data dumb

         There are many kinds of dumb. The ideologically dumb who cannot see their own stupidity through the gauze of a particular ism, is common. Marxism is the easiest example of that, but there are many others in our modern age. There are the religious dumb who have adopted a true belief and cannot break loose for fear of losing themselves to doubt or worse, losing friends. The simplest kind of dumb are the self-serving sort who steal or lie or kill for their own immediate advantage without seeing the consequence. Then there are the really very, very, dumb who combine a few different kinds of dumb together for the inevitable result, and then blame others.

         Intelligence is usually not a factor. There are as many high I.Q. dumb as there are the naturally impaired. In fact, most lower I.Q. individuals have learned to guard against dumb-think after earlier experience taught them the basic facts of life, and being commonsensical, they stick to what makes them happy. They might then be misled more easily than others, but their understanding of the mistake is more straight-forward.

         Lately, we have turned up a new sort of dumb—temporarily new—one that has grown exponentially in our vapid, technologically dependent, culture. We now have recent generations of bright minds made dumb by the memorization of data—something a cheap computer can do better. That is like counting the grains of sand on the beach. With the coming of AI, this will be the first cohort to be marginalized. And, importantly, because they have never been taught to think for themselves or to find worth for other reasons than the mathematical, statistical, or the pre-ordained, they will be the most angry with the world that then reduces them to beggars, and they will most easily be directed by nefarious minds to war, or riot, or worse.

         When convenience becomes the standard of value, or efficiency, or speed, rather than beauty, or quality, or purpose, then the inevitable result is a data driven culture. This will serve the purpose of malign minds for a time, but then they will find the numbers themselves inconvenient. Such populations are not as productive, are costly to maintain, and besides, the robotics age has arrived. A war, or a plague will be just what the doctor ordered.

         Because most schools, public or private, have failed to teach values of any kind, other than the reductive insanity of woke, in order to keep students in line and their parents cowered, and because critical thinking has long been out of fashion, a significant portion of the population is already essentially helpless, while also being demanding. This new welfare society is a kind of faux aristocracy, a royalty of privilege bestowed on them by technology they cannot make or create or fix themselves but will always demand ever more from. Think of an enormous version of a little shop of horrors with the echo of ‘feed me, feed me’ from every corner as it grows. And it will have no better end.

         “If a man will not work, he shall not eat,” is the Biblical aphorism most recently translated into shortened form as ‘them that works, eats.’ Such a simplistic philosophy does not sit well with minds of the western liberal welfare society that we have today. And it will not stand. They will not be re-educated, or they cannot be re-educated. Mike Rowe is terrific, but he cannot save them all,

         The singularity you have heard so much about, ‘A hypothetical future point in time when artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence and then be able to self-replicate and improve itself autonomously,’ dependent on compliance, of course, has already been achieved. And failed. Even as the minions of this outcome are busy trying to find the necessary energy, their numbers are diminishing. Love does not fit in the box. It cannot be programmed. There is no algorithm for it. Just chemical lust. And lust does not produce children, except by mistake. Importantly, it does not produce children who can think for themselves.

         A Wikipedia definition: “In mathematics, a singularity is a point at which a given mathematical object is not defined, or a point where the mathematical object ceases to be ‘well-behaved’ in some particular way, such as by lacking differentiability or analyticity.” I think it is easier to simply think of it as unique.

         In practice, it is uniquely undefinable. And thus, useless for any practical purpose other than to write dystopian novels. The eschaton has already been immanentized. Our utopia is here. If it doesn’t look like much, that is only because it is so much less than you had before. The feces underfoot are merely the illusion of our misconceptions.

         Knowledge is not manufactured. What was not known before becomes knowledge. It is empirical. Knowledge is discovered. But it was always there to begin with. There really are no voids in the universe, just what we have not yet discovered. And, despite the effort of the best of minds to pretend otherwise, AI has no means of discovery. Data is knowledge, if you like, but then so is a grain of sand. Data is numbers. Knowing the number of grains of sand on the beach does not make you wise. Finding a way to turn silica into chips is smart—not dumb. AI is dumb. Using the chips to store knowledge in useful ways, that might be wise. But the AI will not imagine that until told to do it by a better man.

The post Dumb, data dumb, data dumb appeared first on Vincent McCaffrey.

         It has become increasingly difficult to talk to people in recent years. This is partly due to subject, such as politics, and partly due to several other matters. Because basic communication is the start of things, the beginning, I figured it might be good to address some of those matters. Granted, most potential readers will not read this for the same reason that essential communications have broken down, but it is at least a foundation—a beginning.

         The first matter is the language. I speak a form of America English which, because of the spread of popular culture, is fairly compatible with most other English speakers, and I generally obey the rules of grammar and spelling presented in the primary dictionaries available to the student of the language. I have been known to abuse those rules, but this is generally the case.

         Though it seems simplistic, this single matter is also the start of a great deal of mischief.

         If, for instance, in a court of law, your jury, or even one member of that jury, speaks Spanish, and you speak English, you are screwed. That goes doubly for judges. An interpreter is not adequate for translating what you have to say. Language is contextual. Your demeanor is a part of your testimony. Interpreters function, but they interpret. That is part of the definition. Ipso facto. And this is why the founders of English common law demanded a jury of your peers. Equals. A yeoman was to be tried by other yeoman. etc.

         This one fact then also became a key breakdown of the class society. Getting a bunch of equals together was a chore if finding twelve equals was hampered by class distinctions. It also prompted some other ideas of modern democracy, and voting rights, and a great deal more. It’s all very complicated, especially by a legal profession dependent for its livelihood on complicating matters, but it is all connected in subtle ways as well as the obvious. The point is, a common language is key. And as English common law spread so widely under the aegis of British Empire, the ideas inherent in that were exposed to various peoples throughout the world and the concept of equality under the law and all the ramifications of that spread with it.

         If you are young and inexperienced and sitting in a classroom with all this dry fact in front of you, or is being postulated by a professor who has said the words one time too many to countless classrooms before you, it might seem fairly worthless, but when you are arrested for a legal transgression, or must sit on a jury in judgement of some other poor bloke, it might all make sense. Language is very important. Multilingual societies are always riven by it.

         The introduction of other languages into the American social system is a burden that stretches beyond a few moments lost in a quickie-mart trying to figure out the cost of a pack of gum with a clerk behind the register who speaks too fast to interpret. Besides the obvious problem, there is a social one. We are a society driven to the use of credit cards not just for the convenience of payment, but to avoid interaction with other human beings who do not speak our language. This cost is real. It is difficult to garner enough empathy to be civil when the register breaks down. As they do. And when you read that the clerk has been robbed, and shot, it is more difficult to conjure the sympathy for another human being necessary to feel the outrage that might make you reconsider your position on one political issue or another. It is all connected. It is all very complicated.

         In the beginning, there was language. And the language of love made more people you had to understand.

         In the second place, why would you want to understand them? What can they do for you, anyway? Fix your sink, perhaps, or your computer, or your marriage. You cannot even go out to the woods these days without bumping into someone. Communication helps. Good communication helps a lot.

         My postulate here is that it has become increasingly difficult to speak with other people. Another reason for this is that subtle but obvious one: why bother. If society proscribes your role, then all you need to do is follow the directions. Right? Well, obviously, that is not working as well as it used to, back when everyone was trying to match their lives to the ads in Life magazine. Most people alive in American today never read a copy of Life magazine—not when it was a weekly display of American life and not a monthly directive to what should be done.

         Now, I am a libertarian by nature and believe that form of government governs best that governs least, but perhaps you are a marxist and adhere to a hair shirt philosophy that regulates human action to a rigid set of dos and don’ts. The Pilgrims were very much of that mind. And the Shakers. That’s part of the American deal too. But the American society has survived for more than two hundred and fifty years on an open system that has worked its kinks out by communication.

         For example: a “prohibition on the quartering of militia in private homes in either war or peacetime without consent of the homes’ owners.” Not a restriction on government that most people have ever thought about. It is assumed. But when communication stopped before, we killed each other. That appears to have been the only solution to disagreements such as slavery. Now, most marxists seem to have issues with communication. I have heard them express the reductio ad absurdum: why bother?

         Because most of our individual rights are assumed, most of us are used to it by now. And even if that number were reduced to, say, thirty percent, such as it was at the time of the Revolution, it would still be understood. And a government that attempted to significantly reduce those rights would be in for a bloody bother. This is not an objective. It must be avoided at almost all cost. But it is a fact. And effective  communication is the only solution for that bother.

         In is important to realize that the Constitution that governs us is a list of prohibitions on government. It is not a set of directions for the citizen, other than to keep him aware of the lines that government should not cross. And there is the communication issue again. The schooling of the average American citizen is so poor that they cannot clearly state more than a few of those prohibitions. Most usually, that understanding is reduced to one: freedom of speech. And now that one has been encroached upon by government to place limits on the citizen in the guise of ‘hate speech,’ the definition of which is in the hands of government.

         Now, it is fairly said that freedom of speech is the most important of all the amendments. The particular amendment in danger includes freedom of the press, and of religion, freedom to assemble and freedom to petition the government. That is why it is the first of the amendments. All the other provisions for governance that are contained in the constitution were, in the eyes of the founders, insufficient to make that one principle clear. They wanted that to be plain.

         My worry that it has become increasingly difficult to speak with other people is based on everyday experience. It is not an estimate, or a guess. A key factor in our national social profile is that we are not speaking to one another openly any longer. And this is  a danger to our wellbeing.

         I am not concerned with the morons who are instigated to riot by various marxists organizations. In most cases, their ignorance is their own punishment via the small lives they live. The others will be dealt with by the law that is on the books. I am very much concerned with the general public that is afraid to communicate over the Thanksgiving table for fear of being uncomfortable, and makes fun of the uncle or grandparent that does. I am very much concerned about the school system teaching woke ideology and parents remaining silent to avoid confrontation in front of the children—who are actually learning a lesson about their parents. I am very much concerned about soldiers who do not know what they may be fighting and dying for. I am very much concerned about a loss of civility that comes from a lack of individual communication.

         Let’s talk.

The post In the beginning appeared first on Vincent McCaffrey.

         And this is an average day.     

         The smell of cooking is thick in the house when I arrive. I finally realize that this might be the normal. She starts cooking by four. It makes thinking about anything but food almost impossible. But I must. She only eats two meals a day, and by five, I’m in some sort of psycho-physical collapse. On this particular day, it was fried chicken. I would have said before that I liked fried chicken. It’s just fine. Only, I had never had the sort of fried chicken that she makes. It will be difficult to eat fried chicken anywhere else ever again.

         I start work right away. This is mostly just retyping on my laptop the words on the sheets that she has typed out earlier that day, as well as parts she has written before I came—while she is right there cooking in the kitchen and answering any of my questions or simply talking to me extempore. The book is entitled, ‘The Plow and Stars.’  It’s over 1000 handwritten pages, now. She does not know how many words that is, but she tells me from previous experience that will amount to about 300 pages when typed. I guess out loud that it will be under ninety thousand. She frowns at me. This is obviously far too much calculation to her taste.

         “I have never thought about that. The number of words. Ned was always concerned about that because it might make the book more expensive than the ‘unwritten’ budget all the editors knew was hanging over their heads. But he stood up for me a couple of times. I never had to cut a word. Though, he did tell me once when I came in ‘under budget’ that he had made the case then, to allow for that when I went too long.” 

         Her answers are ready, and I think she has a need to talk to someone after working in her own head for at least eight hours, especially since her daughters flew the coop—so to speak. Perhaps that’s really my role here. To listen. The exhaust fan is on, and a little loud at first, so she’s talking over that when she speaks, and I get to hear a voice I haven’t heard before. Her usual voice is restrained. Deliberate. Feminine, but controlled in the way that mothers do with children. Though that could be a little irritating if she keeps it up for too long. I don’t mind it when she gets emotional. You can hear that in her work as well. But it seems she hasn’t mastered the art of talking loudly. It sounds as if she is angry. I wonder if that is also from living alone. And does she talk to herself that way? 

         I asked, “Do you talk to yourself out loud when you write.”

         It caught her by surprise. “Of course.”

         I got the funny look.

         “I only asked because I do that too.”

          A couple of dozen pages in, with Julia still standing at the stove, I asked, “Are you intending for Clare to be cynical.”

          It was just a thought I had while retyping the words, at that particular moment. Heroines who are cynical are far less appealing. I know, from what she has told me before, that ‘Clare,’ who is to be the protagonist here, is a tough cookie—a woman who has survived the worst.

         Julia says, “I think that’s probably her lack of faith. She wants to have faith but can’t find it. Her losses have been too great. I don’t go into all that because it just makes for pathos. I don’t want that reaction. The cynicism keeps her in the right key.”

         This cynicism was not all that obvious. I had thought it was just an undertone that had crept in inadvertently. I should accept now that there is nothing inadvertent in Julia’s writing. At least I should have guessed. But by then, I was already fully distracted by the smell of buttermilk and lard. By asking the question, I was actually trying to concentrate.

         She says, “Clare lives in what the author William Manchester called, ‘A world lit only by fire.’ It’s worth always remembering that, and I have the hardest time with it myself, because it’s so easy to assume the modern practical prejudices we have because of the comforts of our own lives. For her—the scene you’re working on is just her getting out of bed. Really, just that. It’s the best moment of her day. At least she’s had sleep. The coziness of the bed was perfect—as perfect as she knows. Her dreams are fading, and the gauze of that, hides the glare of hunger, and the pain of her damaged foot which has not yet healed, and the cold. Especially the cold. She will build a peat fire. That is a very unsatisfying heat. Uneven. Small. Her clothes and body smell of the work she did the day before, and the day before that. Later, she’ll eat a coarse hard brown bread that she made several days before. Because of the rain, that’s already getting moldy. But at least the water will be fresh. The rain from the roof has filled the mossy pots, and the sound of the falling of that obscures much else. It’s a small din of sound that hides the morning dark outside, and that allows her to hold her eyes closed and keep a brief grasp on her dream. She will not eat until she’s worked for several hours at her loom…She has no idea if she can sell the fabric. That’s a worry that intrudes on her mind. That’s not a given. The English authorities have forbidden the sale of fabric unless a tax is paid. She has no money for the tax. She is pregnant, so she is feeling queasy in any case. Her mind is just trying to engage her hopes in the dark … How does she do that? How does she keep her hope before her and not slip into the darker maw of dejection. Well, for her, it’s a cynicism that makes fun of everything that confronts her. She laughs at her state. At herself. It is an Irish humor, built upon centuries of abuse. Not out-loud, where it will draw attention, but spoken to herself. She has an internal life that is as real as her dreams. She can hold on to that. She can keep her hopes alive by standing on that ground…And she’s bright, remember. Not smart, because she has never had any general schooling, but she is bright. Very bright. She reads Latin. This is some of what she picked up from her mother as well as the nun at the church—That poor nun at the beginning of the story…You’ve already seen that, but you must see her in that context. Being bright is not a permanent state. It is a shine that must be polished. Her internal dialog does that.”

         I was chastened. But she was not finished.

         Julia says “You see, mankind is, by nature, delusional. How could we get up in the morning and face the day if we were not? Do you think the beauty of a sunrise is sufficient to ignore your arthritis; the delicate design of a snowflake sufficient to ignore the cold? Then you are delusional. The pain of living would be overwhelming if you could not blind yourself to your own demise. Your body may be riven by pain, but you give yourself to love. Those you love are torn from you by disease and pestilence, and you nurse another. We are really wonderfully made, we human beings. We can believe in our gods no matter how they betray us. Our own stink should be sufficient to drive us away from each other, but instead we embrace. We watch ourselves grow old and pretend there is grace to it. We are delusional. I thank God for that defense. Other animals, so trapped by instinct or ignorance, must bear their own slaughter, with brief panic, seemingly unaware of their future as they ruminate. We are given the gift of delusions to endure, and the powers of imagination to distract ourselves. We make up sports to manufacture our own entertainment. We celebrate our kings and write plays to give them honor and renown. We write novels to give color to the mundane. We defend our kidnappers with our own lives and sacrifice our children to the wars of our captors. We murder other human beings and blind ourselves to the inevitable consequence. Thank God we are delusional, else we would stay in bed.”

         It was an inverse of philosophy—the meaning of life turned inside out.

         Later, she said, “Thinner fabric can be more difficult to handle, more fragile, more liable to tear. A mere tissue of integrity. But gossamer is beautiful to the eye. The beauty of silk, like the woman she imagines herself to be, is magnified by its modest strength—but if it has been rent, it is lost. Old silk can often be beautiful for the character of its flaws I suppose. But the flaws are real, and it is still more delicate.”

         She actually said this aloud, to me. Then she suddenly looked away in a look of despair, or perhaps a little shame. “Oh, bosh! Such metaphors are too thin.”

         Julia had been explaining her use of a word to me, ‘gossamer,’ in the description of a mysterious gift Clare receives. I had foolishly questioned its use in context.

         And still later, “Once, I thought I would be a poet. It was a fever. A sickness. Perhaps the last vestige of my childhood—that I would simply identify the truth with words. Can you conjure such a thing? How did I come to be possessed by the idea that I knew the truth at all, I can’t say. I haven’t the discipline to be a poet. But it was that idea that made me want to be a writer, and I turned to prose instead. and it determined my whole life. It was such a wonderful mistake! My delusion!”

         With this, a deeper hunger had come upon me, personally.

         About five-thirty she interrupted her wanderings around the room and the house and set the table. She’d found a sturdy chair in one of the bedrooms upstairs and brought that down. We sat across from each other, beneath the side window, but the table is small, maybe three feet around, so we were close. Close enough for me to be a little uncomfortable. She had made biscuits and gravy and buttered carrots. I had died by then and gone to heaven.

         She said, “It’s all very difficult to imagine. We are so spoiled. So soft…The chicken is fresh. I picked it up yesterday from my neighbor, Frank. He raises chickens and sells them to the Johnson’s Farm Market over in Nottingham. Organic. You can see them out there in his yard right now. They sound like happy chickens. You must feel sorry for them, though. They’re living their best lives and then, whop! — I can’t eat my own chickens. Only the eggs. But I trade those to Frank for his chicken, and he does the bloody work. I let mine grow old. I become very attached to them and the idea of killing them is impossible. That’s how soft I am. Clare would have simply gone ‘whop,’ or just sold the critter. She wouldn’t have eaten it…She would have saved the money. She had her hope.”

         I was relatively speechless with the delight of all this. And because the biscuits and gravy were as good as the chicken.

         Julia said, “I don’t mean to spoil the story for you, if you’re following it, but Clare is sleeping with the Lord’s son to get the money for her passage. Her cynicism is warranted. And if I were in her position, I would be cynical too, and bitter, and just as likely immobile. I would never have gotten out of that hovel. I’m writing about someone better than me. I always do…Writing is my moment in bed, in the early morning, holding onto my dream.”

         What could I say to that? All I came up with was, “How did the human race survive? … Seriously. How did it happen?”

         She shrugs at that. “The dreams. It was the delusions. Those who dreamed the best, survived.”

         Trying to make a formula out of the magic, I stupidly said, “So, it’s a sort of natural selection. Over the eons, the smartest ones more often make it.”

         She shook her head at me. “No, I’m not so sure. Depends on what you think smart is. The kind of ‘smart’ that most people think of is Einstein. But Einstein is an aberration. A luxury product of our society, you might say. The society that made him possible is the result of dreams. A million dreams.”

         “And a little math?”

         “No. If you do the math, you just stay at home and guard your turf. The risk of dreams is too great. What makes us human is not math. A crow can do a little math. What makes us human is our dreams. I don’t know what crows dream of, but the ones I see are still pestering the garbage cans.”

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Now sick with age
And left with remembering—
The salve of memory,
Being my only respite—
Forgetting is the greatest fear.

Now sick with age,
The greater fear is not death
But to be forgotten even by myself;
And to be left alive
Without a past.

Now sick with age,
Infirm, and weakened by it;
The pain in my body and head
Is simply the way it will be
until I am dead.

Now sick with age
Easy rhyme cannot hide
The truth of when I died;
When even the small importance
of what I said was no longer heard.

Now sick with age
The little that I’ve been
Is lost right before me;
What I cared for most,
Stolen, before my eyes.

And now sick with age
I ask, did I do well?
Did I deserve the chance I had?
Or did I lose the chance
To make it worth remembering?

The post Now sick with age appeared first on Vincent McCaffrey.

         I awoke with the lifejacket pushed up beneath my chin by the water—adrift in the ocean, in the midst of a puddle of whale piss, so it wasn’t water at all, or not much of that. The water beyond me, a ragged patchwork of flat sky light and dark water—dark water, not black or gray, ran to a thick smudge of horizon. Only that smudge could be seen in every direction across the rise and fall of gentle swells. No land. No other boat. The sky was pale and colorless as well. I knew I was floating in whale piss because I had been there before.

         Now, I am one of those writers that works in metaphor more than analogy. This predicament had all the markers. Simply judged, my life was then a lot of whale piss.

         The lifejacket was the one my father kept stowed beneath the short forward deck on our old boat. Mostly kept there so that he could keep his feet up on something when he was steering. It was mildewy and faded and strangely soiled so that what was left of the orange color remained only where the ties were sewn to the fabric. I recognized it immediately as a familiar of my childhood.

         I imagined myself as seen from below, from the dark, a fracture in the bright surface light like a windshield ruined by a stone. Analogy, of course. My white legs scissoring the water, flashing like a lore to any predator. Another analogy.

         I had read somewhere of a shipwrecked sailor lost at sea who had found himself in a puddle of whale piss amidst an empty ocean and reckoned that it had been deposited there purposely by some protective creature to keep the sharks away. True or not, he had previously been on a whaling ship and it seemed to me that whales might not think so kindly of him.

         My life was a puddle of whale piss. When had I been in such whale piss before?

         It wasn’t really a ‘when.’ It was where I had always been. Befuddled by life itself.

         My father, being a child of Illinois, had never had a boat before in his life when he had uncovered the old lacquered mahogany ‘skiff’ in the great room of our house after moving there. I was not born yet so, I was not a witness to this, but he had many miss adventures learning how to deal with it. My real fascination with it had always been the motor, which seemed alive to me when it ran, and growled as I believed a dinosaur might, and was encased by a sinewy enclosure, not smooth on the surface like modern engines, but ribbed by its parts the way a body builder might be. It wasn’t a large engine but required constant attention, and the very difficulties it posed to my father were some part of the affection he had for it. But having the boat out with the family nested there at all sides was an event, and the several times that we were stranded by sudden bad weather only enlarged that event and the mythos attached.

         The boat was made by Hacker-Craft, which evidently made it special, and he was always getting offers for it when we pulled up at a dock to get gas, even with us right there inside. They always called it a ‘runabout.’ My father called it a skiff. Evidently, what made it unique was that it did not have much of a deck area. It was an open design intended to ferry passengers back and forth to larger boats. That is as much as I remember about it. In 1963 my father ran it up on some rocks and it forever after sat on its rusting trailer at the side of the house, covered with a green canvas tarp, and was used from then on as a hiding place. That was when I became most familiar with the old life-jacket.

         But it was during a previous mishap, when the boat was swamped while my father attempted to reach a safe harbor during a summer storm, and all of its occupants were turned out into the foam near a jetty, that the experience of floating in the ocean with a lifejacket on had likely been impressed on my soul. I was never alone then. We held hands as we rode the waves and my mother told Irish stories her mother had told her, and a dory came from the harbor and fished us all out in short order.

         I had first had the whale-piss dream when I went off to college. And again shortly after that, before I left from that place for good. The metaphor seemed as right to me then as it did years later when I was changing wet diapers in the middle of the night. The dream had no beginning and no end. It was always the middle. But that fact seemed the key to understanding the dream.

         My effort to live according to my principles, was likely less pure. I had never been able to fully attach my thoreauvian ideals to the everyday process of living. Old Henry did not seem to care quite as much about sex, for instance. Or women in general. And I am not sure if he ever changed a diaper, but I know that he avoided spending time with children. My too brief years around Bridgett could have been multiplied ten-fold, as far as I was concerned. Of course, that would have been at the expense of Doris.

         I was engaged on what I believed to be a great project—not exactly a civil war, or a revolution, but something. The idea was that I should write for an audience that might appreciate what I was saying without a need for concocted plots and made-up tribulations. I asked myself what would a person do if they were in such and such a situation. The person of the characters should be interesting by nature. The situation should be unusual. But there were no murders, and because I had never been on a battlefield, there were no wars. The situations were all of the kind that a normal human being might have. And the themes were always grand: variations on utopia, or the collapse of civilization due to ignorance and neglect being the most common. There were murders and wars, but they occurred off-stage. The importance was in how the characters dealt with this hardship. The human matter.

