Killer On A Hot Tin Roof Read online

  “Y’all need somethin’ to drink now,” Burleson said. He started to raise a hand to signal the waitress, but Frasier shook his head.

  “We’re fine, Howard. We won’t be here very long, remember? We have to get back to the hotel.”

  “It’s a nice hotel,” Burleson said. “I remember it, although I don’t think I ever stayed there before. I had a place on the Vieux Carré, a little apartment where Tom sometimes visited me. Mostly, though, we came here to listen to the music and sip on cordials. It was a wonderful time, just wonderful. The light had more colors in it then, and when the breeze blew, it was like warm fingers caressin’ your face. If only things could have stayed like that, instead of the years ravagin’ us all with those horrible appetites of theirs. If only time wouldn’t rip those moments of happiness away from us like it was jealous and couldn’t stand to see us that way …”

  Despite his age, Howard Burleson still had a warm, rich voice, and when he started talking that way, I enjoyed listening to him. Maybe he really had known Tennessee Williams. The reminiscences reminded me of the voice that permeated Williams’s plays.

  “It was right here,” Burleson went on. “Right here at this very table.” He patted its scarred surface again, not keeping time with the music now but more of a tender gesture, like a man touching the head of an old and beloved pet.

  “What was right here, Mr. Burleson?” I asked.

  Before he could answer, Frasier leaned forward and practically snarled, “Not one word, Howard, you hear me? Not … one … word.”

  “Let the man talk,” Tamara said with a quick frown at Frasier. Then she turned to the old man and went on, “What was it, Mr. Burleson? What happened here?”

  Frasier made a strangled sound, and for a second I thought he was going to leap across the booth and clap a hand over Burleson’s mouth. That was the only way he could have stopped the words that came from Burleson’s lips.

  But he held himself in check, and Howard Burleson said, “Why, it was right here at this very table, darlin’, that I wrote Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”

  CHAPTER 6

  That statement flabbergasted three of us at the table.

  Frasier was the only one who wasn’t surprised. He put his elbows on the table, dropped his head into his hands, and let out a low groan. Without looking up, he said, “Howard … Howard, I told you not to say anything about that until the presentation.”

  “I can understand why,” Tamara said. “That’s insane!”

  For the first time, Burleson looked offended. “You’re just as charmin’ as you can be, my dear, but really, you shouldn’t impugn a creator’s integrity. My authorship of that play means a great deal to me, and I intend to set the record straight.”

  Tamara managed to smile as she looked at him and said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Burleson. I didn’t mean to offend you, honestly I didn’t. But the authorship of Tennessee Williams’s plays has never been in any doubt. It’s not like, say, Shakespeare, where we don’t really know who wrote them–”

  “I wrote Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, I tell you.” Burleson was starting to look and sound a little angry now. “It was an autobiographical play.”

  “Well, yes, in that Big Daddy Pollitt is clearly based on Williams’s own father, C. C. Williams–”

  Burleson broke in again. “No, you don’t understand. I’m Brick.” He tapped himself on his thin chest. “I’m Brick.”

  He looked about as unlike Paul Newman as he possibly could, I thought, but he seemed absolutely sincere.

  “That’s … not possible,” Tamara said slowly. “Brick comes from a short story Williams wrote called ‘Three Players of a Summer Game.’ It’s very well known among Williams scholars.”

  Burleson nodded as if she had just proved his point. “He was strugglin’ with that story when I met him in Venice. Brick wasn’t even in the first draft. He put Brick in there after I told him about my daddy and my … my wife. And then when we got back here to New Orleans, he said that there wasn’t a play in the story after all. That’s how he did it most of the time, you know. He’d write a story first, to get everything straight in his head about what he wanted to say, and then he would turn it into a play.”

  “I know,” Tamara said with a nod. “I’ve read all the short stories.”

  “So have I.” Burleson sniffed a little. “The plays are better, but then, they were supposed to be. Tom never cared that much about the stories. Writin’ them was just a tool he used to figure things out.”

