long story.”
    “All I’ve got is time. I’m rich with it. I’m the goddamn J. Paul Getty of time.”
    “Okay,” Violet said, and took a deep breath, knowing it might feelgood to talk to someone besides Carl and her lawyer about this. “A little over a year ago, my sister and her family were driving to visit friends of theirs upstate. But some loser with a pickup truck had decided that the best way to get through his impending dentist visit was to get plastered first. Only he never made it to his appointment. At eleven o’clock in the morning he got onto the Taconic Parkway headed in the wrong direction and had a head-on collision with a little family from Long Island. My brother-in-law was killed instantly.”
    Violet paused, remembering the call she got from the hospital. They didn’t tell her over the phone that her sister was dead, but the coldest, darkest chill swept through her and she knew. In the months since, she could never remember the drive to the hospital or even the words the doctor used. But she could still feel his clammy hand on her shoulder. At the time, it was incomprehensible. How could this man be alive if the world had just ended?
    Violet swallowed hard and continued. “My sister bled to death on the way to the hospital. Delaney, my niece, was in the backseat and survived with a broken arm and a chest contusion that did enough damage to her young heart to put her on medication for the rest of her life.”
    “And the drunk?”
    “Dead. Shot through his windshield like a missile.”
    “That’s one way to avoid a dentist appointment,” Mrs. Parker said, and then shook her head and looked into her lap. “I’m rotten to the core.”
    “No, it’s okay.”
    Mrs. Parker