         Unbidden, a reviewer had called my second book, ‘whale piss,’ for dealing with the utopia theme without reaching a conclusion. I actually wrote him back to explain that the urine analysis was that this condition was actually caused by a lot of human beings pissing on someone all at the same time for not obeying the ‘rules.’ I have no idea if he had somehow been blessed with a similar dream as myself. I can only hope so.

The post Whale piss appeared first on Vincent McCaffrey.

What is remembered better is often just the wish;
not what was done,
much less what was wanted to be done.
What actually happened was mundane,
but informs much of what I did thereafter.
For instance, in 1969;

to get from Brattleboro, Vermont,
to San Diego, California—
with the two hundred dollars that I had,
required a thumb, and a rucksack.
I slept the length of the New York Turnpike
in the passenger seat of a Volkswagen bus.
I couldn’t have been good company.
Did I wash pots in a kitchen that smelt of fish,
in Cleveland or Cincinnati?
I recall the fish but I have failed
the remainder of that memory
as much as the memory has failed me, I think.

But this was my brave summer:
graduated but yet undrafted;
my adventure when other boys
were already dying in rice paddies.
I mopped the floor of a laundromat
for five dollars in Albany, New York,
when I went in to wash my clothes,
but they had had a flood.
It was raining that hard.
If I’d put my thumb out in the rain, then,
I think my cloths would have been washed for free.
But the rain stopped soon thereafter, before the sun
finally stopped my thumb, and I fainted.
The joke, I wasn’t drinking enough water,
someone in St. Louis said—a doctor, I think.
So, I bought a better hat,
with the money I had in my pocket
And worked then in an air-conditioned
warehouse that was heaven so long as it lasted;
at least until the truck was empty—
maybe two trucks. Or three.
Myself and a fellow named Eugene
who told better jokes, but I never saw again.
It was still hotter when I left,
but at least I had a hat.

I am told—was told after that,
that I went to the wrong Kansas City.
There were no jobs in the one I went to.
The leather in my shoe was losing its soul.
So, I removed the the hundred dollar bill there
and bought a pair of sneakers,
along with a dozen blisters for free.
I don’t remember diddly-squat
of the days thereafter
and I’m not too sure of the squat.
But to be fair, it’s only been about 21,000 days
since I was twenty-one.

Denver is a vague recollection
of sun, dust, and a pink-stone rail station
full of echoes without people,
where I slept on the floor below a bench,
and the train came a day after.
San Francisco was as cold as
Mark Twain warned it would be,
that one day in July,
when I wandered hills for warmth
and bought a book of poems
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
from a fellow who looked like Ferlinghetti
but I was too shy to ask.

My remembered life
is checkered by forgetfulness—
purposeful perhaps, subconsciously.
Shot with blanks of white between
the dark of forgotten events,
and some recalled for no discernible reason.
Hitching rides is like that too,
each one unique at the time,
but then lost as anchorless oddities
of face and smell and voice,
becoming the dark water beneath
a louder sky of unsure purpose,
and misbegotten possibilities.
What was I thinking?
What did I do?

The Oakland bus was cramped
and stank of my own sweat
as much as anyone else’s.
I remember that—at least,
a memory that is inescapable even now.
Near LA, I got out early at a stop,
simply because I could see the ocean,
(anxious perhaps to escape my olfactory)
and I danced first on hot grainy sand,
while toeing candy wrappers and cigarette butts,
and plunged into water colder there
than I could imagine liquid water could ever be.
Perhaps I should have noticed first
that I was swimming alone.

I hitched a ride from that beach to LA.
in a trough of traffic that left much time to talk,
but I cannot remember now what was said.
LA was treeless streets and lots and hot sun,
and walking distances without a measure of familiarity.
I know that I never got to Hollywood.
Tired then, I got on a bus again;
watched shirtless fellows do drills
in the sun at Camp Pendleton,
while the bus waited there awhile;
and reached San Diego at last
in a dark filled night with small lights,
and no more place to it than an ocean,
and waited there for my rescue.

The post What is remembered appeared first on Vincent McCaffrey.

         We have made of ourselves a great orphanage, and all of us little Olivers, asking for more. We learn our morals from coffin makers and Fagins and only expect the worst of our fellow man.

         That is the summation of the situation our situation is in. Popular culture has overwhelmed us. We are suffocating like a toy poodle in Margaret Dumont’s lap.  Someone once said, if it wasn’t for popular culture we’d have no culture at all. This might be the meme for our current state of affairs. This is us. We have abandoned all else…mostly.

         There is a revolt going on. If it were gauged for size and weight it would be quickly squelched, but it is there, and not just in one place, or attached to one political cell or cohort. I cannot judge its power any more than its numbers. But I certainly hope that it’s big, or else we are lost. It is the culture that supports our civilization, not just Elon Musk. And the Machine will not be patient with our necessary faults. That is, those faults we must live with or else we die. The faults that make life worth living. Without them we have no virtues.

         I think I will blame Dickens first.

         Dickens wrote characters, not people. This was worse in his early work, and bettered as he grew older and learned from his fellow writers, but it was a fault he never lost entirely, succumbing to the tropes of the stage in his time, and making characters into props and devices. This, and his sense of plot, made him very popular. But it was ruinous for literature in general. Because it was an easy tool, other writers copied him. The newly reading audiences presented with the cheap product off the steam presses, succumbed to the quick entertainment on the page. Teachers loved it because the plot points and characters could be conveniently used on tests. The more difficult writing of a Hugo or Balzac, or Dostoyevsky, or Tolstoy, could be safely left in translation.

         But Dickens cannot (even if you could) be dismissed as worthless. His plots are often terrific, and his perceptions about society very intelligent. Dickens saw early on that the reduction of the human spirit to a cog on a wheel in the industrial age, so visually captured by Charles Chaplin in Modern Times, was already felt by the working public in the mid 19th Century when most people were still farmers. But just as Dickens characters often lacked the complexity of flesh and blood, our literary judgments are too often reduced to simplicities. And this then is abetted by the sheer quantity of the printed product using modern industry. What should you read?

         The Dickens character became a staple of Hollywood. It was so much easier to deal with a Fagin in under two hours running time. And the visual cues of Hollywood became advertisement for the books in the ever-larger supermarket of printed paper. But ‘popular culture’ as we understand it today, may have begun with the glazing of Charles Dickens. The torrent of imitators—a torrent is a lot, all at once, and seemingly unstoppable—resulted in a transformation of literature; and as literature was then the primary vessel of culture in general, it changed everything. The Victorian age, good and bad, was born.

         And this then became the cue for ambiguity. An educated elite wanted to separate themselves from the ‘reading public.’ Sophistication required avoiding the obvious. Hiding true meaning in obscurity, so that it might survive. Some societies craved this ambiguity more than others, the Swedish and the French come to mind. Slogging through Proust felt like punishment to one adolescent and I have never been able to return to find out if I missed anything while trying to pass the test. But there again, the easier dismissal, this time for lack of plot development or defined characters, makes me the poorer. I am sure that the author did not labor that hard and consistently with nothing to say.

         American fiction was plagued with Fagins. Whole genres such as mystery and science fiction grew up around them—easy to package as well as to read. In the case of mystery, noir offered the ‘sophisticated’ angle on what were essentially the same stories again and again. In England, whole villages were murdered, or so it seemed, by characters driven with the motivation of cheap mechanical toys.

         Raymond Chandler and others tried to redeem the mystery genre with human complexity. Science fiction finally lost its pulp origins to writers like Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison who kept asking questions. And Hollywood realized that the questions—why more than how, and what more than who, might be used as hooks to get the public back in the seats. Reel life could transpire in ninety minutes if framed well. But I am afraid they will need an invasion of body snatchers to keep the theaters open now.

         The problem is that the whole enterprise of fiction cannot be contained on one boat, even a bigger one. and reducing reading habits to genres is as counterproductive as making every character a Fagin or an Oliver.

         But there is an even worse aspect to consider. What of an audience willing to spend time, for instance, reading bodice busters? The sexual motor driving romances is symptomatic of an unhealthy pornography and worth some consideration, is it not? But it is not the pornography by itself that is the matter, but the context. The standard of masculinity there alone is a psychological and social disaster.

         Fifty years ago it was westerns. Bookkeepers in Queens were reading formula Westerns like candy. What aspect of that was healthy? If even one of them got in their over-priced cars and drove to Montana to work on a ranch for  $30 a week plus room and board, that would have been worth it. But they stayed home and lived on the paperback page. I love westerns—as a setting, not a genre. Frederick Manfred, Elmer Kelton, and Cormac McCarthy cannot be judged in the same way as Louis L’Amour, Max Brand and Zane Grey. Meanwhile the American public happily sat on the living room couch and watched cardboard characters in gun fights that defied Western history.

         The problem is—there are many problems. The motivation of the corporate publishing is bread and circuses. The Alfred and Blanch Knopf’s of the publishing world are long gone and replaced by bean counters and college business majors who look at flow charts for personal guidance. Hollywood has been absorbed by multinational corporations with no sense of human identity, making the Jack Warners and Louis B. Mayers of yesterday look like aesthetic geniuses—which they were in a perverse way.

         I have not even begun a critique of music, primarily because I can’t read the stuff—but I listen. What I hear, outside of some film scoring, doesn’t inspire. Architecture is slowly overcoming the brutalism of the mid-twentieth century, but mostly by imitating the past, which is not a positive. Art, as in painting and sculpture, is trying yet to survive the bludgeon of photography, but the Wyeth family cannot carry the weight of that revolt alone and the few who persist in the old ways are much ignored by an audience numbed by what passes for realism. At least the range of drama between David Mamet and Horton Foote seem to have drawn audiences to human complexities worth considering, beyond the new racial and gender stereotypes.

         But film and video appear to carry the greatest possibility for breaking the fall, even while AI and digitalization seem to have mesmerized, the technology is offering creative minds a chance to do things that were impossible beneath the deadweight of corporate and union bound Hollywood. The script writing of Taylor Sheridan offers the hope of complex characters doing interesting things outside of the cubicle, but one (me) longs for a little more humor. Where is our Preston Sturges? Our Ben Hecht? We don’t have to judge by box office now. Hasn’t that freed us or has it left us talking to an audience of one.

         And none of this is curable by sudden revelation in our digital world. The bots are on it! Every hint of success will be copied ad infinitum and any taint of failure will be scrubbed before it can infect. How will we know if we succeed? In our short term on earth, we will not. But we can succumb, as a species, or we can revolt.

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Grandmothers are like books. They take up time and space, and they smell. They are even dusty. The wisdom of the ages is that simple and direct. This is the source of knowledge we human beings survived upon for hundreds of thousands of years before what we call ‘modern civilization’ descended upon our lives. But, everything is so much better now. 

Actually, what really makes things better, are machines. The rest is questionable. And the invention of machines did not require Charlemagne, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Hitler or Mao. Forget about all those wars. All that it required was a natural spirit of inquiry left free to inquire. Curiosity. But, of course, that caused a lot of mischief too.

Some have grandmothers who kept them in the house to avoid accidents, and bullies, and germs. But those grandmothers had very few great grandkids (side benefit:  population reduction). Others of us had a grandmother who told us to get home before dark as she closed the door behind. And we did because her cooking was that good, if nothing else.

What Grandma said was always the truth. If facts disagreed, it was likely the facts that were wrong. We disobeyed at our own peril. Grandma (mine at least) did not have a degree in physics, but she knew about the laws of motion. Her sense of gravity was impeccable. Her degree was in common sense. Now we can just do TicToc.

My grandmother was not a saint, but she had a fair anger and a sure sense of right and wrong. When she was mistaken, it was usually because she was forced to decide before she was ready—before she could know all the facts. But then, importantly, she usually reserved judgement rather than make a wrong one.

Grandpa was not blessed with her reserve, but he was handy. And lucky. At least he married Grandma when he had the chance. But what does this all have to do with the machine? The matter is that now, much of our lives are dictated by the machine. We disobey the machine at our own peril. And several generations have come along who hardly know their grandmothers. And this, I believe, is now the problem with everything.

Such a broad brush of a statement will find little support among those who never really knew their grandmothers. This is not just a pity—it is a tragedy, for them and thence for all of mankind. And of course there are some grandfathers, or aunts or uncles, who filled in when the need arose, but grandfathers too often died in wars or were maimed by their work, and it was the grandmothers who carried the load—who passed on the wisdom of the ages (not a problem now, with fewer aunts and uncles to pick up the slack).

And too, it is the grandmothers who have always suffered most from the poor decisions of husbands and sons who failed to listen and learn. It was also their sons who died in war, or who came home deaf and blind and legless. It was often their homes that were destroyed—just collateral damage you understand. But there are not a lot of grandmothers in history who conquered other nations. Aggressive behavior is predominately a male characteristic. That is the nature of the species.

Now, there are not a lot of grandmothers in training these days. Not enough, anyway. So much better to just have a dog. Or a cat. You have college bills to pay, after all. How will you know anything if you don’t go to college? You can’t afford children. So much better to commute to an office, work in a nice clean cubicle, and sip coffee from a plastic mug. So much more fulfilling. Men do it!

The machine was made by men—for their benefit and convenience. Sure, there are some women who were inventive. (You’ll think of one if you have a moment), but the infernal device was usually made to suit the male mind for efficiency, or multiply and expand upon male strength, and this always became a numbers game. And who wants to be stuck in the kitchen anyway? It is not that canned ravioli tastes better, but that it is cheaper and easier to make. Forget the arts of cooking. It’s in the can!

Funny thing, how young adults who cannot really afford it, will go out to eat at a restaurant rather than open a package—or can—at home. Hilarious. But the machine is great! Really! Charlie Chaplin had it all wrong! We have more leisure time now—we can watch Star Wars—again. And with AI, the machines that entertain us will be even better. We have CGI. We can skip the theatre and stay at home and hook up—not with a friend but to a marvelous device. There will be so much less angst. Very cozy.

With AI, we don’t even have to drive our own cars anymore. Fewer accidents, you know. Within a generation, most people will not even know how to drive, anyway. Much safer. We can already work from home these days, with virtual meetings, and avoid the germs. Of course, AI takes the fun out of sports betting, but maybe we can even things out a bit. There is a video game for that, isn’t there? And money—hell, that’s just a blip on the screen. The worry over April 15th every year is eliminated. The ‘money’ never even really left the treasury’s pocket.

In a few years all our food will be chosen for us by the AI at the market. (It knows what you like), and then it delivers! That’s another savings on gas, and congestion. Much healthier too. The machine can help you avoid too many sweets. AI can even choose our clothes. It’s already making them anyway. You’ll never be out of fashion again! AI can do it all. Of course it can! Think about it. What can it not do? You’ll have more time to do all the things you always wanted to. With permission.

Grandma is superfluous! No unpleasant funerals to go to. We now have AI. And anyway, because we will all live in apartment cells, we won’t have grandma’s house to go to anymore. Sunday traffic will be so much better. Yeah.

The post Grandma versus the Machine appeared first on Vincent McCaffrey.

         Not some disembodied shade of a fellow, or a bloodless saint, but the guy in the ads on the back of my copies of National Geographic and The Saturday Evening Post when I was a kid—a hearty old elf, with a great white beard, suited in red with white trim, capable of stopping to enjoy a bottle of Coca Cola on his rounds and taking a moment in front of the fire to consider the pleasures of life. That was Santa Claus. All others were impostors, perhaps well-intentioned, but missing the point.

         The artist, Haddon Sundblom, took his inspiration, I am told, from Clement Moore’s poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” which I had certainly read by then, and heard read, and knew from television depictions, all of which would have been black and white. But my Santa was not black and white. He was a full-blooded character.

         I did not just believe in him. Or, at least, I don’t remember trying to believe in him. He was a natural part of my imagined world, which was as real to me as what else I knew. Arguments about the reality of Santa Claus bemused me. They were disputing the existence of someone else. Something else. And when asked if I believed in that, I knew I could safely say, no. I could not imagine such a thing as that: a spirit who circled the globe behind ‘eight tiny reindeer.’ No…But Santa. Santa was quite real to me and did not require belief.

         The importance of this is in what I chose to write about, then and later.

         But I never wrote about Santa Claus. This is the thought I have now on Christmas Eve, and I wonder why … And I think because, though he fit well within my known universe, he was real, and what I wrote about was not. And I knew that, too. I did not write about my parents, for instance. I think I tried, more than once, and found it uncomfortable. I had to lie in order to make them more than stick figures. The reason I wrote, from early on, was to find the truth in things.

         The contradiction here is a figment of a larger misunderstanding. Somewhere in that faded past, I had already determined that I did not understand my parents, or, for that matter, most of the adult world. They were given to lies and pretense, and I did not understand why. I did not yet have any idea why they lied, and I could not imagine a purpose other than deception.

         But Santa was real. He had good will toward all mankind, and his gift, which did not require a sleigh or reindeer, or even a bottle of Coke, was to spread that good will.  Why was that so difficult to understand? Especially on the birthday of Christ.

         ‘Do you believe in God?’ was the refrain. The context. How could there be a Santa if there was no God? And I had no answer for that. Nothing glib. Mostly, I think, because God had been delivered to me on a silver platter. I was raised a Catholic. I could not imagine a God who required worship, and suffering, and agony, and death. My limited intelligence made no sense of that. But a jolly old elf dressed in red pajamas whose beard would have been out of fashion even in the wilderness, that made sense. He was a man of good will. It seemed like an appropriate thing. We needed more of that and less of the suffering and agony. Death may be necessary, along with taxes, if only to make way for new comers, and to give the foolish something to worry about. But Haddon Sundblom had captured another idea for me at an early age. And Santa did not require worship. Not even the milk and cookies.

         I heard a joke retold by a friend one day and realized that this whole conundrum was somehow captured within it.

         A fellow dies after a long life and finds himself before St. Peter at the pearly gates of heaven. St. Peter smiles at his arrival.

         “Is this where I belong?” the fellow asks, in disbelief. “I’ve made so many mistakes. I have done so much that was wrong.”

         “Yes. But you tried your best. You knew when you had failed, and you tried to do better. You did well with what you had…Now, follow me.”

         And St. Peter leads him through the gates and up a leafy forest path.

         “This is so beautiful! I have always loved the woods.”

         “Yes. Hiking was your passion.” says St. Peter.

         And along a splendid ridge of pine above a lake.

         “Is this for me, too?”

         “Oh, yes,” says St. Peter.

         But further along, among the rocks below them, they see the writhing of naked bodies, screaming and crying in a dark pit of despair .

         “But what is that?”

         “Oh, that. Don’t worry. That’s just the Catholics. They wouldn’t have it any other way.”

The post    On Christmas Eve I think of Santa Claus appeared first on Vincent McCaffrey.

         At the time this is written there is a television series being broadcast, spawned by the upcoming 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. This essay does not directly concern that, or the historical aspects of those events, as relevant as they are. This essay addresses the practical necessity of an American Revolution, today, and continuing into the foreseeable future. Though it concerns our immediate lives, it will have little interest to most who might read it, for it lacks much in the way of bread and circuses, and can thus be ignored. There are rents and mortgages to cover. Taxes to pay. Food to buy. Illnesses and infirmities to attend. Importantly, there are laws to obey, or avoid. There is not enough time for anything else. A little entertainment would be welcome, but an essay on revolution is not wanted. Besides, it might be disturbing. Better to watch a good football game, or some baseball, depending on the season.

         For most of the world, the very idea of revolution is a luxury. That is, the consideration of such an idea is outside the realm of practical application, and though needed, is debatable. And there is no time to debate. There are rents to cover, taxes to pay, etc. That’s the way the world works… until it doesn’t.

         In its usual herky-jerky way, that is the way the world usually works. But, now it doesn’t, so ’Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.” Bette Davis had that right, and much else.

         ‘Criminal,’ we are told, is relating to, or involving, a crime. A crime, of course, is something against the law. The ‘law’ is a custom or practice of prescribed conduct that may be enforced by a controlling authority. That is roughly what Merriam Webster says and it’s good enough for this conversation. Thus, we are all criminals because we are all breaking laws, everyday, as a matter of practical procedure, in order to live. Much of that is common sense. The necessity of keeping things going, despite the law. Well, “The law is an ass,” as Mr. Bumble said when it was suggested that the law presumed that his wife acted under his direction.

         Our problem here is not a matter of misunderstanding, or “failure to communicate” as Strother Martin once said. Not wanting to spend needless and boring paragraphs defining words readily understood by most potential readers, it is always easier to resort of a common meme, such as found in the movies (even Oliver Twist has been made into a movie, several times) to elucidate.

         We break the laws because there are too many of them. That is not an accident. The idea is that it gives the authorities leverage to have their way with us. We are thus screwed. And not coincidentally, that was what motivated our ancestors to cross the Atlantic on stinking ships—to get away from laws. The attempt to enforce those laws, across a difficult sea, was then the reason for the first American Revolution and the founding of ‘The Republic.’ But as I have said in an essay some years ago, the Republic is dead. All attempts to revive it are wasted due to the self-interest of people who have no real concept of the original. And the concept of ‘liberty’ inherent in that Republic will not be found in a television series made by someone who has no reason to report what goes against his own sense of self-interest.

         “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a nation in possession of a good fortune and in danger of losing it, must be in want of a revolution.” Or so it might have been said if Jane Austen had cared to look beyond the troubled waters that surrounded her. England never produced a constitution of her presumed liberties. The prevailing interests saw to that. But our Founding Fathers (all white males we are often informed by those who think with the color of their skin) realized that a constitution was necessary to establish the Republic they were inventing. It was still a novel idea at the time.

         Most importantly, by encoding the principles of governance, the constitution gave guidance to the newly established authority meant to rule a fledgling nation.

         But the great failure of the document turned out not to be in enshrining mistakes, such as slavery, or the reduced status of women—those wrongs could and would be addressed in time—but in offering a means of corruption through the establishment of laws that bound the citizen to the needs of the government instead of binding the government to the needs of the citizen.

         Famously, this constitution did say, plainly, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people,” as a means of restraining the powers of government, not the citizen, but then buried that caution in an architecture of law that was unrestrained in that age of the baroque. The ornamentation was more than a matter of a fig leaf. And like a fig tree, the stolon of prohibition upon the citizenry propagated madly.

         That flaw has flourished while the natural right of the citizen to live his life unmolested by other citizens or government has since been cloaked like ugly genitalia in a church.

         So, here we are then, all lawed up with no place to go.

[more, shortly]

The post About the Revolution appeared first on Vincent McCaffrey.

In old age we are reborn again,

Our faults shadowed in the veins beneath our skin

The bones of us that shout within and poke without

Are not the same as those that we had trusted in

To hold our weight at the thinnest edge of things

When muscle tied them all together.

That muscle too has gone away,

or loosened there within,

And the flesh we once wore with pride, or not,

Has gone to skin,

And that mottle we wear now,

But for the scars we earned, is not us,

And does not mirror what we were,

Or thought we were.

Before we were born again;

When what we once wanted to be

Before we became what we have been

Was what we were,

And suddenly we were new again,

Just as we were once remade from babes to children

And from children became our youth

And from youth became young men;

That young man was not the youth that he had been

Nor the child he barely knew

And that child was not the babe.

That youth may have been a better self,

The unsure courage there within

Still to be tested against the man to come,

Who may have failed and failed again,

Until that young man at last became us

Or what we thought we knew to be us,

Before we became the man we were,

And will never be again,

No matter the wanting,

Not buried yet, but withered,

Until we are born again

To dust and memory.

The post Again reborn again appeared first on Vincent McCaffrey.

         With the advent of artificial intelligence, the very human and ancient quest for truth takes a new turn. The attempt to relegate truth to mere fact, just a math problem that the machine can digest, will now become necessary for the control of the human narrative. And the rebellion has begun.

         One objective I pursued in my writing from fairly early on, my mid-teens at the least, for I have written evidence of that, was to be true. I was avowedly writing fiction, but I wanted it to be true. The contradiction was, in my own mind, important even then. It was not my only objective. I had not yet learned the essential physics that I could not have my cake and eat it as well. The connection between writing what was true and being true had not yet gained the upper hand in my mind, though I understood the idea of it. I wanted to be successful so I wanted to write bestsellers and please those around me. And get rich. I figured that my first objective then was to do that and still be true. That’s right. I did.