  “But you’re saying he didn’t base Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on ‘Three Players of a Summer Game’? Because it’s obvious that he did, even though there are a number of differences.”

  “No, ma’am,” Burleson said with an adamant shake of his head. “The play is so much different than the story because I wrote it after Tom decided not to, basin’ it on my own family and my life.”

  Frasier slapped his hands against his temples and said, “Why don’t you just tell them everything, you … you …” He couldn’t finish.

  “All right, I will,” Burleson said. He tapped the table this time, harder, with one fingertip. “I sat right here at this very table and wrote that play with my own hand. You see, even though I hadn’t known Tom for very long, I had learned a great deal from him in that time. And I’d always been a follower of his work, even before I knew him. He was quite a favorite of mine.”

  Will leaned forward, clasped his hands together on the table, and asked, “Did you give the manuscript to him to read?”

  “Dr. Burke!” Tamara said. “Don’t tell me you’re taking this seriously?”

  “I’d like to hear whatever Mr. Burleson has to say,” Will replied, and at that moment I liked him more than I ever had before, which was considerable. He smiled, nodded across the table at the old man, and said, “Go on, Mr. Burleson.”

  “Well, of course I gave it to him to read,” Burleson said. “I valued his opinion. After all, he was a highly respected dramatist by that time. He’d already had two big hits on Broadway and in the movies, The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire. I thought he could tell me if it was any good or not.”

  Burleson stroked his fingertips across the table, as if he were searching for memories in the grain of the wood.

  “We sat here in this booth while Tom read the pages. I think at first he was doing it just to be kind, you know, because he didn’t want to offend me. And if he had told me that it was bad, I would have believed him. If he had told me I should go and burn it or throw it in the river, I probably would have.

  “But I saw him start to sit up straighter, and his fingers tightened on the pages so that they crinkled a little, and he forgot to take a drink. He laid the pages aside one by one as he finished them, and at first they were in a neat stack, with all the edges squared. But then his hand began to shake and sowhen the pages began to pile up, they weren’t exactly straight anymore. The edges were … ragged. I knew then that what he was reading was making an impression on him. He was surprised, surprised that what I had written was actually good.”

  He had me in his spell by this time, and judging by the looks on the faces of Will and Tamara, they felt the same way. When Burleson paused to take a small sip from his glass of liquor, the three of us leaned forward slightly in anticipation. We wanted him to go on. We wanted to know what had happened next.

  Michael Frasier still looked angry and despairing. He had heard all this before.

  But the rest of us hadn’t, and there was almost a sigh of relief around the table as Burleson licked his lips and then went on. “When Tom was finished, he didn’t say anything. That was unusual, you know. He was a great talker most of the time. I could sit and listen to that man talk for hours, and the things he said were as good or better than what he wrote down in his plays. That’s why he had so many good friends over the years. One reason, anyway.

  “But to get back to what I was sayin’ … Tom just sat there and looked at me for a minute or two, and then he said, ‘Howard�
�–that’s what he called me, Howard, never Howie or anything like that–he said, ‘Howard, there’s somethin’ here.’ And he reached over and touched the pages. ‘There’s somethin’ here,’ he said to me, ‘and it’s good.’

  “Well, as you might expect, I was very pleased by that reaction. I had thought that he might tell me that it was … interestin’ … or unique … or one of those other things you say when somebody you care about has shown you somethin’ they’ve done and you don’t want to hurt their feelin’s but it’s not really good. Like when you look at an ugly baby and say, ‘My, he’s some boy, ain’t he?’ You know what I mean?”

  Around the table, three heads nodded.

  “But Tom didn’t say that. He said it was good. But then … then he said, ‘It needs some work, though.’ ”

  Burleson leaned back against the booth’s Naugahyde seat and spread his bony hands.

  “That didn’t surprise me, mind you. I didn’t think that I was so talented I could write somethin’ like that for the first time in my life and have it be perfect. But to have Tom say it was good … to have Tennessee Williams himself say that my play was good … well, that’s all I could really think about just then. I figured he could tell me what needed to be fixed and maybe even suggest some things I could do to improve it, but then he said, ‘I’ll take it and work on it.’

