Bit by bit, day by day, my cold is easing it’s grip on my throat, my lungs. I have a reading tomorrow night (Friday) at Northshire Books, Manchester, Vt., at 7 p.m. and I think my voice will get through it. I tire easily, but am getting stronger every day. I have only one-third of my Codeine Cough Syrup Bottle left, I will not ask for or get a re-fill. I appreciate my syrup, it puts me to sleep, quiets my mind, gives me the most vivid and powerful dreams – some beautiful, vivid, some disturbing. I am healing.  Last night I had one of the most powerful of my codeine dreams, I dreamed about a woman I knew in Atlantic City when I was a young reporter, it is one of the stories that shaped and changed me, sometimes haunted me.  It is a sad story in most respects, but a story of life, the kind of story an eager and idealistic reporter finds and pursues.

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I was a young reporter, one or two years as a police reporter in corrupt and wide-open Atlantic City, an evocative place in the years just before the politicians and corporate blood-suckers obliterated the city by lobbying for and  building a string of monstrous casinos that destroyed the physical city and it’s businesses and neighborhoods and spirit as well. When it comes to money, nothing really is too offensive for most Americans.

At night, after the papers were out, our deadlines met, we all met at a bar and restaurant in mid-town, two blocks from the ocean called The Stanley. There were lots of papers then, there were about a half-dozen of us, me, the  reporters from the big Philadelphia papers, which all had bureaus there, a couple of radio reporters and me. I was by far the youngest, the newbie, I was razzed and hazed mercilessly. We were good friends, but we competed ferociously for stories all day, drank and traded lies and stories all night. We drank until the sun came up, staggered home, got a few hours sleep and went at it again. There is nothing, nothing in the world that compared to be a young reporter in a city in the hey-day of print journalism. I loved every second of it, it was my destiny.

There was a strikingly beautiful woman who worked at the Stanley, we thought she was in her 30’s, she played the piano there and sometimes sang, she was clearly a drunk, but there were a lot of drunks then, it wasn’t as big a deal as it is now, many of them functioned well, although her beauty sometimes wore a a bit under the daily onslaught of whiskey, she always had a bottle of it nearby, played in a haze of cigarette smoke.  She sang mostly sad songs, played sad and moody music, it was good for a bar, but she couldn’t seem to play upbeat songs for too long. If somebody asked her for one, she would shrug and say she didnt[ know it.

We all were in love with her, she was quite exotic, she would lift a glass to us and otherwise ignore us, she was Garbo’ish, quite unapproachable. We called her Princess Anastasia, after the Russian Czar’s daughter, whose fate was for so many years a mystery after the Revolution. Our Anastasia was beautiful and regal enough to be a princess. We wondered about Anastasia all the time, what her story was, but we never got anywhere with it. Atlantic City then was the end of the world, almost literally, all kinds of fallen and hiding souls seemed to end up there, there was only ocean beyond.

Anastasia was as remote as she was beautiful and talented – everyone who heard her play the piano was enchanted, sometimes she played the big events – weddings, dances – for the big and fancy hotels – the Shelburne, the Marlborough-Blenheim, giant gothic palaces that lined the ocean, where the people with money stayed. Unless somebody got murdered, this was a world closed off to us. Anastasia didn’t  seem to want to stay in those places, it was said she just drank too much for them,   but not too much for the Stanley, where there was no such thing as drinking too much and nobody ever asked you how old you were.

If Raymond Chandler didn’t have LA, he would have had to create Atlantic City, teeming with hustlers on the make, fallen politicians, men having sleazy affairs, and oddballs and lost souls looking for a place to work and live..

Every night, the conventioneers, tourists, the men in the bar would come up and try and buy Anastasia a drink or dinner, take her out, try and hit on her, she never bit, never chatted much, never accepted any of their offers. It was said she lived on the top floor of a rooming house on New York Avenue,  a seedy neighborhood by the water, one of us saw her go in there once, but we never asked her and she never said – she had this huge “do not disturb” air about her and while we drank, we would place small bets – we played poker most nights – on how long it would take the smitten men to head back to their barstools. They always had the wrong idea about her, because she played the piano in a bar, they thought she would be easy.

One night, there was a scene. A man came up to Anastasia and spoke to her and she got visibly upset, started to cry, and rushed out of the bar. There were a half dozen reporters right there, but he wouldn’t speak to us. Smelling a story, I waited until he left, made an elaborate pretense of having to go to the bathroom and followed him out onto the street. My colleagues were all drunk and tired, but I had no wife or kid to get home to. I drooled over the notion of scooping them on a nice story right under their noses, my rite of initiation.

I got the man talking easily enough, went to another bar, I bought him some drinks,  he said he was from New York, he recognized Anastasia, she had been a concert pianist in New York City, she played for the Philharmonic and had performed at Carnegie Hall. There had been a terrible scandal, he said, she and her husband had been in an awful automobile crash in the Hamptons, her husband and two children had been killled, she was driving drunk,  her lawyers got her off on a plea bargain. She vanished, her career was over. So this is where she went, he said. She was a brilliant pianist, she had a wonderful career in front of her.

I got her name and the next day I got on the phone and found the stories about her in all of the New York tabloids, it was a scandal, a horrible thing, a great story. Anastasia was a fallen princess after all.

I waited until she came into work in the early afternoon, told her what I knew and asked her for her comment. She looked ashen, shaken, asked if there was any way I could not run the story. There was no way, I said, if it wasn’t me, it would be somebody else, now that she had been spotted. She was polite but adamant, she refused to talk to me, and she quit her job that night and left Atlantic City without a word or a trace.  I was disappointed, I wanted to have her voice in the story, but it was still a good story and my editor loved it. My colleagues were predictably chastened, but they all bought me drinks, as was the custom when you got beaten on a story.

A month or two later on a Friday in the summer, my editor called me and read a wire story reporting that a singer at a Wildwood, New Jersey hotel bar had killed herself, jumping off an amusement pier in a rough tide while intoxicated, she had left a note behind in her shabby hotel room. She formerly lived in New York City.  I knew instantly it was Anastasia, this was confirmed when I called the Wildwood police. They police said reporters had been calling from New York, the story had run on the AP wire,  she was somebody, they said. Yes, I remember thinking, she was.

A few weeks later, I went to New York to a memorial service held for her at a church on the East Side of Manhattan. The paper wouldn’t pay for me to go, they didn’t care about the story any more, Anastasia had left Atlantic City, but I wanted to go. Her sister came up to me, asked who I was, and told me I was a murderer, one of the jackals that had hounded her sister to death. I did not know what to say, I hadn’t been a reporter for too long but I was already used to angry and resentful people. The story came first.  I believed in what I did.

I did not apologize to the sister, not then or later, when she showed up at a book signing and asked me to sign one of my books. She did not seem angry any more, she said she realized over time her sister didn’t need anyone to destroy her life, she had done it all by herself. My dream was brief, I saw Anastasia walking on the Boardwalk, shaking her hair in the wind, then sitting at her piano at the barn. She looked happier than I had ever seen her look at the Stanley.

Sometimes people lives are like shooting stars or comets, flashing across the sky, and then vanishing into the infinite hole. Who is there to care about this woman, or what happened to her? I asked myself this morning if I had it to do all over again, would I still write that story?

Yes, I thought. Absolutely. It was a great story, one of my first.

I hadn’t thought of Anastasia in  awhile. I guess I have the codeine dreams to thank for remembering her,  they seem to know what is important, even if it is hidden.