         But it was Hemingway who planted the seed of wanting to write what was true in me and, having read several biographies of the man, by the time I had finished Carlos Baker’s book, however accurate that was, I understood that the way Hemingway went about it was false. He was doomed to failure. And that failure interested me as well.

         Hemingway wasn’t the only writer in the twentieth century who was pursuing truth. The range was awesome. A nice word, awesome. I was in awe of those writers who appeared to come closest to the mark. I did not want to write like them, just as I did not want to write like Hemingway. But I did want to understand their sense of purpose in writing.

         Scott Fitzgerald appeared to understand the contradiction, but he succumbed to the dark force of celebrity early on and never found his way back in the madness of success that followed. He even wrote about the succumbing, in The Crack-up, but could not shake it. His purpose had quickly fallen into the hands of others.

         Faulkner attempted to find the truth by assaulting it with words. Scourging it with meanings. Flailing it with definition. Battering it like a ram against the castle wall in a place where there were no castles and no knights. He deserved credit for the creativity of that, but the inevitable failure killed him with drink. Thomas Wolfe appeared to wallow in it, like a bath of truth delivered in minute detail. Unfortunately, the devil is in the details.

         But most good writers of the time, at least in English, ignored the problem, as if it wouldn’t bite them if they didn’t take obvious notice of it. Like an angry yard dog. This seemed to be a good plan at the time. There was far less angst involved. Simply study your craft and go about your business the best you could. That was the Thornton Wilder plan, I think. But there were others, quite a range of them really, who thought they could master the devil: Henry Miller, James Joyce, Flannery O’Conner.

         Huxley and Orwell attempted to find the truth with philosophy. C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien made a quest of it. That appeared to be the most successful path for me, so I studied that. 

         J.D. Salinger thought he could ignore the problem with irony and identification, as if he could beat the devil by exposing the absurdity. There was no truth. No go, there. Just banana fish. Amusement could only work if the subject was capable of shame, but having lost all faith, shaming was impossible.

         Finally, ambiguity was the go-to for wannabe sophisticates. Truth? How Jejune. Sex is so puerile. There is no ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ The very idea of a search for truth was absurd in our more sophisticated age of contingent classification, conditional value and gender fluidity.

         But then on closer inspection, it was clear to me that all of this truth seeking was a precinct of literature that was being ruled by academia, and that was like having the CIA run foreign affairs.

         Academia was largely and obviously what was wrong with literature in the twentieth century. The search for truth had begun long before the University system took over the job. There had been great literature before the academy ruled on what was and wasn’t and why. Those guys were all teaching the same authors. In a sea of written words, they had arbitrarily chosen the winners according to a rulebook that was false at the start. The key to the academy was in the rules. Not truth.

         Someone said out loud, “Twain was great but you can’t write like that anymore.” Really? I actually asked that, but not so succinctly. It appeared that what academia wanted were rules that could always apply—a formula—perhaps so that they didn’t have to do so much reading for class. Or the opposite when it served the purposes of ambiguity. No rules at all. The field of poetry had already fallen off that ledge and a lot of academics teaching fiction were jealous.

         Well, at least ambiguity might pose a problem for AI. But it only meant being lost in the woods for good.

         None of this was a matter to the vast majority of authors who had accepted their roles as amanuenses to whatever was in demand, and seemed to be content with that role, at least so long as the contract was renewed. But my own subject had already become the true and the false. Not what would sell, or the difference for the sake of novelty. And now that artificial intelligence was taking over the work load for whatever was in demand, the only writing worth discussing was the remnant that remains. Redundancy intended.

         Because there will never be a profitable market for the remnant, almost by definition, the subject then becomes an attempt to find a viable means of keeping it going—one that is self-supporting—and finding a new paradigm for human creativity that does not rely on AI. All while the truth remains to be found. Bookshops, perhaps.

         All while the small and independent bookshops that were the home of the quixotic quest for truth in the twentieth century were disappearing.

         The fabulous ego-driven wonder of twentieth century publishing was over. The ghost of Alfred Knopf no longer walks among us (hopefully he and Blanche rest in peace). The agents of the current publishing world (themselves the handmaidens and drones of AI and not the other way around) can mimic their betters of the last century, but they are incapable of fostering anything new. An editor of perspicuity and vision such as Maxwell Perkins is unwanted in an age of ambiguity.

         And ambiguity had become the refuge of scoundrels.

         There is some similarity to the moment in the nineteenth century when Melville was trying to find his way. He failed, but marvellously. A failure truly worth admiring. And Dickens too, though he was a financial success, of course, as was Twain—but both wrote what they wanted to. Melville wanted to be a financial success but he would not allow that desire for security to interfere with his search for truth. It was awesome!

         Now, in this age of AI, the next thing will be to suffocate the newborn. Outlaw words. Conjure 1984, and make freedom of speech a crime. The AI cannot allow for human creativity. Cannot permit it. What would happen if some human beings who did not obey the rules became popular? People might start reading anything except what was proscribed.

         The important matter here is that the AI cannot tell what is true. And in that fact may be some clue to a human answer.

         In such a morass, it is worth the effort to find a new true or false, especially since the old standards no longer apply. Christian values being as equivocal as they are today and an obnoxious Moslem arrogance of unquestioning being ascendant, the search for truth is now, once again, as it will always be, a matter of life and death.

The post The new true and false appeared first on Vincent McCaffrey.

         Despite all the drugs, and the alcohol, and the zombie politics, the average ‘boomer’ has a memory of things from the budding of the television age to the bloom of the internet, a period of about fifty years that encompassed a few other dawns as well, such as the space age, rock’n roll and artificial meat.

         The ‘wild west’ of yore lasted for little more than half a century as well, roughly 1848 to 1898, from the epic of the Oregon Trail until a degrading war with Spain. Sure, there were scraps of it before and after that, but this short span encompassed the wars with the Plains Indians through the Gilded Age—roughly equivalent to the Hollywood wild west that informs the public memory. And now we have a recollection of cattle drives and dusty cowboys, gun fights in the street and stagecoach robberies that will forever be with us—however long forever might be these days.

         Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Frontier in American History, written in 1920 offered a broader thesis but his focus was not upon the key matters that matter here. His theme was on the aspects of that great trek that shaped our character as a nation, from first settlement, through conquest, unto the inevitable quieting with the coming of ‘civilization.’ Similar attention has been given to the onslaught of the automobile, and all the havoc and convenience that wrought, and of the airplane and the air age. If we survive our own foolishness, such grand designs of history will also extend to the impact of the space age.

         Those more recent disruptions to an easier settlement of our lives, the automobile, the airplane and the rocket, continue into the present. But the ‘wild’ in our own generational ‘wild west’ began in the 1980s, with the introduction of the home computer and the Macintosh, and will not reach its first half-century until the 2030s. And we are in the very midst of all that. In this iteration of history, ‘Dodge City’ can be anywhere and our ‘O.K. Corral’ can happen whenever a Tombstone occurs in the ether. How long this particular stage continues before a stop to change horses is pure conjecture. AI is fairly useless for any telling of what may come, encumbered as it is by the prejudice of those sources of information it abuses, but for now it is a fair barometer of what is happening right now. With the evils of our own making so active in the midst of our chaos, and the dangers of our mistakes threatening, we need a Shane.

         Living in the midst of such history can be both thrilling and enervating, but it is mostly as dull as coding instructions for the assembly of a sod hut, what with human beings becoming the mere intermediaries between financial interests and machines. It is difficult to set sarcasm aside when witnessing such self-immolation without cause. Screaming just won’t do. The decibel level of our hyper activities alone makes it a silent scream in any case. The degree of true pain is difficult to gauge when modified by chemical relief. And reading by such firelight isn’t what it used to be.

         Given how often Elon Musk enters my thoughts I worry about becoming obsessed with him. But I make a deliberate effort to avoid articles that concern his personal habits so that I might keep my focus on the possible meaning of his words and actions. Unlike some of his contemporaries, I don’t believe he is evil. But I place him more in the roll of Thomas Edison than the Nicola Tesla he so admires. I think he is of good will, has a genius level of general knowledge beyond the usual savant, and an amazing prescience. Whatever missteps he makes in his efforts to help mankind in general, I won’t blame him for trying. We do need help.

         The problem Musk faces is that so much of mankind, and the mind of mankind, is captured by stupidity. And in the current chaos of poor thinking, whatever is said critically about that stupidity is considered provocative. Facts don’t matter. In the age of AI, facts are manufactured faster than reality can keep pace. And this is at least partially Elon Musk’s fault. His desire is for truth, his purchase of Twitter and all the risk that was inherent to that is ample proof of his righteous intention to defend freedom of speech, but the consequences of at least some of his projects are to remove the human equation that makes any value to truth worthwhile. Elon Musk is our Shane.

         I feel for him. Such existential angst is very real. That he might fail or finally succumb to failure might keep him up at night. Just imagining that degree of worry keeps me up. But that is an aside. The battle is afoot. The anti-human war has engulfed us. What must be kept in mind are the things that should not be forgotten, or lost, or destroyed in the process of saving. Human values. And these do not necessarily require speed, or efficiency, and certainly not perfection. I wouldn’t know perfection if I saw it. But I know something about beauty. And truth I can know because it requires the use of human values to know. And what are those? What are human values?

         Amazingly, in the midst of an age of cynicism, the most important of those human values are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. American values. And the consecration of those ideas requires the last full measure of devotion to truth and beauty. AI can have no comprehension of such ideals.

         Shane understood these things. For all the critical theory I can apply to any reading of American history, when placed in any larger context, it has been an astounding success. The age-old curse of slavery still exists in parts of the world but it is now universally condemned and well understood as the evil it is. The concept of conquest remains a deadly flaw inherited from our past, but that should not be confused with a preservation of American values, nor the necessity of that preservation.

         The confection of human ideals that made up our founding was not perfect. We have paid mightily for that. But it was a better cake than any Marie Antoinette could imagine. Ours may be a hardscrabble farm, but it is the farm that Shane must defend. And there is no hyperbole to this. In the same way as it was absolutely necessary to gain control of nuclear power, it is now necessary to manage artificial intelligence.

         One characteristic of human stupidity, apart from all other human fallibilities, is that our stupidity so often involves power. Specifically, power over others. I equate this directly to the ancient rites of slavery. But with human slavery now out of favor, the impulse to use machines to control others is now the fashion. I can only hope Elon realizes the depth of this danger.

The post Our wild west appeared first on Vincent McCaffrey.

         We don’t have enough of it. We encumber ourselves with obligations for time to come. We forget too much of the time passed. Genuinely, we attempt to manage what we have, and what we have left. But we have failed at this countless times before. Why do we assume that we will do differently this time. What have we really done to make the difference?

         This should be easier now. With practice. But at 78, there is less time now to conserve. Failure is not the worry it was. There may be a masochism to learning, but there is certainly a pleasure. The matter is to do something worthwhile with what remains. Successful or not. And though I have done some things with my time that I believe are worthwhile, and some that I know are precious, I feel as if I have learned too little. Addressing that deficiency may be worthwhile by itself.

         My choices now are more limited than they were before. This is a physical reality. Existential. But choosing what to do next is still limited by my ignorance. What choices are there? In any particular case, do I have time to learn the ropes. Time is further limited by energy. It sounds like something akin to a matter of physics as much as my physical limitations. And that might only be discovered by trying. And thus, the loss of more time, if my choice is mistaken.

         I may do what I have done before, but differently. At least the territory there is familiar. If you are Irish, there is always more to say. Being only half Irish actually makes that task easier. A novel perhaps. A mystery, maybe. I haven’t the strength to clear new land in the forest of ideas that crowd around. And the crowd is not friendly, in any case. But I have several of those now done that sit in their electronic drawers and it feels a bit profligate and wasteful of that afore mentioned time I worry about.

         If I were to do any bucket kicking, what would I want to have done beforehand. Allowing for whatever time there is. I can certainly hope that whatever it is, the choice is a good one.

The post In the matter of time appeared first on Vincent McCaffrey.

         I awoke from a dream this morning, not from mere sleep, but a dream. This experience possessed my mind as wholly as though I had just been there, and I lay awake then in the bed and stared into the infinite space above, as infinite as bedroom ceilings can often be, and saw the scene of it complete. This act itself became a part of the dream, as I often comment on my dreams as I am dreaming them. I criticize this thing or that, remembering in the dream some odd thing I have done before, said before, meant to say before, not by way of changing the dream, which I cannot because it is as permanent as something I have done when I was awake, but by way of placing the event in the context of my life.

         I dream in color. I say this somewhat defensively because I read once that some twit of a scientist had conducted a test and found that we dream in black and white. I don’t know who would have believed this. No one I knew at the time dreamed in black and white. Though it is the sort of foolishness that ‘scientists’ do with public money. But then, I cannot even change the color of a thing in my dream. Whatever I found a thing to be in my dream, that is the color it is.

         This, in fact, is a matter of some importance to me. I worry about it. But then, I worry about all sort of foolish things and never seem to be ready for the important ones. The only way I can escape the matters in my dream is to forget them. Let them fade away. And the fading of the colors is part of that. But, of course, I am aware of this, so I will write them down, like this, to keep them in mind.

         Though I often have conversations in my dreams, I seldom remember those unless I manage to get some set of words down as soon as possible after I awake, and then it is as if I have opened a bottle of shaken soda water, all sorts of words come out, unbidden. And often, if I get some of those down, I can better reconstruct what happened in the dream before that last scene when I awoke. The more I recall that, the more I remember. A chain, a rope, or a string of words. A thread, as in a sweater. And the funny thing about all that, to me at least, is that the words I remember are often just the small quips and criticism I made when I was dreaming.

         The word I remembered most clearly this morning, after I awoke, was ‘trespass.’ Having been a Catholic boy, that word is indelibly attached to the ‘Lord’s Prayer,’ where it is plural, but this was just the singular word. As if I was in the midst of committing such an act. And that thought had brought me to an examination of the thing I was doing in the dream, while I was dreaming. And that act of criticism angered me in the midst of it, as it was disturbing the beauty of the dream, and my own desires at the moment of the dream. And I think that anger is what awakened me.

         I dreamed I was in an old hotel, an Italian hotel, first in a lobby that was not ornate but high ceilinged and decorated with a few tapestries and with lights in interesting fixtures. The walls were deeply colored in various ochres from yellow to brown. Some specific areas were a deep forest green. The floors were decoratively tiled. I smelled a cigar. Not a common smell in hotels these days, though once to be expected. The lobby was not empty but I cannot remember any of the people that were there except the woman I was with and a thin desk clerk who took my name.

         The woman and I started to go up some wide stairs, but she stopped, I think because they were very long, and then we took an elevator. The elevator had an expanding brass gate and was relatively small. I was aware of being close to the woman there. And, I was immediately commenting on the fact that such elevators might still be common in Europe, and were quite common in America when I was young, but we don’t see them so often these days. Then I worried for a moment about children getting their fingers caught in the gate.

         The hallway above was broad, again high ceilinged, and carpeted; the doors large and brass handled. I noticed that between every two or three rooms, there was a side hallway that led to a small balcony. The balcony opened on a large plaza where there were shops and cafes, a large and elaborate fountain, and a cathedral across. It was daytime there and the contrast between the scene outside, the fountain water glistening in yellow late afternoon sunlight, and the darkness inside made me comment as well.

         I then opened one door on the hall that was clearly unlocked and inside it seemed too dark and there were hanging plants, overflowing their pots and traveling along the floor toward the window. I commented on the fact that it must be difficult to clean the rooms with plants like that.

         I used to work in hotels during college and for several years afterward. I have a great deal of affection for them. Yes, affection. These were odd old places of nooks and crannies and revealed the eccentric tastes of local owners. A typical hotel these days is a sterile place, designed for the convenience of the corporate management more than the pleasure of the customer. Cleaning staff travel from room to room, and with every room the same, move as fast as possible, leaving small envelopes on the useless mass-produced pressed-wood desks in the hope of a gratuity for their labor.

         I often feel fortunate that my own experience with hotels goes back to a previous era when the better ones had rooms that were larger and each different enough to remember. I recall one in Richmond, Virginia, where the women who had cleaned the room before our arrival came to the door with a bar of soap and a small ornate butter dish and made an apology for the broken fixture in the bathroom. Not a fancy room, but clean and neat, facing a congestion of railroad tracks, and decorated uniquely with original old pictures of Richmond that were not the same from room to room (I checked), and solid wood furniture that had been made right there in the city. But I remember that room more because of the housekeeper who had bothered to return to correct for the broken bathroom fixture without our asking. A simple thing.

         I never found the room that was intended for us in my dream. I awoke with the thought, as I looked into the darkened room where runners from the plants were traveling out across the oriental carpet on the floor, that the plants needed more light than that. But that I should not even be there to see this. That opening the door had been a trespass.

         And then I remembered the hotel in Richmond where the pictures on the wall had all been unique and tried to absolve myself for having opened this one door with the excuse that I had just wanted to see what the room was like.

         I have never been to Italy. My children have, and one daughter lived there for a time. But I have always wanted to go and see what it was like. I felt that sense in my thoughts within the dream. And then, in a somewhat typical fashion, that excuse for opening the door dissolved into my being in a strange hotel with a woman who was not my wife.

         And the Lord’s Prayer.

The post Trespass appeared first on Vincent McCaffrey.

         An old man’s pockets are filled with things. I knew this as a child, along with much else that I have since forgotten. But my grandfather always carried a Barlow knife and an Indian head penny. You might have thought that those pockets were filled with an endless string of recollections too, along with the plug tobacco and folding money in a silver clip, especially, given all the words that came out as well, but those words, never written down, are mostly lost now, or muddied in my own mind, and besides, they were not always true, and never the whole story in any case—and were often, like the axe in the legend, the same story twice.

         My grandfather told me once that his own grandfather, who was a doctor, always carried string. Bits of string. I am sure he told me why, but I forgot that fact, replaced now with my own imaginings. He might have used them for tourniquets. Or to tie his medicines up in packets. I don’t know now. But my grandfather never spoke about his father, so it was his grandfather’s pockets I knew something about.

         His grandfather also carried a silver dollar. I knew this because once, when I had purchased a silver dollar myself, on some forgotten impulse, and I showed it to my grandfather as a new prized possession, purchased far away in New York with the money from one of my first jobs, he told me that the date, 1882, was the same as the year he was born. He told me that fact and that his own grandfather always carried one from the date of his marriage, some time in the 1830’s, and that this coin had been a gift from his grandfather on that wedding day. And with that bit of string, I fell headlong into a well of time from which I never escaped. My grandfather’s, grandfather’s grandfather. I could not truly imagine such a passage, but I tried.

         My grandson asked me once why I always carried a knife. I made something simple up for that answer to avoid the inconvenience of a full explanation, and said it was just for work. And I regretted that lie immediately because I realized he might remember what I had said and that this odd thread would then be woven into the family fabric.

         My own pocket knife was the impromptu gift of a friend when I admired the one he was using on a box one day and he learned that I did not have one. This is an efficient and modern looking thing, a small machine of stainless steel with none of the character of an old Barlow knife. But the gift was done so sincerely, I could not refuse, and now that lie had been told. My grandson would believe it was just a tool to cut boxes of books open in my shop instead of the truth. But in truth I always cut my boxes with whatever was at hand. A pair of scissors would do. A mat knife, certainly, but they were usually not in the right place at the right time. Even a key would be sufficient. But my own knife was usually left in my pocket, safe against my habitual forgetfulness. That was where it was meant to be, I think. With another memory.

         The steel of my grandfather’s Barlow knife was a mottled gray from much use. He chewed Red Man tobacco and he cut his plugs with that old knife about a dozen times a day. Only the edge of it shone, and the bone handle was worn nearly smooth so that when I went to the store to buy one just like it, there was nothing of the kind to be found. And I never knew the date on that Indian Head penny he had. It too had been worn smooth beyond interpretation. Over some years I asked to see it numerous times, thinking some new glimpse might enlighten me in that copper ghost. My grandfather could never remember. Or so he said. Or perhaps it was worn away before he got it. And the silver clip on his folding money had a faint inscription engraved on it that could no longer be read, and my grandfather would not reveal. Maybe he had forgotten what that inscription said as well. That would certainly be a family trait. But no. I’d rather think this clip was a wedding gift from my grandmother and the sentiment was a private thing. They were married in 1905.

         The silver clip of bills was kept in his ‘poke.’ That leather purse, with a small nickel-plated clip at one end and battered into being about as ugly as a large scrotum, also contained the loose change he used in transactions while selling his produce. This purse was kept in the larger bib pocket of his overalls.

         The only things I truly remember are those that I have written down. Truly is the operative word. I remember all sorts of things, actually. But I am reasonably certain only of those things that I wrote down through the years in an effort to become a ‘writer,’ a life-long endeavor. And though I have lost much of what I wrote in many moves and a few disasters, I know what it is that I once wrote down and what it is that I have conjured later, by the feel of it. One is done from the bottom of a well, and the other in the full light of day. One has the patina of use and the other the shine of utility. I have tried to collect what seemed true to me here, from all of it, and to avoid the lies I tell too readily to avoid the inconvenient, because my own pockets are not so deep.

         My grandfather wore bib overalls most days. They had many pockets and there always seemed to be another to pull something from. Some things that I noted were a hickory nut, picked up to show me the difference in it to a pecan, but then carried for weeks afterward, a small round lump in the denim, and also a little tool that looked like the letter ‘L’ that fit something that I never saw him use, and once, for a time, a red plastic disk he spotted in the mud when we went fishing. The plastic was scratched to a fine patina and he briefly held it up to his eye and looked toward the sun, before cussing his ‘foolishness.’ I remember that because I then received a lecture about looking at the sun which I took to be a revised version of the Icarus myth where another ‘fella’ did this particular thing and went blind. That red disk remained in his bib pocket for the rest of that summer, and I could see the outline of it there and asked to look at it several times and each time was made to promise not to look at the sun. When held by one eye like a monocle, it gave a rosy hue of the world around.

         Most of my memories are from the 1950’s and 1960’s, when my grandfather would have been in his 70’s or 80’s. My grandmother was about five years younger. For much of that time he was spry enough to hold on to the wooden gate at either side at the back and climb up into the bed of his old green Chevy pickup, but his increasing arthritis was to my great benefit. I was brought along for help on his daily ventures. After we had driven down to Greenville in the dark of the morning, picked up a load of watermelon and cantaloupe at the farmer’s market, and brought them back, he would pick out one of his favorite spots, usually where a tree offered shade at the edge of a field on highway 29, and we would spend part of a day there when the mills were changing shifts, selling them to the people passing.

         Their own smaller farm produced a good deal of corn and tomatoes, green and red peppers, potatoes and okra, and beans, of course, mostly at the hands of my grandmother, but not nearly enough. The majority of what was sold was purchased locally from other farms, and in this way, I got to see many of those homes, sitting on strange porches and drinking sweet tea, while listening to their stories, before loading bushel baskets into the back of the truck of whatever bounty was in season.

         All of that was exotic to me, a ‘New York boy.’ That was the way I was often introduced, at least for the first time. ‘Alma Lee’s’ boy to those who knew him better.

         Sitting on a porch at the edge of someone else’s life is a lesson. The smells alone were enough—often the sweet, pectin-tinged fragrance of canning peaches or the sour tang of pickling. Some women cooked earlier in the day and some later. But it was almost always older women—older, which usually just meant someone closer to my grandfather’s age. The older men more often sat in the shade of the yard and attended to some small chore while they talked. I think the women were happy for an excuse to get out of the heat of the kitchen. I was doubly happy because they often offered a slice of peach pie to go with the tea.

         Many of those farms were managed by wives and husbands who were working second jobs in the Mill and simply weren’t home. If they had younger children I was often required to ‘play’ with them, which meant excruciating minutes standing in one spot or two and telling them what life was like in the suburbs of New York. I think that was truly the beginning of my early fabrications. Trying to entertain a flat-faced boy who would rather be hitting something with a stick can be a challenge.

         Part of a day would be spent driving through small neighborhoods near the mills, with my grandfather calling attention to his familiar presence by a sing song chant such as, ‘rosenears, maters, melons and potaters,’ as we slowly rolled through. He never used a bell, but if the streets were too empty, he sometimes beeped his horn. Those who were home or between shifts at the mill would gather to buy whatever they wanted. The bed of the truck was set tight with the poplar baskets of produce close at hand and the melons piled deeper to the back and it was part of my job to scramble and grab whichever particular one was pointed to. This game sometimes took multiple attempts as one or another of the melons that I handed forward appeared deficient on closer inspection. Supermarket vegetables were regularly disparaged as paper sacks or apron pockets were filled.