  “I tell you what, for a minute that didn’t even get through to my brain, I was so happy. But then it did, and I told him I never meant for him to have to take on a chore like that. I knew he was a busy man, always writin’, writin’ like it was air and water to him, and he had to deal with those producers and directors all the time, in New York and Hollywood, and I told him I didn’t want him to bother his head with a piddlin’ little thing like my play.

  “ ‘I insist,’ he said. ‘It’s good, but it needs a professional hand now and, after all … it is based on my short story.’

  “Well, there was no disputin’ the truth of that. I’d taken some of what he wrote in that story and used it in the play, but only a little, a very little. Most of it came right from my own life. I had never told him that I came from a well-to-do family, although he might have figured that out from the way I was travelin’ ‘round Europe when he met me, and I’d never said anything about how I was married once, before I realized that I just … wasn’t cut out to be married. So he didn’t know, right there at first, that all of that was me. That those words had my heart and my soul in ‘em. I guess he thought that I had …

  made it all up. I don’t think he saw, really saw, what it meant to me.

  “But … he was Tennessee Williams. I guess he thought I’d be flattered, and I was, I truly was. And I didn’t want to offend him, so I said that if he really thought the play was good and he was really interested in workin’ on it, I supposed that would be all right. We would work on it together. Whip it into shape, he said. And then we’d give it to his agent and she would arrange to have it produced on Broadway, and then Hollywood would come a-knockin’ and they would make a movie out of it … but to do that, the play would have to have his name on it, too, of course, he said. ‘By Tennessee Williams and Howard Burleson,’ he said. That’s what the play would say. But when the time came for all those wonderful, wonderful things to happen–and they did happen–that’s not what it said. It said Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams, and nobody ever knew about Howard Burleson. By then Tom was in New York, and he wouldn’t take my calls, and I don’t know what he done with all my letters … burned ‘em, more’n likely … and I never saw him or talked to him again.”

  The old man had been talking for a long time. His voice was cracked and hoarse as he finished his story. He picked up his glass again and sipped the liquor. A long, soft sigh came out of him. Silence hung over the table. The trio on the bandstand had stopped playing sometime while Burleson was talking, and I hadn’t noticed. I doubted if Will or Tamara had, either.

  Finally, Tamara said, “That’s a very touching story, Mr. Burleson. Almost tragic. But how come no one has ever heard of it before? Something as big and important as Tennessee Williams taking credit for a play he didn’t write … don’t you think rumors of it would have surfaced before now?”

  “How could they?” Burleson asked. “Tom and I were theonly ones who knew about it, and once I realized what was happenin’, I was so devastated I tried to put the whole thing outta my mind. I went back to Atlanta–that’s where my family is from, you know–and tried to forget all about Tom Williams and the play and that whole time in my life. I’ve lived there quietly ever since. I had a small inheritance to support me, you know, and my needs are few. I have books and music and a few friends. A man can live with that and nothing more if he puts his mind to it. I would have gone on like that, if not for that devil, time. My granddaughter–”

  “You have a granddaughter?” Tamara interrupted. “But I thought you were … I mean …”

  “Not the type to have offspring?” Burleson asked with a smile. “Ah, but I told you, there was a time when I was married. In those days, people like me didn’t live as openly as they do now. And in truth, I think I was trying to deny my true nature. But yes, I had a wife, and I had two children, and in due time, I had grandchildren as well. Great-grandchildren by now, I’m sure, maybe even great-great-grandchildren.” He shook his head slowly. “I have never been close to my family since returning from Europe. Their choice, not mine. Except for Natalie, the granddaughter I spoke of. She has taken it upon herself to look after her dear old homosexual granddad. Last year, after I fell and nearly broke my hip, she insisted that I come to live with her. She was very persistent.”

