It was never clear to Laverty’s old friends whether the young writer, who may have been nothing of the sort, had chosen the Paris Building deliberately in order to be close to the woman she idolized from a distance; it could also have been a coincidence, which Laverty herself was prepared to overlook, or which she found charming precisely because it was so strange. They didn’t know and they couldn’t guess.
The friendship between the young woman and the elder luminary had caught them by surprise. There didn’t at first seem to be any substance in the relationship. But soon the closeness between the two assumed, to their eyes, a familiar pattern: the famous but slightly insecure old writer anxious about her legacy and, hovering at the glittering edges of that fame, the young, fanatically devoted acolyte who promised much for the future of her name while flattering her in the present.
Sarah appeared so nervous and genuine that the doyenne—that fateful afternoon when Sarah had walked up to her table and announced herself as a fan—was taken aback and invited her to sit. She was fabulously rustic and charming. Sarah didn’t know what oolong tea was. It turned out, as Laverty told her friends with relish, that the hayseed was the bookish daughter of a traveling preacher in South Dakota, something like Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter, but that she had read practically everything, especially the complete works of April Laverty. The girl proceeded to give her a lecture about her own work. Seduction complete.
To Laverty, the girl seemed vaguely familiar. Had she seen her at one of her readings? It was possible. As she had told her friends, Sarah was not timid when it came to confessing her admiration for Laverty’s novels. They began to meet regularly and exchange their feelings about books, and many other things. Laverty believed it with only a slight misgiving—her instincts were still sharply discerning. Sarah was undeniably raw. She used her fork as a stabbing weapon and had the air of someone who had spent too much time in the company of books rather than people; the learning worn heavily on her sleeve. But she was wonderfully direct. “She’s so frontal,” Laverty would say to others. “That even if she was lying you wouldn’t doubt her.” To the old woman she was like a girl from the ’60s, wild at the core and unafraid to say what she thought.
This was how Laverty came to ask Sarah if she would like to be her assistant. It would be a small wage, she explained grandly, but a large experience. For Laverty there was a sweet thrill of nostalgia in asking such a person to be close to her. The ’60s, yes—the new world of Frank O’Hara that she had inhabited for a while and that was now compressed into a brittle idea whose time had come and gone. No one among her contemporaries, and certainly no one among the generations that had appeared since, had quite lived up to the raving poems of that era. But she had not forgotten the atmosphere—when, to borrow a phrase from a poet in her inner circle, she was still first-rate and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth. No, it was no use worrying about that time or its lost promises, but still the predictable disappointments of growing old could be offset now by the glow of a young and erudite savage. Enter Sarah Mullins.
She would walk every morning to Laverty’s prewar apartment, taking the iron elevator up to the top floor with doughnuts and coffee, and often stay late into the night taking dictation, answering emails for Laverty, helping plan dinners with other writers, and after eight P.M. reading to her employer while the latter lay in bed with a shot of brandy and a hot water bottle. With time, Sarah came to run much of the household. She was known as Laverty’s secretary and factotum, and was said to assist in the writing-down of the current work-in-progress. But her own life was kept away from prying eyes, conducted in total solitude in a single room ten feet by fifteen with a washbasin in one corner and a hot plate that she rarely used. She was careful never to let anyone see it or to enter any relationships. Her master plan was so delicate that it was easy to ruin.
When Laverty had to attend a function, Sarah went with her to hold her arm and keep her reassured. She helped her at the rare readings she gave and even accompanied her to a dinner party or two, sitting at her side and saying as little as possible. It was noticed as a curious relationship. Within a year, as Laverty’s health and mental clarity declined, Sarah had assumed most of the running of her complex literary enterprise. She corresponded with libraries and foundations, with prize committees and sponsors, with publishers and private collectors of manuscripts.
Collectors were especially interested in paying for Laverty’s letters and private documents, including manuscripts that the author was inclined to sell. There was a market for these in unexpected corners of the world. Millionaires and universities in Seoul, Paris, and Hong Kong wrote every month inquiring about the availability of this or that handwritten set of papers, and the former paid more. It had become a matter of prestige to collect the papers of famous writers as a bored Croesus might collect rare wines or paintings. Sarah had become the go-between in these transactions, the one who wrote to the collectors and asked their price. Sometimes they were not even aware that it was not Laverty writing to them. Since the writer insisted on handwritten notes herself so that everything could be verified later while remaining cheerfully personal, Sarah took to learning her handwriting and carrying on the correspondence by herself. She had access to everything in Laverty’s desks so she could take existing letters and patiently, week after week, rehearse forming the words in exactly the same way as Laverty would have done herself. In the end, and to her own surprise, she found that she had a gift for it. Day by day, she slowly mastered the frail script of her employer while noticing that the old lady had begun to stop asking Sarah questions about her correspondence as her health deteriorated. So Sarah had continued for another year, mastering Laverty’s hand almost completely. It was a life she had suspected she might fall into all along: scholarly in its way, reclusive, focused and unsensual. She had no friends and she was content not to have acquired them.
In her second winter on the job, Sarah received an offer from a private collector and property developer in Hong Kong by the name of William Chan. He was particularly interested in a cache of Laverty’s letters from the time of the Vietnam War that were available for sale. A few had gone to the University of Washington, and Chan was interested in acquiring the remainder, provided that they were to and from celebrities. These might prove to be a worthy investment, especially if Laverty were to win a certain major international prize, as rumors on the literary grapevine had led him to believe. Chan was a man of bookish tastes, and owned two of the largest private libraries in Hong Kong, one of which was housed in his father’s old mansion on the Peak. He revered Laverty, and as such was prepared to pay well above what others had paid up till then. When Sarah discussed it with Laverty, the writer intimated that Sarah should conduct the negotiation and, if she wanted, take the letters herself to Hong Kong for delivery, as Chan had requested. The billionaire made no offer to fly to New York. He expected Sarah to do the traveling.
Sarah agreed. Without expectation, the submissive provincial from Westmorland was suddenly in charge of the exchange of large sums of money in a city eight thousand miles away. When she departed for Hong Kong with twenty-eight genuine letters from between 1965 and 1970, when the young Laverty was in the prime of her political rages, she also carried forty letters that she had patiently forged herself, most of them only a few lines long. She had learned to replicate each letter of the alphabet as idiosyncratically rendered by the writer and then to string them like beads along whole sentences, all on the same stationery that Laverty had stocked for decades. The fictitious correspondents included Angela Davis, Diana Vreeland, and Candice Bergen, all of whom had known Laverty in her heyday, and Sarah had calculated how much to ask for them when she met Chan in person. Everything would be in line with what she was asking for the genuine articles. With whom would he verify?