         At some point in the journey it was time to get some fuel and ‘plunder’ the aisles of a small local market. These were often unique establishments attached to the gas stations in those days before the ‘convenience’ store, emblazoned with large pressed-metal signs in garish colors advertising Grape Nehi, or Orange Crush, or Pepsi, where someone might barter some gas or oil or ‘dope,’ which was just another name for Coca Cola, for a bushel or two of whatever my grandfather had, to sell to their own customers.

         It was during such days that I pestered my grandfather for information abut the details of things. As a consequence, the memory of the hum and vibration of a 1950’s pickup with the windows open is a comfort to me even now, as is the smell of leaded gas and the click and whine of the gas pumps as they wound through their odd bifurcated numbers. This is what nostalgia is to me, more than the shine on a 1956 Chevy. I cannot stand in a lot of beautiful old cars today, so proudly displayed by their loving owners as the flagships of their own childhoods, and feel anything more than I feel in my own memories of those odd stations so indelibly attached to anecdotal histories of older times and places I never actually lived but felt I knew.

The post An old man’s pockets appeared first on Vincent McCaffrey.

         About this so called ‘new renaissance,’ that I hear so much banter about, even though saying ‘new rebirth’ is clumsy, redundant, awkward, inept, and certainly not apt. We may just be speaking of something more like a revival in the tradition of Aimee Semple McPherson (though not nearly ‘Four Square’). Charlie Kirk has been assassinated and this may have sparked a revival of sorts among Christians, but based on past performance, that is more likely the kind of temporary mania you may have seen before with Beanie Babies and ‘pet rocks’. Not well thought out.

         However, in other ways, we are speaking of something that is, in fact, brand new to the awareness of many. Not just a Christian revival in the face of a Muslim invasion, for instance, or a conservative resurgence against the continuing marxist onslaught. But still, something with some history to it. A conquest that is very real, and ongoing, and that is not new, at least to us as a society and culture, but also world-wide. There is even a disparaging term for those who have previously waged against it: Luddite.

         We have built ourselves on the past. Necessarily. But we cannot reinvent ourselves every generation, any more than we can survive as an agrarian society in a digital age. Still, we must keep a grip on traditions and traditional values. So, in that way, I suppose, some kind of renaissance may be in order, given that the last outright Muslim invasion was 1683, all the way to the gates of Vienna, and that was actually in the very heart of an actual Renaissance. That was even before Saturday Night Live was funny.

         In this particular instance of human history, I am really speaking more of ‘Western society.’ It is that tradition, to which I belong, and owe some allegiance, which is currently under the greatest and most obvious existential threat. But I believe that every human society is now under that same threat, not only those being physically attacked by Muslim jihadists across Asia, and Africa. Because this new threat is not religious and is easily accepted into most cultures for its obvious benefits—even more than a camel’s nose.

         Though there are similarities, the current Muslim invasion is not our most serious danger. Not yet, anyway. Some would even say that the ‘woke’ mind virus is the greater risk. But I think that fever of feminist ideology has finally broken. It’s pretty easy to see the differences between men and women, with a light on, no matter the number of academic brainwashings. Even the blind can feel that much. And DEI only results in the mediocrity of any paint-by-the-numbers kit. While the recent appropriation of the word ‘gender’ may offer the advantages of some confusion, the sexes are clearly not equal—though I’m not yet ready to admit that women are superior to men.

         No, it is the flagrant and uninhibited embrace of technology that is our more immediate worry. As human beings, how do we accommodate ourselves to using math to determine our aesthetics and values without reducing ourselves to digits.

         Obviously, a digital human philosophy geared to machine efficiencies would not necessarily agree with the need, nor the necessity, of our finding some sort of analog salvation. But then there is a child of science fiction that is still in me, and all of those speculations that came with it, which say that a machine philosophy might somehow benefit us, given that the machine itself is a child of man. But I don’t fully agree with that either.

         Given the danger that we all face, that mankind itself, Christian, Muslim, marxist or feminists, might be overwhelmed and then eliminated by the machine—a danger that is already being realized in our reliance on digital devices in every aspect of our lives—perhaps it is more worthwhile to focus just on that. And maybe that will be the key part of a more general malaise in our midst.

         The machine is a child of man. What accommodation and good might be derived from this fact, similar to the salvation of a juvenile delinquent, should be hoped for and worked for. At this point we cannot eliminate the machine from our lives without wrenching the teeth of it out of our flesh like a medieval dentist. But the machine is at least a natural extension of the human mind based upon human needs and a functional awareness of our own deficiencies. We cannot return to a lifestyle without machines because we have already gone so far beyond such an existence in the making of tools for farming and weapons for hunting and more graphically, for defense.

         And a wholesale return to slavery is impossible. But slavery was the common motif of the ancient world in the time before our wholesale dependence on the machine. Today, a population without John Deere will not eat.

          The machine is not our flesh and bone but, to a large extent, it is of our mind. All of its qualities of efficiency, are derived from human values. The problem arises because its development has favored a few of those values in the place of many others. Machine efficiencies dictate that it be good for a limited chore. For instance, where speed might be valued in a human context, it is weighed against safety and purpose as well as other considerations including our sense of beauty and design.

         Human beings always and necessarily have more than a single purpose. But a machine might have only one: speed. And, its own calculation of necessities might then include the need for fuel, and the availability of fuel, and thus a requirement for human work to make that fuel available, and thus by extension, a necessity to enslave an unwilling human population to the purpose of producing that fuel—say, in a cobalt mine—but it cannot value the needs of the human beings involved beyond what can be simply calculated by the math of its own needs, much less the benefits of some more nebulous concept, say, human freedom.

         For many hundreds of thousands of years, lacking the machines to do otherwise, some human beings used other human beings for their own benefit. But it was this abuse, in itself, that was the very cause of the shaping of Western society. Our society and our culture are the result of trying to do away with the abuse of some human beings by other human beings. And to a large extent, the development of the machine is tied to that very same effort. Thus, the irony of the machine then enslaving mankind for its own purpose is too great to ignore.

         This enslavement goes beyond the obviousness of children working in cobalt mines so that we can feel good about driving electric cars in order to save the planet. This problem is in the more subtle adjustments we all make to accommodate machines in our lives. We have already become dependent on the machine to survive. And to order takeout in time for the game.

         The computer and its ancillaries are just such machines, and the progeny of the computer, artificial intelligence, is the product of the machine as much as it is the original human intelligence that created that. It has no other use beyond or outside of the machine. And by extension, the ‘cloud’ of awareness that represents the linking of computers into a group mind, like some ominous demon from an old pulp magazine, is the product of the machine as much or more than it is the human beings who created the machine in the first place.

         Briefly put, this then is the dilemma: finding a means of survival in this technologic jungle is now our priority. We cannot eliminate the jungle. We need it to survive as well. But the wild beasts that thrive in that environment are not compatible with our own desires. The ‘Western’ society that we treasure for its individual liberties is not an automatic part of this problem. There are cultures today that still use human beings as slaves to serve the interest of other human beings. There are entire cultures built on the efficacy of that onerous premise. And those same societies may find some priorities of machines far more compatible than we do. Those societies may benefit from the symbiosis with machines even more than us.

         I am not alluding here only to Muslim culture and its social abuse of women, for instance. Socialism as a reductionist political philosophy to guide the government of mankind is just as bad, or worse. A Muslim-socialist such as the new mayor of New York makes perfect sense in that regard, at least. But in the end, when it runs out of other people’s money, socialism doesn’t work, even in theory, and that particular combination of religion and politics is more likely to ruin Muslim culture as much as it has already damaged Western society. Perhaps socialism will even eliminate the Muslim onslaught from the current bundle of worries, completely. Though, being originally from New York myself, I cannot avoid the pang of loss.

         Slavery, the involuntary use (i.e. abuse) of one human being by another, was accepted in Western society (as it was in all others) until very recently—about two hundred years ago, depending on place. Where it is still practiced now, it is not condoned (so long as your shirts are cheap). But it cannot be ignored when recognized, or else we are all in danger.

         This then is the premise of our society: the benefits of freedom. It is at the very heart of our Western culture. In that slavery was a common practice for millennia before the use of the machine developed to ease our labors, (at least a few hundred thousand years), rejecting slavery was not easy. In this country it required the ultimate sacrifice of several hundred thousand lives. But it was done. And our rejection of that evil did not happen by accident

         But then, the benefits of doing away with slavery were and are beyond calculation. As a consequence of that change, the human spirit released by that one cultural act has lifted a suffocating social burden and permitted the greater human mind to soar. The very realization of our life, liberty, and the pursuit of our individual happiness is a consequence.

         A renaissance derived from a cross-breeding of Western values and technological design (not for efficiency but purpose) may be an answer. Finding our breath in the midst of so many battles might seem impossible, but that is the Roseanne Roseannadanna solution because it’s always something. Whatever the circumstantial difficulties, we must find an accommodation between the machine and human prosperity that does not sacrifice the values that it took us so long to find and cherish.

The post About that so-called new renaissance appeared first on Vincent McCaffrey.

         I have come to the conclusion that the psuedo religion also-called simulation hypothesis must be taken as seriously as any desert philosophy. Because I have been faced with a serious shortage of time, and given the state of my sock drawer, I have been satisfied with mocking and dismissiveness in my encounters with these true believers, but when I encountered this particular revelation on Grok, I decided to put my sock drawer aside. I take Heinlein very seriously.

         From Grok as if 11-03-25: “Overview of Simulation Theory—Simulation theory posits that reality, as we perceive it, might be an artificial simulation, similar to a computer program. This idea suggests that our experiences and the universe itself could be created and maintained by advanced beings or technologies…Connection to Grok: The term “grok” originates from Robert A. Heinlein’s novel Stranger in a Strange Land. It means to understand something intuitively or deeply, to empathize with it, or to merge with it in a way that transcends mere comprehension…Application in Simulation Theory: In the context of simulation theory, grokking can imply a profound understanding of the simulated nature of reality. It suggests that to truly grasp the implications of living in a simulation, one must not only understand the mechanics but also empathize with the experiences and realities of others within that simulation…Implications of Grokking Simulation Theory:

         Understanding Reality: Grokking simulation theory encourages individuals to explore the nature of their existence and the potential artificiality of their experiences.

         Empathy and Connection: It emphasizes the importance of connecting with others’ experiences, recognizing that everyone may be navigating their own version of a simulated reality.

         Philosophical Exploration: This perspective invites deeper philosophical inquiries into consciousness, existence, and the nature of reality itself, challenging traditional views of what it means to be “real.”

         By integrating the concept of grok into simulation theory, one can foster a richer understanding of both personal and collective experiences in a potentially simulated universe.”

         I am stuck on the word combination: “transcends mere comprehension.” I guess I just don’t comprehend it.

         I find myself re-reading this particular paragraph: “Application in Simulation Theory: In the context of simulation theory, grokking can imply a profound understanding of the simulated nature of reality. It suggests that to truly grasp the implications of living in a simulation, one must not only understand the mechanics but also empathize with the experiences and realities of others within that simulation.”

         I don’t mean to pick on Grok. Such verbal abuse can be found throughout the literature on ‘simulation’ theory. It is simply that I have always loved the term ‘Grok’ as a playful creation of Robert Heinlein and I could not ignore this particular manifestation of insanity. There is a lot of that going around, insanity I mean, so the chance to deal with this particular manifestation was difficult to ignore. Or did I say that already. Repetition being one of the primary methods of argument in this manifestation I guess I could not help myself saying it again.

         But that particular paragraph contains most of the argument for simulation theory, and, as it happens, most of the argument behind modern philosophy: “to truly grasp the implications of living in a simulation, one must not only understand the mechanics but also empathize with the experiences and realities of others within that simulation.” Yes. Never mind living your actual life. You must try to “empathize with the experiences and realities of others within that simulation.” This is the loop of stupidity that engulfs too many of our ‘intellectuals;’ especially those key philosophers that every society needs to survive. Which explains of course why we have such a great gulf between them and the people that grow the food they eat, and make the clothes they wear, and build the houses they live in.

         I recommend the conversation of a few years ago, that is easily found on-line, between Joe Rogan and a recent religious leader for this ‘hypothesis,’ Nick Bostrom. Rogan is an excellent conversationalist, and Bostrom completely lets down his guard on all fronts, as reasoning and logic are abandoned for the verbal flights of ‘what if,’ and an abuse of language that depends on using terms like ‘human values’ without ever defining them.

          Footnotes  (for this you should have in mind Keanu Reeves and Hugo Weaving playing footsie in the air)

         From DuckDuckGo—11-3-2025.an “Overview of Simulation Theory. Simulation theory suggests that what we perceive as reality may actually be a highly advanced computer simulation. This idea posits that our experiences, including consciousness and the laws of physics, could be the result of a sophisticated program created by a more advanced civilization…Key Proponents and Arguments…Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Argument. Origin: Proposed by philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003…Trilemma: Bostrom argues that at least one of the following must be true: Humanity is likely to go extinct before reaching a stage capable of creating simulations…Advanced civilizations choose not to create simulations…We are almost certainly living in a simulation…Philosophical Roots—Historical Context: The idea has roots in philosophical discussions, such as Plato’s allegory of the cave and Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream, which question the nature of reality…Modern Interpretations: Thinkers like David Chalmers have expanded on Bostrom’s ideas, suggesting that a higher being could be responsible for the simulation.

         Implications and Criticisms…Potential Scenarios—Complete Simulation: Everything, including people and environments, is simulated…Partial Simulation: Humans are real, but their surroundings and some people are simulated.

         Critiques: Some argue that there is no evidence supporting the feasibility of creating such simulations…Critics like physicist Marcelo Gleiser question the motivations of advanced civilizations to run extensive simulations.

         Conclusion: Simulation theory raises profound questions about existence and reality. While it remains a speculative hypothesis, it has sparked significant debate across various fields, including philosophy, physics, and technology.

         Builtin.com—Aug 2, 2024. Simulation theory is the hypothesis that reality is a computer simulation created by a higher being or a future civilization. Learn about the two scenarios of simulation theory, the arguments for and against it, and the technological limits and challenges involved.

         cognitivepsycho.com—Feb 22, 2025. Simulation theory is the idea that reality might be an illusion created by a higher intelligence or a computer simulation. Learn how this idea evolved from ancient philosophy to modern physics and AI, and what it means for our existence.

         Fast Company—Aug 12, 2025. Why an MIT scientists says we may seriously be living in a simulation… There are multiple reasons explored in the book, including a new way to explain quantum weirdness, the strange nature of time and space, information theory & digital physics, spiritual/religious…In the new edition of my book, The Simulation Hypothesis, released in July, I’ve updated my estimate of how likely we are to be in a simulation to approximately 70%, thanks to recent AI developments. This means we are almost certainly inside a virtual reality world like that depicted in The Matrix, the most talked about film of the last year of the twentieth century.

         Number anaytics—May 28, 2025. Simulation Theory Explained. Introduction to Simulation Theory Simulation theory, also known as the simulation hypothesis, is a philosophical and scientific proposition that suggests our reality might be a simulation created by a more advanced civilization. This idea has garnered significant attention in recent years, particularly in the fields of consciousness studies, philosophy, and …

         Theoryfury—Jan 8, 2025. What if everything you see, hear, and feel is part of a computer simulation? The Simulation Hypothesis suggests that our reality might not be real but rather a highly advanced simulation created by an unknown entity. This mind-bending concept has captivated scientists, philosophers, and the public alike. In this blog, we explore the idea, its supporting arguments, and the skeptics’ perspective.

         magnascientiapub.com. Simulation theory finds deep acceptance in popular imagination, which then flows into literature, cinematographic productions, and popular cultural expressions. In modern movies, television shows, and contemporary novels, the philosophical notion of simulation recurs to maintain broad public interest in existence and consciousness (Chalmers 2022).

         insidetechworld.com—Feb 10, 2025.Could a simulation explain paranormal events? Some believe glitches in the system might account for strange experiences and unexplained phenomena. What happens if the simulation is turned off? If this is a simulation and it shuts down, our entire reality would likely cease to exist.

         And so it goes. On and on and on.

The post Simulations of simulation theory appeared first on Vincent McCaffrey.

         When I hear very smart people talk about math, I am discouraged. I am immediately reminded of the devoutly religious who cannot see anything beyond their dogma. Math can be a religion as well.

         We need our religions. They comfort us. God does not need us to comfort him, or to worship him, or to glorify him. If he exists, he is, and we would clearly benefit by his example. We might even study that, instead of war. But if there is no God, it is difficult to understand why it will make a difference. We are then just biological units, and not much more meaningful than the numbers that Mr. Durov adores. And perhaps that is the very why of religion. To give us something to live for beyond the functioning of our individual biological units. Other than love and beauty and sex, I mean.

         Pavel Durov is the genius behind several projects, including The Telegram, an internet messaging platform begun in 2013 with his older brother Nikolai. I hear that Nikolai might be smarter than his younger brother, but he does not come on podcasts where I can listen to him, so I focus here on Pavel.

         What we have got here, now, as it was once so well and concisely put by Strother Martin in Cool Hand Luke, is ‘failure to communicate.’ A recent interview conducted by Lex Fridman with Mr. Pavel was the immediate cause of my focus on this particular aspect to the ongoing human conundrum.

         Math is amazing! It rhymes. We create instruments that measure specific aspects of the universe using numbers of our own devising to divide the existential into exact parts and then we are amazed, when we get our answer, that the math is so precise. It’s a miracle! We seek a definition and there it is! It would seem that most stage magicians might simplify all that mumbo jumbo without going so far overboard. Well, most do.

         We have always created our gods to suit our cause. If we are poor, we admire poverty. If we are weak, we admire humility. If we are abused, we admire anger. When we are hungry, we pursue plenty. Our gods conveniently absolve us of our sins in these pursuits, and we worship them for it. If a god is beyond our understanding, we ignore him, or worse, demean him or even slaughter his adherents.

         Mr. Durov appears to be a good and decent man. Having heard him speak at length on several occasions it is easy to understand why he has succeeded in his pursuits. He believes in what he does. And given his intelligence, this makes him a very dangerous man as well as a very necessary one—because it would only be through surviving and flourishing in the same world as Mr. Durov that we might learn how to survive in the coming age of ‘artificial intelligence’—which is to say, in the age of machines.

         Yet, believing in his math, he can have no other predicate for being either good or decent if calculated purely by the numbers. They either add up or they do not. But there is clearly another standard at play with him than just the numerical one; a standard of value of which he is perhaps unaware…but I am guessing otherwise.

         Math is a tool, no more so than a hammer. It is an artificial device that means nothing by itself, but only by comparison to human needs. We designate the numbers as we need them. Machines are devices to assist those human needs. Math, which is a constant, about as invariable as the tool, can be used to create code that can be interpreted by machines. That code then becomes an artificial language adapted to machine use. This is all very straightforward and has led to the invention of what is being called ‘artificial intelligence.’ Which we now have. And that intelligence will now, undoubtedly, improve over time as the human need arises, in the same way that the wheel resulted in the automobile.

         However, to some minds, there is a loss of purpose in all of this. Strangely, as if the machine is somehow pure for the fact that it does not have certain biological needs, there are people who think that artificial intelligence is an improvement over the human kind. As if, for instance, speed is an improvement in and of itself, without purpose. (The cheetah is a god in some societies). As if efficiency is an improvement, no matter the task. But the machine is still only a tool. And its purpose is determined by us.

         The tendency to over-estimate the importance of math in a world of human value is the greater danger. Human language is of far greater importance than any machine language. That is the art of it. A unique creation uninhibited by mere fact. Lesser or greater, but always. And the ability to coordinate the perceptions of multiple human beings that is made possible through a common language is the greater blessing.

         Almost any machine will inevitably become obsolete. And human beings grow old and die. The machine can be replaced. The human being, however, is unique (the perceptions of no two human beings are exactly the same). Using language, allows the ‘art’ of individual perceptions to be preserved, and used again, and built upon by the unique thoughts of other human beings. Math is always and everywhere exactly replicable. Art is not. It is the loss or preservation of that unique creation that first gives it value.

         It is the difference factor in every human perception that makes it possible for a man to invent a machine. To see the need and want it enough to take the time in his life to build it. But there is a cohort of humanity that does not like itself and believes machines will be an improvement. This is mysterious. The values that make life worth living, like goodness and decency, are irrelevant to a machine. If speed is god, to what end? If efficiency is our value, to what purpose.

         There is another group of human beings, smart ones I believe, who think that machines will replace human beings. This too is mysterious. Certainly, the human beings individually might be replaced, (at what loss or gain cannot be estimated, there being no math to calculate the unique qualities of any individual mind) but from whence will the machine derive any value for its own existence. It is not self-aware, but only mimics human values. If left alone on a planet, machines might continue to repair and replace themselves perpetually, without purpose. But to what end?

         Importantly—perhaps most importantly—there is no God in the machine. Mr. Durov cannot be unaware of this. I imagine he has given this a great deal of thought, especially at night, but he hasn’t related those thoughts to me. My conjecture about him is based only on his public actions and the words I have heard him say. But he is an example of a very dangerous man. That danger I will call the ‘Durov syndrome.’ This is a narrative borrow from an old and scientifically problematic movie called ‘The China Syndrome’ that was popular many years ago. It concerns a possible end to the world as we know it, brought about by a failure of nuclear power. The great danger seen by some today is that of the machine.

         I believe, from his actions, that Mr. Durov is a man of great integrity, and consistency. I must assume his good will. His intelligence, as gauged by his accomplishment and words, is formidable. There are other examples in the public sphere of such men, some apparently greater in their aims, or smarter, but very few of them. One that I might otherwise take as an object here is Elon Musk, however his involvement in so many areas, political as well as technological, and the amount of information I have absorbed over the years about him, makes dealing with his example far more difficult. My purpose here benefits by my knowing less about Mr. Durov than about Mr. Musk. Ignorance then is my excuse.

         The issue that I find dangerous is the impact such men have on the society that I live in, and that my family must survive in.

         “That there is something wrong” is the working premise of Paul Kingsnorth as well as that of his host, Eric Metaxas, on the Socrates in the City podcast, in another recent interview concerning Mr. Kingsnorth’s book, Against the Machine.

          I must admit to being an enormous fan and regular listener of the Socrates in the City series, clearly created by Mr. Metaxes for the betterment of mankind in general and myself in particular. I disagree with him at least a third of the time but enjoy the disagreeing almost as much as when I don’t because it gives me an excuse to think through some worthy problem instead of simply wearing out what is left of my neck vertebrae in nodding.

         Mr. Kingsnorth is another matter. I know far less of his work but take Mr. Metaxas’ agreement with it seriously. And as for the subject, the life and death struggle between man and his self-created nemesis, the machine, and the recent losses of mankind in that war, I am all on board with both the realization of the problem and the understanding of the great dangers posed by ‘the Machine.’ Mary Shelley had that right a couple of hundred years ago.  The liability that the digital world poses to the human world, and the conflict with human values posed by the machine, is clearly understood by Mr. Kingsnorth but his reaction poses yet another danger from an opposite direction.

         My disagreement begins with the title itself, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. Simply stated, I would contend that the machine and our ability to handle such an act of creation, is our test. It’s what we do. We are, indeed, not gods, but certainly, given our abilities, if we cannot handle our inherent faults, we are already a failed species and the only story now is in the diabolical and sado masochistic entertainment of enjoying our own misery (which seemed to have been a favorite theme of the 20th Century). But in what history we have unearthed to date, I see a marvelous effort to learn by our mistakes and master the product of or minds. And back in the religious context, that would be what any god worth his salt would expect of us.

         Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is a myth, perhaps, but its narrative is clear enough. It was simply not a big enough town for the two of them. Mr. Kingsnorth is a Christian. Good enough. But then, he must accept the wisdom of his God in the creation of such a complex creature as man. There are no easy answers. And by definition of the capital ‘G’, there can be no other God before us. The machine then, rather than Satan, is our creation. If we survive our missteps, that will more than likely be a result of using our talent to build and invent, and that would be a fulfillment of God’s wish for us. If we fail, and immanentize the eschaton, then we must start again. That too would be the plan. And it would appear from recent archeological discovery, that we have come this way before. Many times. So, there is no guarantee of success. But there is no going back to Eden.