  I was glad to hear that he had somebody looking out for him, at least. Somebody besides Dr. Michael Frasier. Somebody who actually cared about him.

  Will asked, “How did Dr. Frasier find out about your story?”

  Frasier sighed. “You have to know everything, don’t you? Nobody’s willing to leave me anything for my presentation tomorrow.” Bitterly, he went on, “Go ahead and tell them, Howard. Tell them the whole thing.”

  “There’s no need to be like that, Michael,” Burleson said. “These nice folks asked. It wouldn’t be polite for me not to tell ‘em what they want to know.”

  Frasier scooted toward me, bumping his hip against mine in a mighty unwelcome manner. “Let me out,” he snapped. “I need a drink, and I don’t need to hear all this again.”

  Will and I got up so that Frasier could slide out of the booth. He went across the dim, narrow room to the bar while Will and I sat down again. I have to admit, it was a lot nicer there with Frasier gone.

  “You were going to tell us how you got involved with Dr. Frasier,” Tamara prompted.

  Burleson nodded. “Like everything else, it was fate, I suppose. The universe movin’ in an endless dance to music of it’s own makin’. You see, I was in a bookstore. I love bookstores, especially the ones with old books. I love to just stand there and take a deep breath and drink in the smells of paper and leather and dust. Even when it makes me sneeze, it’s worth it to experience that wonderful smell.”

  He looked around at us and smiled.

  “Ah, but you folks are young. You’re growin’ impatient with the natterin’s of a decrepit old man.”

  “Not at all,” Will said without hesitation. “Please go on, Mr. Burleson. We want to hear the rest of the story.”

  Tamara and I nodded to make sure Burleson understood.

  “Very well. I was in a bookstore”–he named the place, an antiquarian bookstore I had heard of but never visited–“and I was browsin’ through the selection when I saw another customer, a young man, lookin’ at a copy of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I don’t have any earthly idea what possessed me to do it, but suddenly I was seized with the impulse to speak to him, to tell him what he was really lookin’ at, to speak the truth to someone, anyone, after all those years…. So I said to him, I said,‘Despite what’s printed in that book, young man, I wrote that play, you know
.’ ”

  “And that was Michael?” Tamara asked.

  “Indeed it was,” Burleson said. “And I must say, startin’ out, he was rather rude to me.”

  Tamara said, “Huh. I’m not surprised.”

  “He moved away as if I was botherin’ him and didn’t say anything. And again, I don’t really know what moved me to continue the conversation, but I said, ‘You don’t believe me.’

  “He looked at me then and said, ‘Of course I don’t believe you. Tennessee Williams wrote Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.‘

  “And I said, ‘He put his name on it, but I wrote it.’ I started telling him about how Tom and I met in Venice and then came back to New Orleans, and how Tom wrote that little story of his and then abandoned it, and how I picked up the gauntlet and wrote the true story of the Burleson family of Atlanta, Georgia. Only I used the name Tom came up with, Pollitt, and moved the settin’ so not everybody would know that I was writin’ about my own family. And by the time I’d told him all that, he was interested, mighty interested, whether he wanted to admit it or not. After that, I wound up tellin’ him everything. He came to believe me …” Burleson smiled. “And here we are, in this wonderful old place. I feel like I’ve come home at last, like this is where I was truly meant to be.” The old man’s mouth tightened. “Not in some cookie-cutter house in the suburbs where everybody looks alike and thinks alike. My granddaughter, bless her heart, does not provide an atmosphere that’s hospitable to a creative soul such as mine. The only reason I agreed to stay with her was because she said she could have me declared incompetent and place me in some … some home for old people.”

  The sneering emphasis he gave the word “home” made it clear he would consider such a place anything but. I understood what he meant. I wouldn’t have wanted to wind up in one of those places, either, unless my health was so bad I didn’t have a choice.

  “Natalie meant well,” Burleson went on. “I’m sure she did. She really does have a kind heart. But sometimes I just have to get out of there and be around my own kind again. And by that I mean … literary folks. Book people.”