“Yes,” she replied, “I’m Helen Morelli. Joe Morelli was my grandfather.” Still expecting that the door might shut in my face, I said there were a few things about Joe I hoped I might talk over with her.
“I guess I got a little time,” she said. She turned and led us upstairs to an apartment that was being refinished: the paper off the walls, the floors scraped but not yet varnished. The room had a gypsy-like atmosphere, as if everything could and might be moved out in ten minutes flat. We sat on maple chairs with plastic chintz covers.
McLean said we were from the Boston Globe. At that she became animated, telling us she had once studied journalism in New York. “I used to know Walter Winchell there,” she went on. “My grandfather had a restaurant there for a while and sometimes Winchell would come in for a cup of coffee. My grandfather knew him, knew lots of people—James Michael Curley, the mayor of Boston. You knew him? I used to see him at Danbury. Remember how he got himself re-elected mayor when he was in jail there? I got letters from him.”
When I could slip in a word, I told her that what we were really interested in was the whereabouts of her grandfather’s autobiography.
She looked at me coldly. “You know, I had a feeling that’s what you might of come for. Yes,” she went on, her full lips twisting down, “I have it and it’s in a good safe place. As a matter of fact I’m rewriting it myself.”
“I don’t know whether you could let us see it or not”—I tried to make my voice sound matter-of-fact, watching her smile derisively and shake her head—“but could you let us know what’s in it in relation to Sacco and Vanzetti?”
I realized suddenly what the cliché about a veiled look coming over someone’s face really meant. The derision became vocal. “Do you think you’d get that out of me? A fat chance! But I can tell you this much, the whole secret’s there. Why, if it ever came out I guess millions of people would jump. Did you see that TV show? I had to laugh. Making those two ditch-diggers make speeches like that! Maybe people all over the country will fall for that stuff, but I had a good laugh because I know the truth. Silas Bent and Sinclair Lewis offered ten grand for that document. I could get big money for it. I know that, all right. Don’t think I’m green.
“Look.” Her voice sharpened. “How do you think it felt to be a Morelli when I was a child? When I was at school, any time I wanted to do anything, people would whisper behind my back I was one of them. Now I’m the last one. My Uncle Frank, he’s dying of cancer of the throat and he never had kids. My father’s in California. So I’m the last of the Morellis, the last legitimate one anyhow. Do you think I’m going to let that come out against my own kids, have all that stuff brought up again? No, sir!”
“Why bother to rewrite it then?” McLean asked her softly. “Why don’t you just burn the thing?”
Again her veiled look. “No, I’m going to keep it. Maybe when I’m gone. I don’t know. But I’m going to keep it.”