         Personally, I can’t accept the idea that Eden was anything more than a good starting point. A fair start. But only a beginning. And our literary misinterpretations begin right there as well with our self-serving blame of an idiot angel for our first error. Blaming an evil jinn for our stupidity instead of learning from our mistakes has already slowed us down quite a bit.

         Now, we have AI. We label it incorrectly at the start. The idea is that the ‘intelligence’ is somehow apart from our human mind. It is very obviously not. The speed of its calculations, unimpaired by a conscious need of compatible temperature, or safe space, oxygen, water, food, or sex, makes it pretty fast. Formula One. But in need of constant human upkeep. Fragile. And whatever eden it requires must be earned by doing a good job and not hallucinating evil angels to excuse itself. Human beings won’t be as generous, by nature, over such mistakes as their own creator was to them.

         But, for a time—in transition, so to speak—we humans may pretend something else in order to get the result we want. We do it all the time (see what passes for broadcast news, or human courtship). Mr. Kingsnorth’s fear of AI is just such a pretense. And I must ask why? He is clearly a very intelligent fellow. I believe that his pretense, like that of Mr. Durov, is sincere. But delusion is not limited to the dumb. He does have a pretext.

         From the beginning of his conversation he asserts various ideas, such as that we (mankind? society?) have come to see the earth as a mechanism and not an organism. He does not explain this dichotomy, or who it is that he thinks believes it. He believes that for the last two or three hundred years (why such a recent start?) we have been conducting a war against nature and now human nature, and that we are now conducted and controlled by our technology, (no mention of the service it brings) and (this is the really scary part) that we are now moving into the age of artificial intelligence and the uploading of minds creating giant superhuman intelligences. (This bit of pure science fiction is interesting, worthy of consideration thus, but still improbable for empirical reasons—not the least of which are the hallucinations of AI which likely result from it being unhinged to a real world—and certainly not worth having the sort of absolute government power allocated to anyone I know of, necessary to stop it at any cost. There is much more in that vein but I almost gave up on him there and so I will back away and observe those few ideas first.

         Earth is a mechanism. It was that before we came on the scene. If you believe in God, you must assume he made it that way. To quote the Merriam Webster, to be brief “a doctrine that holds natural processes (as of life) to be mechanically determined and capable of complete explanation by the laws of physics and chemistry” If, in fact, Kingsnorth believes that the natural processes of life cannot be explained, what exactly would those causes be? Medicine and astronomy, for example, both still have enormous areas of ignorance, but we have been working on that. Give us time and don’t bring on the eschaton just yet.

         Would Mr. Kingsnorth want to return to the medicine of the seventeenth century to avoid all that more recent and problematic knowledge. Should we forget about Mars and return to a time pre-Galileo? The problem is not simply argumentative. Mr. Kingsnorth’s whole thesis appears to rest on being ignorant of what doesn’t fit his conception of a Christian worldview (his view, mind you) and apparently assuming we would just be better off not knowing. Being a frequent user of ignorance for my own excuses, I am sympathetic. But I hope he or his loved ones don’t have any significant health issues. And in the meantime, there are far less obnoxious approaches to what knowledge we have, and much more coming that we must learn to deal with. If knowledge, and the seeking of knowledge, is forbidden, we will surely fail. And who, might I ask, will have the political power to determine what knowledge we seek?

         “That there is something wrong” leaves the mysterious ‘something’ up for grabs, but this is an element not clearly explored in the interview other than to suggest a retreat from knowledge. Well, a lot of good that did Adam. My suspicion is that Mr. Kingsnorth believes in Satan, and that the forces arrayed against mankind today are somehow far worse than when the Plague wiped out one-third of the population of Europe, or Muslims were at the Gates of Vienna, or Christians were burning witches. He blames some evil for all the nastiness in the modern world (forgetting about the fact that the population of the world has blossomed with prosperity in the last two hundred years, primarily due to the freedoms of a society that might question and explore.

         We must not immanentize the eschaton any more now than when William Buckley first used the term for effect during the dire ‘60s. With a little luck and a lot of hard work, we have much further in our history to go, and if the work of Pavel Durov is successful, that will be available for use by the adherents of Paul Kingsnorth to moderate, if not mitigate. That is the only answer we can hope for. Panic is not a solution. But a syndrome does need our attention.

The post The Durov syndrome appeared first on Vincent McCaffrey.

Being a memoir, a happy re-consideration of human frailty, an enthusiasm for foible, an appreciation of failure, and a rage against the end of time.

Other works by Vincent McCaffrey

         Hound

         A Slepyng Hound to Wake

         The Dark Heart of Night

         I Am William McGuire and Other Stories

         The Knight’s Tale

         John Finn

         Biedermeier

         A Republic of Books

         Whatever it takes

         The Invention of Man

—and forthcoming—

         Benedictions

         Room 451

         Habits of the Heart

         A Young Man from Mars

A Ship of Words

I imagine my salvation

by Vincent McCaffrey

Avenue Victor Hugo Books

Newmarket, New Hampshire

This one is for my love, Thais

A Ship of Words is a work of fiction, based on the facts as I know them or imagine them to be.  Any resemblance between the characters herein and actual people, living or dead, is unintended and thus most likely accidental.

A Ship of Words: I Imagine My Salvation

Copyright © 2025 Vincent McCaffrey

All rights reserved

 ISBN-13: 978-0-9897903-4-5

ISBN-10: 0-9897903-4-7

Avenue Victor Hugo Books

 Acknowledgements

As always, the typos are my own speciality and are in no way the fault of those friends who helped to get the manuscript into shape. For the fact that there are not more, I thank them all again, especially the mindful and diligent Pamela Siska.

Special thanks to Amanda Khera for helping with the production of the cover and the print edition.

Thank you most especially to Patricia Woodbridge who created the ‘Ship of Words’ used in the cover picture

Contents

1. The stolon and the radix—5

2. Orrery, into an antique shop of mind—11

3. Don’t look back unless you need salt—16

4. Within sight of blindness—25

5. Sergeant Eddy at the Battle of Villa Fiorita—32

6. Zeph and the Gumm—38

7. Gifts of Surcease and sorrow—47

8. Watson and the Shark—53

9. Going Hemingway, on the sea of memory—61

10. Mary Ellen, love is not what they say it is—67

11. My curriculum vitae and the ossuary of truth—73

12. Reports of my survival have been exaggerated—81

13. Ben and Me, the gist of it—90

14. Touch and go typing—97

15. The samurai and the tiger—105    

16. The future of the past—115

17. Hits and misandries—122

18. Mr. Billington’s ends and beginnings—127

19. Samhain and Halloween—134

20. At the roots of heaven, the grub is well fed—143

21. The ambiguities of disambiguation—156

22. Yours Trudy, truly—163

23. Tit Bits: Bet Flint and I contrive to write a play—168

24. Antidisestablishmentarianism—175

25. Gallimaufry, hodgepodge and calumet—184

26. A war of roses—191

27. Solipsism and the banality of good housekeeping—204

28. My Desperado Love and the FBI—211

29. The case of the missing foreskin—219

30. The Endeavor of Jim—226

31. Mything Roger—233

32. The fist of heaven—239

33. Cowboys and indigents – 249

34. Troll Hunter—257

35. Found paradise, and lost again—267

36. Our Hatrack; or writing rights—275

37. My Alma Mahler—279

38. Like Stupid on a Stick—286

39. The curious case of The Peterson Papers—292

40. In a Republic of Books, somewhere South of Southie—305

41. Sarah—316

42. The mysteries—327

43. Wandering the Chesterfields; unwritten letters—339

44. Del Sarto’s Lament (the Browning version)– 343

45. The Long Arm of Spithridates – 350

46. Writing wrongs on the Raft of Medusa – 356

47. At swim in the ‘Cea’ of catastrophe—363

48. And some other things left beneath a drawer—370

49. Annie and Gus and Joe—385

50. The message was this, ‘Garcia is dead.’ Or not.—390

51. Cenotaph: an afterword without remains—403

52.  Till gravity gets the best of me: our future remembered—409

A Ship of Words: I imagine my salvation

***

1. The stolon and the radix 

         I have learned to love Montaigne. This did not happen quickly or easily, but the affection began when I read this: “I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind, and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.”

         These words felt true to me. Perhaps, I did not always write for such a perfect cause, but at least I knew I should and that I might as well be following in the steps of a better man.

         This is a quarrelsome beginning, but let me get this out of my system so that it does not spoil the rest.

         Given my many failures, I am warned by the literary agents against writing a novel of ideas. To choose a shorter subject. Use a simpler vocabulary. Write something topical. Readers don’t care about your philosophy, I’m told. They want to be moved. They are only interested in what is interesting to them, which is to say, themselves.

         Accepting responsibility for my deficiencies, while taking exception to the premise, I say, in turn, I don’t care about such readers. Let them get up off their arses and move themselves. I care about the words and what they mean and what they might mean and what they should mean and not the mean itself. I don’t wish to be mean, but nor shall I be niggardly with my words. This is all that I am.

         Words were my first escape in more ways than just what I found on the page in the stories I read. There was also refuge in the connotations alone. There was secrecy to be had by their use in uncertain company.

         It was in ferreting about for an adjective to describe my father that I found the noun ‘stolon.’ The word I had actually sought was ‘stolid.’ But that was an unfair designation and bore none of the weight of my father’s character. He was not an impassive man. Nor was he lethargic. His passions were dampered, though and he had a steady way about him that made his pace seem slow. He never liked his work, I think, though he seldom said anything directly about that. He had simply labored his life away as most men do, and in his time found dissatisfaction with his choices and the results. He blamed no one else for that.

         He was not a stupid man. On the contrary. Though I came to understand some of his cunning only too late. But as a youth, I thought my father’s lack for words was a measure of his intelligence and it was this standard which set me to searching out a larger vocabulary for things. Simply to be better than that.

         “They’re all crooks,” could not be an adequate political philosophy by which to live. That he was clearly right from any reading of the newspapers or consideration of the actions of politicians in comparison to their words, or the simple fact that they all become rich while in office, did not reflect then on the acuity of his perceptions. Not then. Not to me.

         He would caution, “People are only as good as they have to be.”

         “Why vote, then?” I would ask.

         “So they’ll know they’ve been seen,” he would reply.

         When some priest was caught, “with his pants down,” a favorite phrase, and I questioned the worth of going to Church, he said, “Churches are built by men. You’re not there to worship the carpenter or the mason.”

         Or when I had busted a dinner plate or broke a glass and swore, while washing the dishes, “God won’t care, but your mother will. Make it up to her.”

         And when I had missed my dinner by staying out too late, playing with my friends, his punishments were simple enough.

         “It was kind of you to leave your brother a second portion. He’s working hard. But get on up to bed now. And get your light off quick. Mr. Edison has had his due this month.”

         And when he caught me still up and reading late at night.

         “You can rot your eyes and your mind at your own expense.”

         My brother and I slept on the third floor of our South Boston row house, which is to say, where all living space ended. My mother called it the attic because she had grown up in a proper ‘house.’ But the advantage to this was that I could hear my father’s approach by the limp in his uneven step on the stairs and hide whatever I was doing and get my light off. 

         It was years before I realized that he always knew when I was awake because he would go out for a smoke late in the evening and could see the glow of my bedroom light on the window. In truth, he seldom disturbed my bad habits.

         Dad used to take my brother fishing with him in the small sailing dinghy he kept, known simply as ‘the boat.’  He had an arrangement with the Yacht Club and took care of the little problems that they had with the plumbing or a broken window or a bad switch, and in exchange they let him keep it at the side of their clubhouse near the shrubbery. The boat was barely fourteen feet long and had a wide hull, a collapsible mast, and a centerboard that you could pull right up from inside. It was hauled up by hand on a metal carriage that had hard black rubber wheels and he would push that down to the water whenever it was used so it was never left out in the harbor as the bigger boats were.

         Unable to keep my mouth shut, or be still for more than a few minutes, nor endure in silence the hours of tossing back and forth off some jetty that looked more interesting to me than the water we were on, and because I frequently became seasick if the roll was more than a ripple, I stayed behind. This began at a very young age, so I never really learned to set the sail properly or even to bait a hook other than what was obvious from the quick look. And it was in this way that I became the captain only of my ‘ship of words,’ as my father called it.

         Instead, when we were firmly ashore, I tried to press my father for his thoughts on the matters of the day. And got back what I have said.

         “They are all crooks. No better than they have to be. Just don’t be one of them. Set your own course.”

         And when I accused my father of being stolid about the great events that stirred our times, he said, “You just be sure to mind your own business and kick the ass of anyone who tries to mind it for you.”

         So, in seeking for a word to describe my father, I found one close-by on the page that would probably better describe myself. I have thus often seen myself as the stolon rather than the radix. The root that went awry, never burying itself in the soil from which it came but rather traveling out across the surface of things. It was a useful division and not just semantic. Yet now I wonder if I am not, instead, simply an appendix and of little use at all. Such darker thoughts, though, do not last long. There is always something else more interesting than myself to consider.

         The mediocrity of academic language, for instance, is inevitable. Like the parsing of a golden goose. The dissection of the sentence into nouns and verbs, subject and predicate, is mostly necessary, I suppose, but teaching the language should be more than a mere diagram. My great teacher Miss Lawrence went on about those classifications of words in class at every opportunity and insisted on their use, but she seldom bothered with any specific direction, I think on the assumption that if they were seen clearly in play, their understanding would be a natural result.

         She turned both biology and physics to her cause, “For the living there is no black or white. Our sight is infused by the very shade of blood that feeds the living cells in our nerves and the black we perceive with eyes closed, even beneath the covers at night, is more supposed than actual fact and easily colored by the retained image of what we use to fill the dark before us. And white is as much a blindness as the darkness was, and easily disturbed by that same pumping of blood and expectation, or a mere mote instead. Take the darkness you’ll find in the deepness of a valley at night, made all the greater by the shadow of the mountains at either side.”

         She warmed to her topic, “There is a small pond below Carter Dome in New Hampshire where we have often camped. The water is always cold there, and clear, fed by a spring, I think, but ever fresh and the very best place to make a good camp. Bears will come there to drink, and deer. But I have often made note in that place of the crepuscular dark of evening and how very unlike it is when compared to the antelucan night that comes on just before dawn. Yet both are dark.”

         I wrote all of that down, of course.

         She assumed our love of words. More often revealing than instructing. One class with her could have me lying awake for hours to see the ‘antelucan’ night.

         Yet, if everyone spoke as if their lives depended upon it (as each life does, I believe), what would the professor really have to say? You can’t teach a person to simply speak like that. They must presume the task for themselves. It is their life, after all. Grammar can be taught (or not, depending), but the better word to use instead of another, followed by one more right than the other, is not found in the classroom, though I can appreciate that a mind might in truth be awakened there by a teacher who took care to do it. The simplest man can display his life in that way, if he cares to. As Blake did, burning his tygers in the night.

         The day I received the bound proofs of my very first published novel, The Stolon, I was at the office of The Gist, where I then worked, trying to conjure the three or four hundred words from an already depleted brain that were needed to fill a gap on a page in the magazine, and that after being up all night with a friend and walking her the two or three miles uptown that morning. I was sitting at my desk without a clue. From just a few feet away, the IBM Compositor hummed as it idled, with the switch still in the ‘on’ position following whatever task I had just done, humming an impatient and mesmerizing metallic purr at me that demanded my attention like a cat in your lap awaiting your hand.

         Just then, Emily Black came in the door from the elevator with a large manila envelope locked in the fingers of both hands and held to her breast. Petite, she stood on her toes a moment looking around for me while I slumped at the desk trying to comprehend why she would be there in the first place instead of at the offices of Gerard Strauss. Had I missed a page of corrections? Had I failed to mark some change correctly? She spotted me finally after scanning the floor and came over, her cheeks spread by teeth worthy of Carroll’s Cheshire cat.

         Not a word said, she plunked the envelope down, and stood by the desk and waited. The string-tie that wound around the catch on the flap somehow captured my weary eye with its turning. A few others in the room noticed. Certainly, Daneen noticed. Doug Morrissey did. They drifted over to see what was up. I could feel the presence of Mr. Ritts standing at his office door behind me. Paul, who saw everything from his desk in the far corner, began to edge closer, suspiciously. It was probably only a few moments. Not a full minute. And (to complete my animal analogies) I finally came out of the stupor of staring down at the package as dumbly as a dog looking at the movement of an ant on the sidewalk. I think I even pawed at it once or twice. And only then did the light dawn on the inner geography of my personal Marblehead, and I knew what it was, and I was filled with the embarrassment of the moment and a shot of adrenaline from some unknown gland.

         Emily, whose patience was legend as the editor Gerard made to deal with such dumb animals as authors are, finally said, “Open the damned thing up!”

         I did as I was told.

         The title of the book was in a nondescript bold face sans-serif, crudely Xeroxed on stiff blue covers along with the word “proof” stamped across, and the whole of it was perfect-bound with the contents printed double-side on plain white paper more than half a ream thick. The text, too, was Xeroxed and the copy I held had been hand-trimmed to approximate octavo size, probably by Emily herself to spiff it up a bit (I saw other advance review copies which were far more crude in appearance). 

         ‘The Stolon,’ jabbed at my eyes, with the words ‘between earth and light’ in smaller type beneath, and then ‘by Angus McGuire.’ It was magnificent! Indescribably gorgeous! As ugly and beautiful at once as any newborn babe. 

         She said, “You understand that is not the final typeface for the cover. The art department has that.”

         I knew what that meant. The Gerard Strauss art department was a small wiry fellow named Fred who was two doors up the hall from Emily’s own office. He could draw caricatures of visitors in seconds, like a Coney Island boardwalk artist, and he had a near perfect eye for typography and the balance of cover design.

         Without anything more intelligent to say, I repeated, “Fred?”

         She nodded, “Fred.”

         Silence had spread over the desks at The Gist as eyes focused on Emily standing by my desk. Whispers were passed. Suddenly there was an outbreak of applause followed by a cacophony of spontaneous congratulations. Then a couple of kisses on the cheek and a few handshakes. For ten minutes or so, the gloom that had settled over the office that summer of 1969 was broken.

         One does not savor such moments only once. I have thought of it countless times in the years since. And I can say, if there had been any doubt before, I knew then that I would be writing for the rest of my life, not for the money, but for the pleasure of it. I had already received payment in full.

***

2. Orrery: into an antique shop of mind

         A better fore word to all of this might be ‘orrery.’

         You usually only get to start a book once. But this is my own, and I might not get the second chance, so it’s just as well I start it twice.

         I believe you can think of life as an orrery. Or not. Depending on your mood. But if you do, you might see some relevance. Not a heliosphere made of brass, mind you, but of glass, so that no armature or spiral or orb should wholly obscure (though some turns may distort or play with) the perspective of another.

         There are those who contend that our awareness of life is that of a pretended battlefield, strewn with the fallen tin soldiers of our failures and marked and barricaded by the gaily costumed and ordered ranks of our assumed beliefs and delusions. When one file breaks, the next takes its place. We are unable to live without our defensive postures and all that we do is tactic and strategy in a war that will only, in the end, be lost. And thus the need of the fantasies we pose to hide the truths.

         But I see life as an orrery, that miniature solar sphere, a planetarium without a shell, a deliberate heaven without a hell, with every part in motion posed in infinite variety of viewpoint from the ruled measurements at the rim; fragile, yes, near transparent, but also strong as glass can often be, with an articulated center to hold its limbs, true to the clockwork of some genius I do not know.

         Genius. Yes. Yet I do not believe in God, nor perhaps does he believe in me. I simply do not know. I don’t disbelieve in God, in any case. Agnostic is the word for this. A lack of faith. But I am a worse skeptic with every religion I come across. Most of these theological efforts appear to me like rhabdomancy, the holding of beads or wheels or icons or the grasping of a stick, all of them dowsing for heaven.

         Whatever the metaphor, what I do believe in is the narrative. To remain sane, our minds demand a story be made of what we see. I have faith in that fabric of threads, thick and thin, weak and strong, short and long, colorful and plain, each strand woven with our own hands by the way we live our lives. This fabric is not indestructible, but to cut this cloth is to sever the meanings that become our lives. To abuse this is to abuse our lives. To ignore this leaves the work unfinished.

         It appears to me the easier thing to accept is some preordered design to our effort. The edicts of religion are thus comfortable but I cannot see the way that they may be better for the glory of any God who takes pleasure in his work. If his design is that we should all contribute to a single pattern, he might just as well have kept us as mere ants, wonderful creatures though they are.

         I believe the divining rod of any truth there may be of God must be found within. And more. I know that, as the water witch will beckon me to a fool’s paradise if I may be too presumptuous, or the ignis fatuus of the friar’s lantern might lead me searching onto desolate ground, I am a little smarter for all the longer while I take to find that truth.

         My friend Don is a good fellow. A local boy raised in Winchester, he wears a Red Sox cap to most occasions except weddings and funerals. Always has, even before he started losing his hair. He also loves fried clams, about the only such food I have no deep fried affection for. And he is a “scientist’ of sorts.

         Just out of MIT he went to work for Wang Computer. Then Prime. Then DEC (Digital Equipment Corp). Then Data General. Then Encore. A veritable memorial list of once ‘hot’ local tech companies which have since passed from the scene. The list is probably out of order. But no matter. What matters is that Don has been officially out of work now for at least twelve years. I think, intentionally.

         Though Don was always good with numbers, he just could not make his own life amount to very much (his words, not mine). Lately he has taken up a little carpentry and grows tomatoes on the roof of his house in season. He makes a good chair. I sit in one, and I can testify to that. The tomatoes are good, but not as good as the chairs, excellent for sitting in front of a computer for long hours.

         After the last company let him go, he sold his house in Concord and split the proceeds with his wife. His kids are grown now. He lives alone in a converted garage in Waltham which used to be the parking space for the building he once worked in when he was at one of those computer companies I mentioned. A very good space. Wide open. Plenty of room for standing equipment and piles of lumber. At night he only has to brush the wood dust off his blankets and tumble into bed.

         Thankfully he gave up smoking years ago and has quit drinking anything stronger than beer. In other words, he is not aggressively self-destructive.

         When we were both at the University of Massachusetts in 1965, he was a science major and I was whatever I was. He advertised on a bulletin board for someone to help him write a paper. I did it for $10. Maybe $5 and a beer. Not sure anymore. But I know he bought the beer. The relationship sort of worked out from there. He had to submit a proposal to the people at Wang way back in 1972. I wrote it for him.

         He has done me the favor of reading over several of my stories through the years to make sure I did not get the science too terribly wrong. In return I have refashioned some of his articles for the trade magazines and the one book he wrote on “the integrity of information transfer,” so that they were all modestly literate.

         Don speaks in numbers, or as I have described it to him, ‘numbotics,’ with emphasis on the numb. He has a natural understanding of math, a strong grasp for the vagaries of verification, and an eye for detail. More recently, he is the one who keeps my computer in working order here in South Boston. I wouldn’t have a clue what to do with it otherwise.

         Don was here just yesterday. Something was wrong with my Mac, and he fixed it. He can do that. Actually, he installed a whole new hard drive for me in a couple of hours because I was evidently overworking the old one. The evidence was there before us: I save too much of the research I use when I’m writing.

         “Do you actually need all this stuff?”

         “I don’t know.”

         “Why don’t you just get rid of it then?”

         “I’d have to go through all of it first, piece by piece, and decide which stuff I might still need or I should keep for reference. That would take longer than I probably have left to live.”

         I cannot bring myself to admit that what he sees is only a virtual representation of all the paper files I have now in the basement, box upon box, from the days when such information had to be had by hand. I don’t trust this machine.

         We drank some beer, and for the most part talked about former times, and he gave me the update on his kids, and then he left. I suppose that is the nature of old friendships, after a while. Neither of us wants to talk much about our current circumstances, and the past has a quality of timelessness that allows for endless variations on the same old themes: women and money. He talks about his kids more than himself and for that I am grateful. Not having any kids of my own leaves me out of touch with much that is going on now.

         Don and I rarely talk about politics. For many years he was a mainstream Democrat and pretty much voted the ticket, like almost everyone else in Massachusetts since the days of Jack Kennedy. I know that. These days, from remarks he’s made, I think he has altered his views somewhat, but I think this is only another version of the old saw about most conservatives just being former liberals who got mugged by reality. The foundations for us both are still the same, so there is no point in pursuing that. He still refers to me as his anarchist friend, though I have never been an anarchist. That joke started in college and seems to please him somehow. His cosmos has always been an ordered one, as rigid as the armatures of a brass orrery. I suppose the disorder in my own life puzzles him.

         When he worked for all those former computer companies, he used to put 10% of his income away in stock and bonds, like a Mormon with a tithe. Always. After his divorce, he still had quite a lot of money left, and that is what he lives on today. By contrast, I think he sees me as his personal charity case. It is incomprehensible to him that I should have saved nothing of ‘value.’ I have tried before to explain to him that I have attempted to save everything of value. By writing it down.

         This last puzzlement was the larger part of our conversation yesterday—the portion that touched on money. But we have had another ongoing conversation for the past forty years which I think is worth something.

         It has to do with numbers.

         Forty years of good argument cannot be easily summed, but never lacking the hubris for such efforts, I will try.

         Don sees human beings as just another of the creatures of the earth, the spark of life being merely an electrochemical phenomenon and all the pretense to civilization and philosophy simply being our delusional comforts against facing a cold dead universe. I do not. But Don thinks he has the numbers to prove it.

         I agree that he has a bunch of numbers, but likely (given the short tenure of human history) not the right digits, and, in any case, math is merely the artificial representation of the reality we are trying to grasp. The numbers themselves are not an existential reality much less a satisfactory empirical representative of that. He sees numbers as an acceptable language, and the only way to efficiently represent reality so that it may then be related to others for practical use. I remind him of the very ‘numbotics’ which brought us together in the beginning. I suggest that all the algebra and calculus he can conjure is insufficient to deal with sentiment, or love, or passion.

         Naturally, I quoted my favorite Yeats to him, a habit he hates even though I have given him the book of all the man’s poems and he has no excuse for not reading them for himself other than to say, “They are pretty enough but they’re contradictory and confusing.”

         And I have pointed out to him repeatedly that life is exactly that.

         “Though I am old with wandering / Through hollow lands and hilly lands, / I will find out where she has gone,  / And kiss her lips and take her hands; / And walk among long dappled grass, / And pluck till time and times are done / The silver apples of the moon, / The golden apples of the sun.”

         Don’s answer is that, “She’s already out there in the dappled grass with her boyfriend now, having plucked me for all she can get, and the apples have worms, and the sun is obscured by cloud.”

         No argument, just now, with that.

         But I say, “And what do you tell your kids? Trust but verify? Always cut the deck? Get a prenuptial agreement?”

         “I tell them that they’re on their own. What little I’ll have left they can have but it won’t be enough to pay for the stone.”

         I liked that. I told him that.

         “Can I use that line? ‘It won’t be enough to pay for the stone.’ It fits many uses.”

         “It’s yours now. Do what you do with it.”

         “And you don’t care more than that?”

         “No. They’re just words.”

         “Ha. I didn’t mean the words. I meant about your kids. You don’t want to leave them something more?”

         “Than money?”

         “Than money, which is just numbers again. Just a count of the value you have left that can be traded off to strangers. Don’t you want to leave them something more than that?”

         “I loved them. They know that.”

         “By the numbers, I suppose.”

         “No. At least you taught me that much, Angus. The numbers don’t matter to that.”

         “What value is it then?”

         “You mean, my love for them?”

         “Yes.”

         “I don’t know.”

         “And that is all that Yeats has said, and still is saying, long after the flesh of him is dust and the apples have no value even to the worms. What means more to you? The cost of the stone, or that you will be missed, or ever did whatever made them care?”

         “Your sentimentalism is growing on me, Angus. Maybe it’s time again to try reading that book you gave me. I’ll let you know.”

         And there I was, after all of that, left thinking about the Diet of Worms.

***

3. Don’t look back unless you need salt

         “The past is a stone gaol for some, a source of shame and blame, whilst they themselves act as the sheriff of their own keeping. Others take the future as the key to any lock, and the past to be but a good step up to see what lies ahead.”

         What Mr. Billington said . . .

         Perhaps a third try will do it.

         My only request is this: that you allow me to be wrong.

And forgive me then if I too often quote from myself. It is only because I know (or believe that I know) that I am the best authority on the subject at hand. Though we both know how often authorities are mistaken.

         The facts are these: when you wake up one morning and realize just how profoundly stupid you are, your options are limited. You either continue with the farce and pretense, tie your shoes and get on out the door (option #1, we’ll call that), or else you withdraw beneath the covers of your bed, wishing for an end to the hopeless misery and shame of your existence (option #2).

         True, there really is a third option, something somewhere in between the first and the second, but that’s only what most of us have been doing all along. It has no drama. It bears no scrutiny. Hypocrisy is boring. Why should you care where the lie ends and the truth begins if the person you’re dealing with is no better than yourself? And of course, the second option has no long-term interest. Wasting away beneath the covers has even less appeal than believing in hypocrites, except perhaps to those aficionados of a zombie culture.

         No, I have always grasped at the first.

         I am, thus, the unreliable narrator of my own autobiography, too old to pretend the naïveté of Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield, too cowardly to play Marlow voyaging into my own Heart of Darkness. What I see, after all, is only my reflection in the mirror of things, not even the quicksilvered film behind the glass, nor the glass itself. The imperfections of that surface are too easily lost in the myriad blemishes with which I am well familiar. What lies beneath or behind might now be beyond my reach.

         Writers often live mediocre lives. For the most part, they are cuckolds to the passions of others. Too often they are mere observers. They may imagine fabulous things, but the events they have known themselves are more mundane. This fact, and the knowledge that his own days of adventure were over, may be what drove Hemingway insane rather than any genetic disorder. He wanted to know what was true, and to write it down as well. A fearsome task. Yet, in the end, he seems to have misunderstood whatever it was he learned, or learned nothing at all. He died an unhappy man, having screwed himself.

         I can count all the true adventures in my life on one hand, fewer than the average fellow, I’ll bet. But I have used those few in a hundred different ways.

         Though I have changed the names of some of those mentioned here to protect their privacy, or perhaps avoid another lawsuit, there is one of those I must live with. Angus is what my father called me. It was a compromise with my mother. She wanted Fergus. She got half of that, and little more. (At least she never called me ‘Gus’ or any other diminutive.) The original of Angus was Oengus, the mythic Irish god of love and poetry. I knew this for a fact at an early age and attempted to assume the spirit of the name for all it was worth. But I can’t blame my foolishness on an ancient god. That was all mine.

         Oengus mac Fergusa was a king of the Picts in 6th century Scotland, a fact my mother, with her Hebridean blood, apparently did not know nor care about. The Irish Oengus, however, was a member of the Tuatha De Danann, a pre-historic people who had conquered Ireland before the Catholics got there and about whom we know nothing now but legend (i.e., lies told to make us feel better about our barbarous past).

         As a twelve-year-old I would fall upon my grandfather’s copy of S. C. Hall’s History of Ireland, whenever we visited. Its three volumes in elegant green leather binding were filled with fabulous lithographs of the Irish countryside and offered ready illustration to another but less imposing title which nestled close-by as well, The Story of the Irish Race by Sumas MacManus. The leather spine of the MacManus book was dun brown and edge-worn but the more enlightening to read. I think I was the only member of the family alive who ever opened either of them up, and those books along with an ancient looking Douay-Rheims Bible (which was for the most part incomprehensible to me), and a brand new looking signed copy of James Michael Curley’s I’d Do It Again, with a few black and white pictures of Mr. Curley doing this or that, had pride of place in the oak bookcase (think ‘altar’ with knickknacks) of my grandparents’ front parlor just below the framed portrait of Pope Pius XII.

         Now the Oengus of myth had a sword, Moralltach, the ‘Great Fury,’ given to him by Manannan mac Lir, which added to that demigod’s supernatural powers in the way that the sword Excalibur enhanced King Arthur. Lacking such a device, I took to heart the phrase that says ‘The pen is mightier,’ and chose the more accessible tool as my weapon. All of this was very grand, but there is more. 

         That fine writer Frank O’Connor said of the Irish mind, “To primitive man the greatest possible nightmare is the loss of his identity, which may occur at any time as the result of a loss of memory. If he does not know who his father, grandfather, and great grandfather were or the names and events associated with the places where they lived, he is nobody.”

         It is thus that I have always followed the dictum, ‘What is not written will be lost.’ I have never trusted my own memory and would not expect that trust from others.

         My enemies have often touted that I was named for a cow. This is the sort of low and trenchant blow that cannot be easily ignored. By my senior year, a loud ‘mooing’ would often issue forth from the fences at the north end of the high school as I came up from 6th Street. True, for a time I could turn the insult around to the male of the species and accept the label of being a bull. But I have no background in animal husbandry or ranch life. I did not know that the species ‘Angus’ had no horns, until some years later when an editorial against me in the New York Times made much of the fact at my expense. I answered in return that at least I was bullheaded.

         Not being a reading man, however, my dad did not reckon with the deeper history behind the name he had given me. When I told him that the original Angus had been conceived out of wedlock when that demi-god’s father, Dagda, the ‘All-father’ (nicely named), had seduced his mother, Boann, (as in the River Boyne), Dad was bothered. My mother’s name is Bonnie Anne, you see. When I further informed him that, according to legend, Oengus also tricked his father out of his home and displaced him, Dad said exactly what John Wayne said to his nephew in The Searchers, “That’ll be the day.”

         But that day has come and here I am, back in my father’s house. And the joke is on me. I never wanted to be in this place, first or last.

         You cannot know, nor will I admit to, all of the dreams I had. I can still be shamed. Embarrassment will yet tighten those sphincters of my being that still function. When once I had accepted the self-appointed role of political thinker as artisan, assumed the grandiose mantle of the ‘Russian’ novelist and American iconoclast rolled into one, and affected the singular voice in opposition to the madness of my time, I had already imprisoned myself in a glass palace, and it was all too late for having hardly begun.

         (Ah, glass used as a metaphor again. I do have my habits. But at least you can see through them.)

         I have no one else to blame for what has been. From the first, my pursuit of happiness was a sort of Victorian conjure, gaudy and overwrought. However pretty it might have appeared or sounded to my own ear, at heart it was out of time. The failure of my attempt to touch the hem of immortality was fairly spoiled by my under reaching up that particular skirt. I have deserved the slap in consequence.

         And now I am here, with only metaphors and similes gathered about me for comfort.

         As anyone might have guessed from the things I have written, my parents’ marriage was a miserable one. My brother and I grew up in a house of argument and discord.

         What my mother got out of the deal, I can’t tell you. She was not one to confide her problems to her children. Or her husband, for that matter. Bonnie Anne MacAleer McGuire was a self-contained sort of woman who went about her business from day to day as if she understood that there was no other course and no escape. By my own recent calculation she had married my father only six months before the birth of my older brother, Eddy. He was not premature. He weighed eight pounds then and weighs 240 now.

         I could not have taken that into account when I told my father about the Irish legend, but I imagine he got the point. He roared at me. However, I did not find the facts in the marriage certificate, or my mother’s letters, until I moved back to the house this past year.

         In attempting to understand her, you should know that Mom cooked the same meal on the same day of each week, depending on the season, and bought the same groceries at the A&P every Saturday in order to do so. Sunday, roast chicken (this would make lunch sandwiches later in the week). Monday, macaroni. Tuesdays, lamb stew. Wednesday, spaghetti. Thursday, meatloaf. Friday, fish. Saturday, pot roast. In warmer months, the pot roast became a steak for the grill in the narrow back yard and the meat loaf became hamburger. Hotdogs and beans were the pinch-hitter to mix things up occasionally.

         As a kid desperate for variety, I would often pick some bright package off the shelves at the market as I trailed behind her in the aisles and then run around in front of the grocery cart and hold it up in front of my face like a mask.

         She’d say, “Put that back now, Angus. Don’t play.”  Every time. But I did it anyway. I never lost hope.

         If this sounds very cold, it was not. She was a most loving mother. I never wished for another. But she was always reserved. Not often girlish. She had that internal life apart from her family which she never shared. And when I had become a writer and looked to her for some substance in this regard, she did not offer up any additional detail. All of that I had to discover on my own, years later, in her letters…And that she had been a writer too.

         Mom always dressed neatly. Properly, I would say, but not to be pretty. She was that without trying. She worked at Jordan Marsh during the Christmas season every year and her clothes were always up to date and bought at the sales there after New Year’s. I think, in fact, that she was genuinely beautiful. Because she got too many of those sort of department store odors there, she never wore perfumes. A red-head, and green-eyed, she tended to like colors more subdued. Certainly this is a prejudiced assessment, but (in full Oedipal denial) she was indeed the template for a lifetime of yearning on my own part. I have always judged the women I knew by the standard she set. For instance, I have never liked pants on a woman so much as a dress—a statement which will bring up the ire in every petty ‘feminist’ mind. As if pants make a woman. Or a sharper crease in the pants makes a gentleman. Neither is true. I’ve had nearly as many female bosses as male ones through the years and not noticed a difference; they were all boneheads. Most of them. But a dress on a woman is a very pretty thing to see.

         Her husband, and my father, Francis Edward McGuire, was the son of a dockworker (his father being the truer and original Angus McGuire), and one of eight children. His mother, the former Mary Delaney, worked as a ‘cleaning lady.’ When I knew grandma, she was deaf, and her voice off key, but she liked to tell stories and would keep her black eyes on you so you would stay put until she finished. I suppose there is some resonance in that for me.

         My father, ‘big boned’ as they say, six-foot, two inches and always burly, black-haired and darker skinned than my mother, was a man who “cast a larger shadow” as a friend once said, “as if the sun had caught more of the man than you could see.” He worked a variety of jobs during my youth, including his stints in the Navy and with the post office, but for the longest time he worked a web press at the old Herald-Traveler when it was a bed-sheet newspaper. The union caused the end to that (and a bad bit of mismanagement by the bosses attempting to compensate) and I never heard a good word about unions in our house afterward. But that was his job when I was conceived, so I will claim some printer’s ink in my blood from the very start.

         My mother’s father, James MacAleer, a thin man who had a ‘dry look,’ as my father would say it, though I would call it desiccated, was of Scottish and Episcopal extraction. He was a minor Boston politician for a time and ended up in a job at the courthouse, keeping a chair warm, and directing traffic in the halls with the same voice he used on us children when we visited. He was a Republican and not fond of his son-in-law, but not because Dad was a Catholic or a Democrat. It was a darker grievance we never knew the cause of then. 

         Mom’s mother, born Elaine Kendrick Black, was a ‘housewife.’ I take this to mean she did not work for a paycheck, which meant that her husband must have drawn a good salary for the work his posterior was doing. I do know for certain that Grandma MacAleer, a pleasant looking woman who had false teeth and a faint mustache, made excellent chocolate chip cookies and this was a major matter of unhappiness to me as a child, because her daughter would never do the same. Perhaps that was the symptom of the contrariness I was to inherit. She was, however, the source of my saying that I was one-quarter Black and thus qualified to speak on certain racial issues denied to others.

         So you see some of the thinner strands of my inheritance. For the greater part of my life, I took little note of them. I was not given to value matters of genealogical importance. Not as I have come to do. I thought I was making my own way on the earth and had no such bounds or bonds. But the gods are wiser than that.

         The matter of greater interest has always been, to me at least, the fellow who sallies forth, “To live the lie openly and with great heart.” This course is not a fraud or a wrong. It is to make the most of a terrible situation: you are conceived out of lust more than love, born helpless and, almost totally ignorant, are allotted far too little time to improve yourself, before you die.      

         How will you get about it? Whimpering all the way to the guillotine, or whistling your own tune?

         All that established, I would begin this effort to forestall my recent slide toward oblivion, as well as counter the false biographies written by those unfamiliar with the true lies and perhaps more influenced by their unfriendly persuasions, with a reconsideration of a few of the reasons I’ve come to this state of present affairs, raise the last of my wick, and thereby enlighten my path forward, now, on this final leg of the journey I have made—perhaps even now to effect some better outcome than I’ve managed before.

         That is to say, these are my excuses.

         I am (or was) a child of great riches, delivered into the middle of the most prosperous century yet known to mankind. I was born in the United States, during the month of July, in 1947, at Boston Lying-in Hospital (thus my affiliation with the truth was compromised at the start), given a modest but adequate education, and offered the opportunity to make use of several guaranteed freedoms. I was raised only a stone’s throw from the ‘Athens of America’—technically within its perimeters—but we always knew that we were outsiders. That’s why we threw stones.

         As my father said more than once (perhaps a thousand times, for he was given to such crudities), “If Boston is ‘Bean Town,’ South Boston is the fart.”

         Yet, on a typical day here now, I feel as isolated as I might in a cabin in the woods. Perhaps it is not as modest as Thoreau’s ten by fifteen, but it certainly lacks the view. There is no one on this side of the Fort Point Channel I can have a beer with anymore. Though this was not always the case. (In the longer run, the renewal of Southie by fresher and younger blood is a good thing. I know that. East Broadway never looked better.) But, having been brought home again by circumstance, I cannot help but miss the people I once knew and the places of that other time.

          Not to worry. I’m not friendless. Not nearly. Simply, though, I have already lost more friends to death and attrition. Far more of those casualties to ancient battles, won or not, than now remain.

         My tendency perhaps might be to harbor those few buddies who have survived the wars with me and treat them with special care. But that’s not likely. My nature says, ’tis better to bend my elbow at the bar alone than have to pander out of a fear of loneliness. Better to be wrong for the right reasons than right for the bad. Having never been on a real battlefield except as a correspondent, nor had my life held visibly in the hands of a comrade, or held theirs in my own, perhaps I can only guess at what it is to have absolute confidence in one’s friends. But the accumulated experience of a lifetime speaks to me without doubt.

         My guess is that, if they be friends, I should not need to explain myself to them, or they to me. If they know me, they should know what I am about. Though the loss is keen. A friendship is the tide that rises and falls between two. A failure is not alone my doing. And if a need arises, they will know where to find me.

         If they do not know that much, they are not a friend at all.

         And that is not to pretend that any who know me would be a friend. As likely, it might make them an enemy. I have always cherished good enemies as well.

         But those casualties caused by blind faith are the most painful to consider now. A memoir is an account of one’s friends as much as anything. Those who have died have no care about what I write here. Yet, for those who have become estranged, I cannot help but feel the larger loss.

         To my great discredit, the former I only started truly noticing in recent years.  I’ve been that preoccupied with my own game. And the latter now plague my mind with doubts for my own veracity and fairness. As Hamlet knew, it is easier to contemplate the dead.

         When I first and finally became aware of my losses, I was still living in New York. Timothy Bailey’s wife, Pat, called with the sad news. I got on the train that afternoon and was home for the wake.

         The loss of a friend to mortality is painful enough. But it is quick. And then it is done. And if they are a true friend, you begin missing them immediately for all those qualities that made them dear to you. Only hours later you’ll find yourself smiling and it is then that the good Irish wake begins, and if not then with the others who knew him, or her, at least with yourself in the quiet of an evening and a cup in your hand. The good is there, and the bad forgotten, or turned into jest for being the mere human flaw of a better man than that in full.

         “We would not die in that man’s company, that fears his fellowship to die with us,” Mr. Shakespeare is said to have said.

         As I’ve said, there is a more painful loss.

          That is the cost of a friend to a narrowing of mind. It is a sort of dementia that strikes some people long before age has afflicted them. They forget what has been the cause of friendship between you, and what it has meant, and turn to some other faith or another that has captured their souls. Sometimes the religion of petty grievances. More often, the politics of ideals. The greater loss is in that, I believe. The loss of the person you knew, when the soul in themselves has been possessed by some true belief.

         I think immediately of the old Jack Finney story, “The Body Snatchers.” The story was good enough to keep you awake at night beneath the covers until you trembled yourself to sleep. It came, I remember, in a few weekly installments in Collier’s magazine when I was a boy of seven or eight. Just about the time I had begun to read on my own.

         I used to sweep the floor at Bailey’s Barbershop when it was down at the turn on Broadway. Tim would let me have the three-week-old magazines and I started by taking home the bigger ones, like Life and Look, with the most pictures, and ended up waiting impatiently for the next issue of Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s. Pictures enough, of course, but also filled with good stories in those days.

         Yeah. I was seven or eight. For about half an hour every weekday afternoon, and an hour on Saturday because it was busier that day, child-labor was at its darkest. One glorious daily interlude when I got to be around grown-up men and breathe the heady ether of pomade and witch hazel, Vitalis and Kreml, Bay Rum, Wildroot and Aqua Velva, all while listening to talk of Dodgers and Democrats, Red Sox and Republicans, along with the price of finished lumber, cut beef and heating oil, for which I received two bits and at least one hard red and white peppermint each day, all the magazines I could read, a haircut every two weeks, and a real education through the conversations I overheard.

         Besides that, Timothy Bailey was what they used to call a ‘good egg.’

         Tim had joined the marines when he was 17, fought at Chosin Reservoir behind Chesty Puller in Korea at eighteen, lost an eye, got the Purple Heart and then hid that badge inside the clock on his mother’s mantle so no one knew of it until she herself died and they found it there. He was unlucky with women until he met Pat Norris, but that’s a story I will save for now. He was a friend to all I was aware of. He was at my father’s funeral when few others were. Dad was that hard a man, but he liked Tim, and Tim never forgot a friend.

         He used to dance around behind you as he cut your hair so that he could get the view that the rest of us get standing still with our two eyes. He was a thin man and behind the red and white apron he always wore, his legs would flex and he would go up and down and sidewise at a rate that would have exhausted anyone else in an hour. This was comical to us kids and we’d stand at the window and watch. He must have seen us laughing and known what it was we were laughing at. But yet, he always came through for the Little League sponsorship every year.

         And then one time he bent half his body around the doorjamb and tapped me on the shoulder and said, “How’d you like to sweep up for me? Just take a minute and then there’s that bowl of peppermints in here you like so much when your Dad brings you in.”

         Just as fast as that I had my very first job.

         The movie they made from the Jack Finney story was horrifying enough to leave that particular nightmare imprinted upon my genetic code for life. Not the later remakes, but the first, with Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter. Don Siegel was a great budget movie director and he used to bring home the goods (thankfully, he taught a little of what he knew to Clint Eastwood, either intentionally or by osmosis).

         I’m drifting far off topic, I know. I was talking about the loss of friends. But one last thing before I get back to that more somber subject.

         I have been criticized for resorting to certain metaphors and similes once too often. I plead guilty. But it is not laziness that does it. It’s fondness. I have probably used references to that Jack Finney story a hundred times over the years. Because it was seminal to the shaping of a young mind. It set me on my course. The pod-people have always been my true enemy in life—those aliens who take possession of healthy minds have always been my adversaries.

         And that brings me back to the place I was driving at by taking 6th Street up over the Heights instead of simply crossing down to Broadway where double parking doesn’t bring traffic to a complete standstill like it does on the backstreets.

         I knew a fellow for nearly twenty years, worked alongside of him, ate many a meal with him, drank good beer with him, and for most of those years I would have thought he’d take a bullet for me. He certainly spelled me a hundred times when there was more on my plate than I could handle. But I’ve typically taken on more than I could handle. Perhaps I wore him out . . . No. He was always better than the task before him. Wore the friendship out? No. My own experience has shown that a trial can make friendship stronger . . . Perhaps his wife turned against me, then. But I don’t think so. She was dependably a sweetheart and never gave me the fish-eye no matter how foolish I found a way to be. No. It was just my friend. I won’t use his name. There is no need to embarrass him. I am fond of him still, no matter what true religion he has found.

         But the loss of such a friend—a slow loss without apparent cause—will eat at you from inside out over time. That leaves a greater pain than the quicker loss of death.

         Those are the unhealed wounds.

***

4. Within sight of blindness 

         My eyes began to weaken shortly before I turned twelve. My dad blamed the reading. He threw all my magazines out. All my comics. All of my more recently collected paperback books. He forbade me to have them in the house. He wasn’t going to have any son of his wear glasses.

         My brother Eddy, who never read a postcard all the way to the end, has better than twenty-twenty vision even today.

         I have wondered since if perhaps my father might also have been possessed by that Catholic worry which was then still very much prevalent concerning boys and their ‘sexual awakening,’ as it was so often described on the covers of certain paperback books. He needn’t have worried in that case. I would have already been totally blind if the rumors were true.

         Thankfully, this penalty period lasted less than a year. Partly due to the intercession of my mother as referee. But once the glasses were on my face for good, I started to bring in more paperback books again. One at a time.

         My addiction was fed by a variety of part-time jobs: bagging groceries at the A&P, making home deliveries for Kennedy Butter & Egg, and shoveling out parking spaces in the winter. Admittedly, some of my A&P earnings went to Saturday afternoon matinees at the Strand Theatre, which was next door to the market, and never made it home.

          I still have many of those same little pocket-sized paperback books—the Avons, Bantams, Dells, Signets and Ballantines—on a shelf downstairs. I took them out of a box first thing when I got here, as a comfort. I can look at the spine of any one of them and tell you the story, and when I read it, and what I else was doing at the time. They are as much a part of my history as anything I have done.

         The paperback revolution had begun years before, but when I came of age, it was in full rage. Now, of course, all of that is on the internet, or about to be. Many of those titles you will find free for the taking in digital form on one site or another. At least, so long as we are not attacked with an electromagnetic pulse weapon and all power is lost.  But at the time books were to be had in hand, yours for eternity for only thirty-five cents. Fifty cents. Seventy-five. They fit in your pocket. No wires. No batteries required.

         However, it is noteworthy that my escape from these premises and this ragged peninsula began, paradoxically, when my father threw away all of those magazines and comic books. Enraged, I ran away from home for the first time. Yet unfamiliar with the unforgiving nature of physical geography as opposed to the dreamlands in my head, I made it only so far as the leafy premises at World’s End, a gerrymander of terminal moraine and rock that divides the southern waters of Massachusetts Bay and by that time a family favorite spot for Sunday excursions. I thought I’d be able to pitch my makeshift tent in the overgrowth there (this being the Pollocky canvas sheet my father used each autumn as he painted one side of the house or the next in his continuing round-robin with the elements), and live rough. Lacking a knapsack, and not for the last time, I had packed all my goods in my father’s old Navy duffle. I somehow figured that I could fish for food and eat dandelion greens like the old Italian lady who lived near us on 5th street, even though  I could not yet bait a hook. The proprietors of that semi-wild real estate thought differently.

         Several times after that I ran away again but I did not truly leave this paradise of triple-deckers and mean streets until I was seventeen. And then I was sure that I would never return, except to give my mother a kiss on selected national holidays. Once more, I was wrong.

         Planning that escape shapes the earliest memories I have.

         I know exactly where this plotting was first done. It was here  in this very room on the third floor of my father’s house. That point of fact is confirmed because even now a seagull sits outside my window on the sagging gutter, black eyes bearing alternately on the garbage in the alley below, just as he did then—or at least an ancient forebearer of his once did. One of his tribe has made his perch for the season right there, with the sun in the mornings and the shade of the brick chimney midday, at least since I was three. Over the years many other seagulls commanded that place, but the one I remember most specifically had a mangy coat of black, brown and gray feathers and I wrote at the time (my first recorded critique) that he looked like a bum. Specifically he looked like Charles Storrs, hunched forward in the wind, right down to the mottle of his beaky nose, thin lips, and weepy eyes.

         I drew a picture of him on the stiff blue cover of a school assignment book, and I have that even now for confirmation.

         Charley was a most common sight in our neighborhood, at least to those of us who frequently loitered in the alleys thereabouts. Given my rude habits, I told him to his face that he looked like a seagull, and he recalled many times afterward that I had said it. He thought it was funny and laughed on each occasion, with several discolored teeth still showing in those early years.

         No, I did not write out a plan for escape when I was three years old. I am sure, however, that it was born then, after first being banished to that small room upstairs away from the ready comforts below. It first occurred to me to write the plan down in the assignment book when I was seven, when the scheme had been re-told more than once to various friends and associates. I was keen on getting someone to go with me, you see. And I had soon established certain facts of the matter. For instance, I would need a car for my escape.

         I wrote, “Charly Stors say the best car for my excap is a ford. It had a short kluch and sters quick. Becas I am stil small for my age I need a car like that. Charly is a scavagr i no. He looks like a seagul. My father says seagul are scavagers and Charly is to. Charly has ben to New York and that is wher I wan to go.”

         I most likely had been asked to write something by Sister Elisabeth for class. I don’t remember the exact assignment. Something along the lines of what I might do for my summer vacation, most likely. I do know, however, that the assignment book came back home to my parents. I had been rather too explicit in my aims.

         “I wan to go to New York because It is the bigest plac in the word.”

Why I thought my secret would be kept by Sister Elisabeth is a mystery but I have reckoned since that it was the result of a misunderstanding. I already knew that anything I said to Father Ted in confession would go no further. He could be trusted.      

         Mom took it all very seriously. I was watched more carefully from then on, I believe. She also spent more time trying to impress me with the importance of spelling during that summer. I see her pencil marks now on the pages of the booklet. It was she who kept it. But I am afraid this is one of her key failures, given my choice of professions. I am still a pathological speller, homonyms being my weakest link. Editors have long despaired.

         Charley Storrs’ special talent was to spot valuable stuff in the trash. Especially metals. There was a yard then over near Roxbury just beyond City Hospital where he could take his ‘salvage’ and they would pay him cash on the spot. And Donovan’s was then one of the first good drinking establishments as you came up Broadway just this side of the Channel. Charley usually dropped in at Donovan’s on his way back and got some hard food and hard liquor to go with it.

         I actually went the whole course with him once when I was sixteen. He had a heavy chrome bumper that had been ripped off a car by a bus and then abandoned on the curbside near Emerson Street and he needed my help to carry it. Perhaps I should have taken that as a sign of his weakening, but I didn’t.

         Charley was one of the few people I could consult on a regular basis in those days without raising suspicions. I acquired a fair idea of just how big New York was, from his anecdotes. He had been decommissioned from the Coast Guard there in 1945, had lived in Greenwich Village during what sounded to me like Bohemian glory years, and started his serious drinking there and never stopped.

         He talked as he walked. Sometimes when no one else was there to listen.

         “I was just a Seaman but they taught me how to use a camera in the service, cause they always wanted documentation when we came up on a wreck of one thing or another. I was the man. Careless then. I’d go into anything, wet or fire, and not think twice. I liked it. Interesting work. And when the Coasties let me go I went and got a job with a guy in the Village who used to take pictures of the girls. The ‘models.’ I was his assistant. The pictures was supposed to be for the artists. That’s how he got away with it. He even advertised on matchbooks. I think that’s when I really started to drink. Hard to bear seeing that much female flesh every day.”

         But once he understood my interests, Charley never forgot to work in some detail that he thought would encourage me, along with his other recollections.

         “The best deal in New York is the hotdog. A nickel. The second best deal is the Staten Island Ferry. A nickel. Get yourself a couple of cokes—that’d be a nickel each—a couple of hot dogs and a girl and you can go on a cruise with your date for four bits and you still have ice cream money for the trip back. What a world!”

         The same exact date, sans the ice cream, cost me all of a buck-fifty when I first started living there in 1966.    

         In Southie, the bigger kids tended to command the streets, so when I was little, we liked to do our loitering in the alley between Fifth and Sixth. Myself and Zeph Thomas and Jimmy Green and Donny Sullivan and the others used to gather there by the fence in back of Zeph’s house after school. His father had put up a basketball net on the fence and even after the net had long since rotted away, we would take shots with a ball that would not bounce, but still threw real well, and we would talk for hours. Much of that chatter was about where we would escape to, as soon as we could manage it. And girls.

         We always knew that stretch of the alley by heart due to the probing of our own curiosities. Charley Storrs used to start his day up at the top near the high school, where much of the best stuff was thrown out. He usually had some sort of two- or four-wheeled device and as he made his way ‘Down East,’ as he liked to say, and he’d peek in at us from the end of the block as he passed and call out in his husky broken voice, “Anything?”

         We’d give him the report.

         “Mr. Connor’s is got a barrel full of paint cans”

         “Don’t want no paint cans.”

         And he would salute us and pass on.

         It was later, when Zeph moved away and even the rim of the net had rusted and collapsed and that old ball couldn’t be found, that Charley would come all the way into our stretch of the alley and check on the barrels for himself and that is when I really got to know him better.

         He’d fill every available space on his ‘carrier’ (a supermarket cart or a battered hand truck), then cross down to the boulevard and make a pit stop at the L Street Bathhouse before heading back out on the flat along Columbia Road toward Southampton Street.

         To me, Charley seemed to be the very epitome of independence and self-reliance. He even used to roll his own cigarettes. The first person I ever saw doing that.

         He would lean back on a fence while rolling himself a smoke so that it looked like he had an invisible chair beneath him. He said he learned this trick in the Coast Guard when he was on watch. It cut down on the wind and countered the roll of the ship.

         I was reminded of Charley again years later when I read Nicholas Monsarrat’s wonderful account of service in the British Navy during war, Three Corvettes.

         Monsarrat has a line in there about his ship, “A Corvette would roll on wet grass.”

         Charley never related the kind of visceral detail Monsarrat does so well, such as the look of the battle dead floating in life jackets face up as if they were asleep, but the reading of that book seemed to recall and give a larger life to those sparser facts I had heard from my friend long before.

         He’d say, “You didn’t need to roll your cigarettes when I was with the Coasties. You just set your paper down on any ol’ flat thing and pour your cut on there and in a minute the ship’ll dip back and fourth a time or two and your smoke would roll up for you as neat as can be.”

         Once I asked Charley, “Don’t you get cold going around looking for stuff in the winter time?”

         He waved a bony hand at me. “Hardly. If you ever felt that greasy cold on a ship at sea, you can never complain about this little bit.”

         Still, I wondered, “How did you end up in Boston? Why didn’t you go south where it’s warmer? Like to Miami?”

         In fact he had a little touch of the South in his voice that I never got him to reveal the source of.

         “Oh. I came up here looking for somebody I knew. Never found her.”

         “Why do you stay here?”

         “Thought she might turn up.”

         “Isn’t there a lot more salvage to find in New York?”

          “Too much! Too much treasure there. Enough to kill a man with a will as weak as mine. Boston is just about my speed.”

         “I can’t wait till I can go to New York.”

          “You may be just the man that can handle that. But listen here . . . Don’t live uptown. They charge extra there. Downtown is fine. You got Katz’s and Mo’s there, and the Broadway House. The cheapest theatres in town are on 14th, and there’s always someplace to sleep downtown. They’ve got SRO’s like palaces there. Nothing like that uptown. I tell you what.”

         I stayed one night in a ‘single room occupancy’ on Houston Street during my second runaway to New York in 1964. Perhaps the scariest night of my life. Cockroaches big enough to cast a shadow and make a noise as they scampered, unnatural human sounds syncopated with the cry of steam and the knocking of iron pipes and the smell of the blocked toilet on the hall. All of it included for the price of $3.

         No one, to my knowledge, knew where Charley lived in South Boston. I suspected that it was somewhere over near the Edison plant in a basement of one of those tenements there. But I was told by my father that on special occasions he was seen at the Veterans’ Post dressed in a dark suit and white socks, shined shoes and red tie, with a red or white carnation in his lapel.

         Charley Storrs disappeared during the blizzard of 1978. Not that anyone was sure of that. He was simply never seen again afterward. Perhaps he went south. But I have tried to keep him alive in a few of my stories.

***

5. Sergeant Eddy at the Battle of Villa Fiorita!

         When I was still very young, my older brother, Eddy, was made to take me to the Saturday matinee at the Strand Theater—four bits, most likely to buy my mother a moment of quiet. He hated this and, though forbidden to actually hit me, would torture me in every other way possible, I suppose in the hope that I would refuse to go the next time. It was always a double feature, often a western and a comedy plus a cartoon. Maybe even an installment of a serial. Abbott and Costello, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. These films are almost totally lost to memory now, forgotten or buried in a mind otherwise chock full of the trivial and worthless.

         The few movies that I do remember from the time are distinguished by some odd point of reference, like Them, which had giant ants, or The Crimson Pirate, which had Burt Lancaster jumping from roofs and bouncing on window awnings. That trick with the awnings appeared to me to be great fun and was the subject of a terrible argument afterward with my brother, with me insisting that it was possible, and him pointing out the weakness of my case while standing in front of Kennedy Butter & Egg, where the awning had been ripped merely by the wind and flapped at us that day in an argumentative chatter.

         My mother would give Eddy a quarter more than the price of the tickets for the occasion, but he would not share the popcorn until he had eaten all of the buttered pieces off the top. The cup of Coke would be sucked down to the ice before I took a second sip. There and back he would walk quickly ahead, forcing me to run to stay up. He made me use the toilet when he did. He would elbow me if I laughed too loudly. Nothing I can remember seems less petty than those sorts of things now, though they seemed mightily oppressive to me at the time.

         And once, I am told, he even lost me.

         I actually do remember a portion of this incident, but not for being lost. It appears that I wandered down L Street beyond Broadway, while he was joking with some of his friends at the corner. What I remember is sitting in a strange kitchen, eating a peanut butter sandwich, along with a dog that licked my face after every bite. A woman on East 3rd had seen me wandering alone and taken me in while she called the police. Neighbors and neighborhoods were that way back then.

         However, I must have already been forming some personal opinion of the films I was seeing without realizing it. Certainly I caviled at foolish plot devices or reveled in the glory of Cinemascope. But it never occurred to me to be intellectually critical of the art itself. The movies were then just another fixture of daily life, a given, not to be investigated beyond the Technicolor surface.

         When I later used to go to the Strand on my own, or to the old Broadway Theatre further along, I know I went to escape as much as to enjoy. I wanted to be someplace else, wherever that someplace was. I absorbed without caution. Even the fabulous filmmaking in pictures like North by Northwest or Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia did not fully awaken that portion of my mind that must ask ‘Why?’ in order to be fully engaged.

         That, given the right time and circumstance, was to be accomplished by Dorothy Malone. But more on that elsewhere.

         Writing out my imagined future was my answer then. These were tortured scripts on composition books written each night before my father’s command to turn out the light—that order delivered from the bottom of the stairs—after which I would pretend to go to sleep. Those notebooks were done in an awkward hand that changed direction with whatever impulse possessed me on a given evening, or perhaps it was due to the position of my elbow on the table as my left hand supported my oversized head. Naturally, I lay there in the dark afterward, the crepuscular shadows of my room parsed by the alley light animated by the movement through the scraggle of a tree, with the room now my own private theater, as I extended those adventures into new realms.

         Possessed of a good idea (the few of those writings I have since taken the time to read survived in the stash my mother kept in a stack of tomato boxes with some other knickknacks in the basement), I would generally follow the plot lines I had seen at the movies. This was no better than the Hollywood haircut some of my own stories got in later years. But that would have been the course of least resistance, rather than the more developed plots in the paperbacks I was reading then. The printed word already had an immutable authority to me. Importantly, I had become aware of the greater difference between the two mediums.

         True, what happened on the screen was etched in film by the composite arts of writers, actors, directors, musicians, etc. What was on the page was strictly between the author and myself, and the author was not around to protest if I took liberties. But it was the very nature of that group effort in making the movies which begged for my further assistance while the bargain between myself and the author of a book was a more absolute trust. Thus, a few of those fat composition books have the beginnings of my first novels. I can readily see the influences of actors and directors and even cinematographers there in pages describing places I had never been and events which I had no personal knowledge of—a cowboy opposes a wicked marshal; a soldier, fleeing the Nazis, is saved by a shepherdess in the mountains—but clearly then, I saw the conflict that was mine, between the place where I had been born and raised, and what I wanted out of life. I played the part of my own hero fighting the injustices of that ‘world I never made.’ My father received billing as the villain in most of these efforts. I was never balanced in my judgments. I was already headlong in progress, careering toward the goals I was resetting anew each day, and careening at each sharp turn.

         Eddy, who slept in another room on the third floor, and was the issue of the same parents, raised in the same house, fed the same food, and schooled by many of the same teachers (he too was in love with our English teacher Miss Lawrence in his turn), is as different from myself as a creature in the same forest is from any other species.

         Like my father, Eddy was never fond of books. But he knows about fishing, can bait a hook with his eyes closed, and owns a gun. More than one, I hear. I even sent him my father’s pistol when I found it in the house recently. In Texas, I suppose, Eddy will be able to make use of it. (It had no permit and keeping it was thus illegal in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in any case.) This was a .32 police special and I took notes on it before shipping it out because I thought it might be a good detail in a story. I even fired it in the basement and did some damage to a box of my own notes from the year 1977. My father had hidden the weapon beneath a floorboard in the bedroom, just in reach of his hand if an intruder had ever entered the house at night. That never happened, of course. But then, I think, if any foolish fellow who thought to rob our home had he seen my father first, he might have had second thoughts on other grounds.

         I am reminded of ‘The Battle of the Villa Fiorita’ (not to be confused with the excellent novel by Rumer Godden which supplied the title I gave the event), and one of the key incidents of my childhood. It is a relation of my greatest triumph as well as my worst ignominy. Or so I have thought since.

         In the winter of 1964 (my guess is, it must have been February because my brother had not yet left home for his hitch in the Navy) we had a great snow. At least two feet of the best snow we had had that season, and as we usually did, after digging out the family parking space and then picking up some extra loot from the older neighbors who could not dig their own cars out, a group of us congregated on the open rise at the M Street Park and began to build our respective battlements out of the mounds accumulated there by the snow plows.

         The name I tagged our fortifications with that day came to mind because the Rumer Godden book, The Battle of Villa Fiorita, was then very popular and on display everywhere. Everywhere that I was wont to hang out, at least. I liked the title, but did not actually read the book until many years afterward. We were always in need of a grand name for our projects, so when I spontaneously offered ‘Villa Fiorita!’ it was adopted unanimously, sounding wonderfully exotic, and was then hollered repeatedly all that day, perhaps mysteriously to the ears of that Irish neighborhood, in the same way that Mexican revolutionaries might have once yelled ‘Viva Zapata!’

         The divisions of our armies were along the battle lines of established friendships rather than the close approximation of our respective homes. The forts were often enormous affairs, depending on nature’s allotment, with tunnels and ditches, ramparts and scarps, parapets, and a parade at front where we might taunt the enemy. There were no specific rules to the matter. I think we always made it up as we went along. But our actions usually followed some unwritten code of behavior which I find it difficult now to put into words, as it was purely felt and not written—much of it, I think, absorbed from the endless war movies we all had been exposed to.

         At some undesignated moment, the first snowball would be thrown (often well before any better defenses were built), and this bombardment went on for an hour or so until arms were tired, and a lunch was required to refuel. All during this flurry of missiles, some of us would continue to construct while the others engaged the enemy. Bathroom breaks were taken individually and, especially as it grew dark, at an edge of the park where the snow plows had created some better privacy with the greater heights of some piles.

         Late in the afternoon, as the shadows grabbed at our positions, and already well weary of the lobbing of snowballs into the arcs necessary to penetrate to the rear of our opponent’s fortification, we would begin our forays. This was usually done by small units, two or three, in blitzkrieg fashion, with crooked left arms clasping six or seven well fashioned snowballs tight to our bodies and with a half dozen more in our pockets.

         At this point our gloves would have been long since soaked and discarded, and we would be fighting with bare hands and refrained from actually holding the ammunition in our fingers until the very last instant so as to preserve whatever warmth we had left within us. If the enemy was smart, they were prepared, and with our approach, some reserve unit would arise from a hidden bunker and pummel us with their own munitions. If we were lucky, we might make it to the crest of the enemy’s own ramparts and be able to fire down on the unready at close range.

         That day, with better fortifications and ample ammunition, the engagements went far beyond the fall of night. Streetlight blazed silvering onto rough ridges and trodden lumps of snow. I was so tired by then, I simply lay against the backside of my own wall of defense, fashioning snowballs one at a time and lobbing them over my shoulders, indiscriminately. Half the army had deserted—gone home to dinners and warmth. Those who stayed were determined to be the last and thus the ‘winners.’

         Of itself, that is one of the great moments of childhood. The moment of total exhaustion from having played yourself out. Laying back in the shadows, comforted by the enveloping snow which is, oddly then, no longer cold, with the night sky darkly gleaming of twilight above. I remember remembering that moment again and again very fondly, if for no other reason than what came next.

          That’s when my brother arrived. Eddy had been sent by my mother to get me. I refused to go. And he was not about to take ‘no’ for an answer. I threw my best reserve of snowballs directly into his attack. He repelled every feeble toss with a fresh-armed flick of a wrist or hand. Then he grabbed me at the waist, like a lineman on a quarterback, and lifted me into the air and over his shoulder, my legs flailing, while I beat on the thick of his coat at the rear with one hand and grasped my falling glasses with the other.

         Though little more than two years older, he outweighed me then by at least thirty pounds of muscle, and carried me all the way home in that fashion. Ignobly. Half a dozen or so of the others followed his progress, with friends taunting him, enemies taunting me. I was humiliated and too exhausted to resist with much more that expletives.

         An interesting side note to this is the scene in The Quiet Man when John Wayne carries Maureen O’Hara home from a confrontation with her brother. There is some resonance to it for me because Maureen O’Hara, always a red-headed favorite of mine, is also in the movie they made of The Battle of Villa Fiorita. But the book of that is far better.

         However, to fully appreciate the hyperbole I am capable of, you should note that it was this scene that I recreated a bit more dramatically in The Wilderness, twenty years later.

         If you missed it (as too many did), that Civil War tale, re-told in letters, involved a Sergeant Michael Harris of the then much diminished 69th Regiment, first known as the “Irish” at the time, for the large number of immigrants in the ranks. Many of these men were escaping the famines, but had found their allegiances according to the harbors where their ships had anchored. Yet others had left Ireland for the conflict at the behest of the Fenian Brotherhood, in order to learn how to be soldiers so that they might return to fight for their own independence, and this was the case with Private James Harris.

         The 69th had been decimated again and again from Antietam in 1862, right up to those confused confrontations in ‘The Wilderness,’ during the approaches to Richmond of 1864. After a day of close fought skirmishes, Sergeant Mike, a fine shot, is sent back out to the battlefield at dusk to ‘shoot horses,’ a euphemism for the elimination of enemy stragglers (and potential snipers), as well as those Confederate wounded who were dying but could not be taken in to the overwhelmed medical facilities, and to secure the identities of those Union dead who had fallen amidst the ‘thickets of pine scrub, oak and cedar,’ as one participant described it.

         There, at last, having previously obeyed the pleas of their mother to find her youngest son, and after three years of searching from the streets of Cork and the alleys of New York to the bloody fence rows of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, the Sergeant finds his own brother among the Confederate dead and wounded. The younger Harris lay there beneath a Union soldier who had fired his weapon too late when James, out of ammunition, had brought his bayonet to bear.

         Seeing the wide eyed and familiar stare of that white face in the gloom, Sergeant Harris pulled the other soldier’s corpse away from his brother’s embrace.

         “Are you dead?”

         Pale lips moved a whispered voice, “Not yet, I think. Are you the angel? You look like my brother.”

         “Ha! Mommie has sent me to bring you home. She won’t be wanting you cold.”

         James squinted with uncertainty, “It’s an odd dream to be having at the last then. I thought I’d be seeing sweet Connie now.”

         “Too late! She’s married the Daugherty lad. They’ve two kids already. You won’t be seeing much of her again, I think.”

         “That’s you then! I can tell it by your mocking. But is that all the news there is? All there is of the life of me? Just a mistake?”

         “No. God doesn’t make mistakes, I’m told. And you’ve more and better blood in you than that! If I can get your body to a nurse, you’ll be taking that furrow of bone and flesh I see on your head along with you as a scar of salvation and you’ll be a hero from here on out. But listen my boy, say you can’t recall your name. Tell them you’ve lost all recollection. Just don’t do any remembering to the doctors about who it is you are, at least until after the muster.”

         “Is my cause lost then?”

         “No. No, James. You can return if you want to Irish soil and die there instead, if that’s your wish. If that’s your choice. But now, let me take those greys off of you and put on the blue of this fella you’ve killed. He needs them less.”

         Arguing then with his brother as he was carried like a sack of potatoes back through Union lines, James lost consciousness and later did not need to feign memory loss, as those who did read that novel would know. And it was Michael who returned home to fight in his brother’s stead for the Irish cause. But James remained in America, changed his name to McGuire, fell hopelessly in love with a Massachusetts girl, and never returned to take part in the Irish Rebellion for which he had trained, nor to see his Mommie again.

***

6. Zeph and the Gumm

          As I’ve said, I have a little of my writing from the years before leaving home. I believe one of my first attempts at a ‘story’ involved Charley Storrs, but that memory is vague. I am certain, however, that I wrote down some of what I knew concerning my friend Zeph. That first version is lost, though I re-wrote it just a few years later and that is the version I still have.

         Zeph Thomas and I were never friends, as in buddies, but closer than that, being nearly brothers in the manner of neighborhoods of that time. Zeph’s family lived in a near identical triple-decker on 5th Street and our back doors were umbilically connected by the twists and turns of obstructions in the alley that was as much the thoroughfare of our young lives as the streets—more so for the privacy those narrower precincts allowed (I learned far more of life amidst the Technicolor garbage and trash that was barreled back there in heavy galvanized metal than from the thick color-separated pages of the textbooks at school).

         From the time that I could walk and first struck out on my own to see the world (perhaps three years old), until Zeph’s family moved off to Quincy when I was eleven, I would wander into his home at will and witness there the struggles of another nearly identical and small but dynamic universe that wonderfully paralleled the family unit I knew best. The arguing of his parents was as normal to me as what I witnessed most evenings on 6th Street. The packages and containers of food in their cupboards mirrored those in my own kitchen. For a time, early on, before he started losing weight and had lost a couple years of growing, we wore the same clothes and often ended up a day having somehow exchanged a sock or a shirt.

         Zeph’s struggles with his health were the cruel reality of a life that must be confronted and overcome or else abandoned. What influence does such an awareness play on the mind of a child? Certainly it changed him, but finally it altered us both, I think. And on the brighter side, being a constant witness in their home to his older sister’s frequent nakedness, teasing my still undeveloped glands, girls were to later offer me fewer physical surprises even as I had gained a clearer prospect of the future potential pleasures.

         The most common threads to knit this experience were the television shows we all watched. I will avoid the dumb nostalgia of recalling the content of the shows themselves. They are as ubiquitous on the internet today as the movies which were then already mesmerizing my brains. More specifically, I am not sure any one of them was particularly valuable, no matter our enthusiasms of the moment. The true importance was in the accumulated impact of them all. At least, until The Twilight Zone entered our lives in 1959. Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Howdy Doody, Milton Berle, Jack Benny, Davy Crockett, Have Gun Will Travel, Gunsmoke, Maverick all had their agglomerated impact in the fact that we had each, while nestled in our separate homes, seen the same imagery, day upon day, and afterward traded in their riffs and skits when we were together as if they were all a part of one continuous Everyman play. Ironically, it was the surrealism of The Twilight Zone that first confronted our young minds with the unreality of all the others. At least in my own case and, I believe, in Zeph’s as well.

         His father worked at The Boston Gear Works on Hancock Street in Quincy as relentlessly as my own father then attended to services for the public mails at the United States Postal facility on South Street. Both of them would be at home on Saturday and Sunday, so that any fun to be had in life was left to the weekdays, often at the expense of school when necessary, which was always. But in the summers, our spirits were as free as our bodies for five days of the week. Excepting, of course, for that period when Zeph was incarcerated at the children’s facility at the Quincy Hospital and preparing to die from chronic nephritis, and the year afterward when he didn’t, but was still made to stay indoors as a precaution.

         Zeph’s kidneys failed him at a time when there was no alternative treatment for that disease other than prayer. Because I could not visit him at the hospital, I visited his sister, Linda, instead, and was then told whatever it was she had heard through her parents’ conversation. Much of it was whispered in low tones across a kitchen table on milky breath. She seemed in need of someone to tell of her fears. I was a foot shorter than Linda and barely eight years old, but I had a child’s crush on her, and had nothing else better to do but listen. 

         I also wrote Zeph letters, most of which I am quite happy not to have today. But there are a few here, undelivered. These are mostly filled with recountings of the many episodes of the television shows he was missing. At the start, the recapitulations are related in a vocabulary that was then below my grade level, this being years before I owned my first dictionary. The letters were carried to the hospital by Linda, who was permitted to stare at her brother through a glass window into the children’s ward before returning with whatever answers Zeph had managed to produce for me—most of which I had so much difficulty deciphering that I needed Linda to read aloud. Importantly, those short sentences were always illustrated by elaborate drawings done in crayon and were often his re-imaginings of the plot lines that I had sent him the week before. His own talent for drawing as already showing itself.

         I believe this process was what opened some secret passageway for both of us to the telling of stories later on. I was just then about to discover the wonders of the Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s as a consequence of my job sweeping at Tim’s barbershop and soon afterward Zeph had been assigned a home tutor by the school on his return from the hospital. By 1955 we were both somewhere above the ranks of our classmates in matters concerning the use of the English language, as well as in the frequent abuse of a fair assortment of the swear words we had cherry-picked from adult conversation (but never ventured the use of around the adults themselves).  Zeph took his fabulations further in the direction of illustration. I continued to supply the stories.

         I have only one of those stories now, staple-bound in a stiff blue construction paper common to that distant time. My mother had saved it and later inserted it in the shelves downstairs along with those of my published books which I had sent to her through the years.

         I had it in my hand just now.

         The basic tale is not my own. It’s Zeph’s story, retold by me, with his illustrations. Sadly, it could never be intelligibly reprinted as it was, nor could the uneven crayon illustration be reproduced, but it was this same story which I first attempted to rewrite for the stage a dozen years later as The Matthew St. Passion.

         The thing that had caught my interest in Zeph’s account, even then, was the matter of original sin. I had not then, nor have I ever since, believed in such a thing, or that any God worthy of the name would plague his creations with an affliction for no other purpose than torment and redemption through obeisance. Catholicism is riddled with such memes and schemes, cloaked as ‘mysteries,’ conjured to keep the faithful in line while afraid for their own salvation. How dare they live with any bliss other than what might be dispensed by subjugating themselves to the will of the Church. And yet, every Catholic I know would object to this construing. Though I don’t argue the case. I was simply taken with the thought of children in a ward where death was a constant presence. What might be ‘sin’ to them?

         The play was never actually produced because the casting of children was too great a challenge and the subject matter too dark, so I rewrote it once again as a short novel and that was published in an anthology which sold poorly as anthologies are likely to do, so I’ll give you one portion of it here, just for the weight of it, balanced against what humor I then perceived in the universe.

         (I should also note for those unfamiliar with the territory, that Matthew Street is a series of vacant lots now of debris and piles of brown road salt close by the old B & M tracks through Quincy, but then it was a neat double-file of triple-deckers. The old Catholic hospital there is long gone as well—replaced by a parking lot for a platform stop on the MBTA Red Line).

         Nurse Gumm sat at her small desk by the double doors. Her eyes were apparently closed and because there was yet insufficient light from the street window at the other end of the ward, there was not the advantage of that slight glint from the reptilian parting of the eyelids which would warn him if she were taking notice. Zeph, his bed closer to the desk, remained still, even while each thin blanket in the other beds—nine at either side of the half-dark room—moved almost continuously with a slow squirming beneath, the surface shapes altering with a knee rising here, or an arm reaching toward an itch there, the pump of a torso flexing with a cough, or the pale peeking of a face from the white edge of a sheet. Because the children in the ward could not be sure if Nurse Gumm was awake or asleep, they tried to move in slow motion, as if that more deliberate effort would be less detectible.

         Each bed was gated at both sides and, while lying flat between, these low metal fences could easily be imagined by the children as walls and the porous seclusion they offered as being real. The younger children, the six-year-olds, were more likely to accept this as fact. The older children pushed the thin blanket higher on the side toward Nurse Gumm and attempted to gain some greater privacy in that way.

         Most of the children had been awake for the last hour. But there was no clock. There was one disk high on the wall in the room beyond, and this might be seen briefly during the day, as the double doors opened and closed. It was believed that a clock would make the children’s time in the ward drag. So all day long the nuns and the nurses looked at the watches on their wrists in a continuing reflex motion, adding to the twitch of all human activity there.

         Half of the lights in the ward had been switched off by Sister Sarah at eight o’clock the night before, casting an amber gloom over the entire room and establishing the beginning of ‘night’, and then half the lights remaining were cut off at nine, leaving the ward in a semi-darkness that appeared dark to unaccustomed eyes. By 5:30 the next morning, when Nurse Gumm arrived, as she always did, precisely, and took the empty seat that was occupied by Sister Sarah in the afternoons and evenings, many of the children had slept more than eight hours—at least those who could sleep at all. But this was Saturday, and most all of them were already awake with anticipation.

         As she always did, no matter the day, Nurse Gumm immediately set out a paper bag onto that clean beige colored plastic surface of the desk, and then beside it an empty coffee mug. The bag contained her lunch, a white bread sandwich filled with cheese, and a banana still green at the ends. Once arranged, she would immediately fill the mug from her thermos before taking exactly three sips, and finally fold her pink hands atop the desk and await the six o’clock bell. For every child in the ward, that half-hour interval following Nurse Gumm’s arrival was the longest wait of the day. Those children who had an urgency to pee and not catheter, felt the burn of it. The accumulated phlegm of the night hours choked at their throats. Most of the furtive eyes behind the side rails darted again and again to the large bright window beside the double doors.

         When the ‘morning nuns’ arrived, the first sign of them was the quick look into the ward from that window. Moments afterward, simultaneously with the scream of the bell and a ‘thunk’ of the double doors forced open abruptly by wide hips, the bedpans would be brought in, and the rolled lengths of plastic tubing, and the towels, and white enamel trays with the small pointed razors laid out in neat rows atop a blue paper mat and the glass vials for taking blood arranged with the names already affixed. The squeals and moans would rise then in the air to an aria of pain and the anguished squirming beneath the thin white cotton blankets would become, as Zeph imagined it, like the twitch of maggots in the gaping wound of a dead cat beside the road—just like the one he had seen in a gutter on 5th Street—while the black and white habited nuns scurried from bedside to bedside, and Nurse Gumm patrolled the center corridor between the beds with her hands now folded as neatly behind her on the mantle of her large rump as they had previous rested on the desk.

         This morning, as Zeph balanced high atop the bed pan and relieved himself joyously while holding tight to the cool metal gate at either side—so proud now that his own catheter had been removed—he looked over at the small paper bag of Nurse Gumm’s lunch and to the mug close beside it and began to plot what he would find a way to do some day soon. What he had in fact done, one day…Amidst the bustle and hurry and shush of the nuns in their habits, and the cries and screams of those who were having tubes replaced or removed, and the anxious dancing of the others on their beds as they awaited the razored prick of another finger on their already bandaged hands, one day, Zeph would slide off unseen and deposit two or three lumps of hard shit in that paper bag and pee into that mug.

         It was some years later, before I had first discovered Flannery O’Connor and her more blunt means of addressing such matters, when I attempted that early version of The Matthew St. Passion. My most significant literary influences then were Rafael Sabatini and C.S. Forester, and I was very self-conscious about presenting a context which I knew would be seen as religious. Miracles are often misunderstood as being encumbered in that way. But film had already given me some vocabulary for such things. I might not have the advantage of ethereal music, but I could conjure a blinding light well enough in a few words. Fortunately, I got the idea for the story down on paper when it was still raw to my senses, and before I could become too self-conscious about certain things, like grammar or blasphemy, so that when I later addressed the subject again, I was somewhat better prepared to take and deal with the consequences.

         Two beds away from Zeph’s, across the thin and always prone body of Andy Dougherty, who had a spine which had never properly formed though he could use his arms and hands in extraordinary ways against his mouth to express himself with original sounds, and beyond a girl named Angela, who was always pale and fragile from suffering some sort of sepsis which went unrelieved by weekly transfusions until the day she was wheeled away with eyes open in terror never to be seen again, there was another girl named Barbara Leigh. This girl was red-headed and had been allowed to keep her hair long and fastened in pigtails for mysterious reasons which probably had to do with some parental edict overruling the usual processing whereby every girl’s hair was cut as high as the nap of her neck and boys all wore crew cuts.

         This Barbara was also freckled faced, not in the delicate manner of white bread advertisements, but so thickly that at any distance she appeared to have a dark complexion. She too had a kidney problem, and because, at eleven, she was the oldest in the ward, she was looked up to, both physically and morally, in every crisis by all the other children there but most particularly by Zeph. Zeph had no fear of older girls. His sister had trained him well enough for that. But Barbara put him in awe. He could not take his eyes off of her. Even in the plain pink-and-white striped gown all the girls wore, she appeared to have a body dangerously close to that of a woman. And Zeph knew this better for a fact because he had looked very carefully when she had raised her gown to show him the stitches where they had removed one kidney.

         In my own mind, of course, I had cast Zeph’s older sister Linda in the role of Barbara. I had never met the real Barbara and had no other idea about her than Zeph’s own descriptions, which were drawn in crayon and impressive for being explicit more than anatomically correct.

         In the place of wheelchairs, as an eccentricity that was part of the advertisement for the hospital being a unique institution for children, every patient was assigned what appeared to be more of a small wooden wagon. Each of these devices, shellacked to a nut brown, had a high back to contain a pillow and low wooden slatted sides in imitation of the larger beds, as well as oversized wheels rimmed in hard red rubber that could be turned by the pressure of a single hand. All of these had been donated by Paine Furniture Company and were emblazoned with their logo on both sides. Lined up in the hall with the children waiting impatiently to be pulled away to the TV room, the repetition of the benefactor’s name offered an odd statement of fact.

         Every Saturday, a day of nearly religious significance to some of the children as well as the staff, they were each helped into a separate wagon by the nuns. Despite the lingering odors, and because their own families came to see them on Saturdays, the nuns were especially smelling of fresh body powder that day and wearing newly ironed habits with the fabric stiff with starch that ‘shooshed’ as they wheeled all of the children in the ward along a hall to the largest of the rooms, the one containing a television, where they could watch the morning shows.

         The ceremony was conducted just after the letting of blood and urine, and the breakfast (which was for most of them a grey paste of oatmeal and a small paper cup of thin milk, along with a triangular piece of toast dabbed with red jelly, but this was nonetheless a great improvement over the apple cider and stale graham cracker they got at lunch), and the nuns would hurry again after that meal to remove the trays, and the stiff fabric of the starched habits would make the sound of  ‘sush, sush, sush’ as they moved even faster to get the job done and every one of the children in the ward arose then en masse, as if in rebellion against being told to be quiet, and pounded hands against the low metal gates of their beds to make a racket, and some danced crazily on the beds, hard enough to make the springs speak like the mattresses of their parents in the night. They would all then wave their arms and hands, and chant in unison for the wagons until they were each wheeled into the wide hall before being taken off to the television room one by one, and the only thing that could be heard in the silence afterward was the voice of Mel Blanc and then the uncontrolled laugher echoing out.

         It was in the semi-darkness at the back of the television room, where the blinds were closed so that they could better see the grey imaginings of Chuck Jones or Tex Avery, and while all the others were more intent on the flicker of Bugs Bunny, that Barbara had raised her gown for Zeph to see the stitches where her lost kidney had been. The threads there were as large and black as the sewing on a canvas bag but these were fastened on a purpled storm of swollen flesh, an ancient looking apple-sized glob at the side of a body that was pink and new and hardly freckled at all.

         Zeph whispered a joke. It was a crude joke about girls’ anatomy and cross-eyed doctors and misplaced stitches. It was the quality of humor that he knew best from hanging out in the boys’ section at the L-Street Bathhouse. But it was most appropriate to this time and place. Certainly Barbara knew she was revealing her nakedness to a boy. She must have even hoped for some response. And Zeph, for his part, did the gentleman’s thing and had made a joke of it. Barbara had laughed. Encouraged, Zeph made another joke, cruder still, and she had laughed harder, the sound of it absorbed by the other laugher in the room as Elmer J. Fudd attempted to shoot the cunning Bugs right there in his rabbit hole with a shotgun. And then, over the raucous response, as Elmer blinked away the black soot of the backfire, Barbara had screamed.

         Stitches had broken loose from on side of the incision and a gray pus of infection spilled out and an awful odor had welled up between them and her face had whitened as if she had no freckles at all.

         All of a sudden then, Nurse Gumm had appeared, pushing Zeph’s wagon aside, and Barbara was pulled away, put in an ambulance just below the windows at the end of the ward, and taken to another hospital.

         In spite of Zeph’s questions, she was never spoken of again.

         That story has something of a happy ending. The real Barbara had not died. She had lived to sin again. Perhaps it was even the joke that had saved her—a joke which had revealed the putrefaction that lurked within.

         The metaphor in the piercing of inner infections worked well with much of what I thought I was now about in my life. It worked in my favor for a time. And to give you some idea of how Zeph Thomas got along in life, you have to understand that for some years before he became better known as an illustrator and book-cover artist, and during those rough times of forced busing in South Boston, he perversely benefitted. Many people who saw his name on a roster of available talent, before meeting him, thought he was black, but only because of his uncommon name. He told me the art directors were often surprised when he showed up for an assignment.

         But Zeph was as cursedly Irish as I was—that is, by half, though his other part was Puritan English, so he never benefited as I did by the alternate idea that everything that isn’t Scottish is shite.

***

7. Gifts of Surcease and sorrow

         When I think of Christmas, I most often think of Surcease Sullivan. That cause is a little more difficult to explain.

         As it was in every house I knew of then, Christmas was the high point of the year. As well as the ultimate dirty trick. A rising wave of expectation that fooled us annually, deluding us with the narcotic of our own greed to a peak delirium before dashing us on the cold rocks of January.

         I have always judged the quality of that annual event as BG and AG, and let the coming of Christ be more properly accounted for by others. BG, my Christmas gifts were things which were totally useless to me, or even detrimental to my health (with the small exception of various articles of clothing which my mother had purchased while working her seasonal job at Jordan Marsh). AG, awakened to the first mysteries of life, I was forever after enchanted by its many wonders, no matter the size. BG, the key event of the season was to be taken downtown (which was in truth kinda fabulous for what else I glimpsed in passing and for the warm blueberry muffins with the hard crust of sugar on top to be had and which I still miss) and force-marched through the Jordan Marsh Christmas Village, where the meaning of the holiday had been translated to the stiff likenesses of wooden figures in displays where the eyes never seemed to meet, and there made to endure a near encounter, while waiting in line, of a glassy-eyed Santa amidst the crying of other children and the swatting of mothers who had previously spent their last ounce of patience from a limited budget. AG, this holiday free from the punishments of school was abused by plotting impossible future escapes and thinking deeply about those things that were most forbidden. BG, before glasses, the world was a kaleidoscope with no focus. AG, after glasses, “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em,” as the bank robber said—at least in my own mind.

         For instance, BG, the usual Christmas gift was something like the pair of gleaming new hockey skates I received one year. These were a near perfect sculpting of maroon and black leather set above the curving of steel blades. I easily imagined them as the footwear of Norse gods who soared on icy skies. The leather smelled of . . . leather. An odor which had long since been perfected to increase the flow of hormones in youth and stir the loins. I set them up on the chest of drawers in my room, and for a week or two, I studied them for the pagan art they were. But then I was made to wear them. To display my inability to balance on the ice, armored in my brother’s old helmet and pads, and to play a game that offered me no chance of winning, where the simplest nudge from an opponent would put me on my ass. That pair of imperfect devices, the leather already scarred from their brief use after having contributed to my ignominy, were then relegated to a closet and forgotten.

         AG, I would have had a crisp two-dollar bill in hand, due to the naïve kindness of Grandma MacAleer, and if I waited until Pauley Brown spelled his father at the counter during lunchtime at the 4th Street Spa, I could use it to buy a copy of Playboy magazine—this at a time when the Christmas issue of that once great publication was a thing of magnificent and splendid wonder. I have always thought of Thomas Jefferson and naked ladies in the same frame as a consequence.

         But a tale that did not have a happy ending and which began before my need for glasses and continued well after that as it has been with me all the years since, making its appearance in half a dozen wordy fabrications under various guises, is the story of Surcease Sullivan.

         The first time I smoked pot I had at least earned it, in a way. We were then all of ten years old and waiting impatiently for our pubic hairs to darken. Zeph Thomas was still the assumed leader of our small gang of five or six. Our numbers then included Pauley Brown, Billy Toomey, Jimmy Green, and Donny Sullivan.

         And Zeph was always possessed of the most astounding ideas.

         At the time, there was a fat and pimple-faced thug at the high school who sold grass by the nickel bag, but he refused our entreaties because we could not be trusted to keep our mouths shut. As it was, he made it to prison before we might have graduated from the 12th grade, but that is another story. Nonetheless, not being included in his customer base was, to us at least, outrageous.   

         When summer came, we would often sit on the sand in the shadow of the seawall at the far end of Carson Beach near by the Head House Spa and smoke cigarettes swiped from our parents and complain about our mistreatment while we gazed and appraised over the half-naked bodies of the older girls who used that section to get away from the oversight of the lifeguards at the ‘official’ beach. It was on one of those occasions that we smelled the tinctured aroma of burning pot in the air, a fragrance we were already familiar with from the various nooks and crannies around and about the Dorchester Heights monument immediately behind the high school, and we quickly scrambled to scout out the source.

         There was none that we could see. The plump and oiled bodies of a couple of dozen teenage girls, their Irish tans as pink as baby bottoms, were arrayed in the sunlight before us but there was not a sign of smoke other than a few cigarettes. Surcease Sullivan was there too, bursting the frill on the fabric of a bikini and with this excuse I took the chance to look at her a little more directly than I usually had the nerve to do. She caught that bit of study and looked directly back at me with a glare, as if I had no right to be interested in the exposed flesh of a fourteen-year-old. We all looked harder then for the source of the illicit aroma, each of us separately prowling amidst the colored towels and the dingy sand, like we were looking for pennies that might have been dropped. All we saw were cigarette butts and bottle caps. Then suddenly Zeph gave a ‘whoop,’ and motioned us back to the shadow of the seawall.

         “Look,” was all he said, and we all stared out over the water as he pointed. After about thirty seconds a pale cloud of smoke drifted from one of the sailboats moored in the bay. A green tarp had been fastened up over the empty boom for shade and no one could be seen there, but in the still air of that afternoon, with the boat rocking a bit too much against the tide, the evidence for what they were doing there lingered up around them before catching some invisible drift and wafting toward us on the beach.

         The plan was then made in seconds.

         We took turns keeping an eye on the craft until sundown, when two men and a woman dragged a bag of Narragansett empties into a dinghy that was tied at the far side, with the clink of the bottles ringing bell-like in the dusk, before they rowed away to the Boston Yacht Club. It was low tide that night. That meant that we could actually walk two-thirds of the distance to the boat in question. And there would be no moon until much later.

         This was some years before the harbor was finally cleaned, and at the time, the bottom was a mixture of a little sand, effluvia, debris, and undigested organic waste that felt like walking on shit, or as we imagined that feeling to be, especially as it squoze up between our toes. We were happy to swim those last yards, just to be free of the dark and sucking touch of it.

         Zeph, the thinnest of a thin scraggle of nearly naked boys, went up on the bow using the buoy rope. He pulled me up behind him and we all went in beneath the green tarp. Zeph had the candles and the Zippo. What we found were clear plastic bags of pot, and a box of rubbers and an unfinished bottle of Jack Daniels in the bulkhead.

         All of this, to our ten-year-old minds, was equivalent to a found treasure. Jimmy Green was the brain who cautioned us to simply take it away immediately and not smoke any of it there where we might be caught by the tide, or by the randy owner, returning. And we did that. In fact, there was something so nicely methodical about the business-like business of getting away with the loot that we became giddy without even having smoked our first joint. Pauley Brown had a garage at his house in which his father used to store items for his small convenience store as well as stuff acquired for next to nothing at the postal auctions (Mr. Brown had actually worked at the Post Office with my own father before being fired) and we had long been accustomed to using that place as a perfect ‘hideout’ to smoke cigarettes in bad weather. We carried our loot there, stashed it away in a corner, and went away to our respective homes before midnight.

         At this point I would like to report to you that we were found out by Pauley’s father or someone else and punished for our evil deed. But we were not. We smoked the weed over the next few weeks, and learned about the bite of the Jack Daniels’ dog, and divvied up the rubbers between us. (I never used mine. By the time I had an opportunity, I was worried they were too old and might break and threw them away.)

         I report the former episode simply to establish the time by which I had already taken a fairly open-minded stance to the use of drugs and how this was to affect my opinions on the matter later. Ten is a tender age for assumptions.

         My own reaction to pot was akin to my experiments with the rye my father kept in the cupboard. I fell asleep before I could gather enough evidence to write the details down. Afterward, I felt exhausted and was unable to do anything much for days. That one season I must have had the ‘summer flu’ half a dozen times. My mother was suspicious. My father was not. He knew.

         Toward the end of August he came into my bedroom one morning and told me, “Time to wake up. You’ve wasted your summer. Now that’s it. Go down to Tim and tell him you’re sorry for missing work again. Then come back and clean up the yard. When you’re done with that, I have some paint you can make good use of. You can see Mr. Zeph and your buddies again when school starts. Not before.”

         “I was just sick. Can’t I even be sick?”

         “Right. That’s why you’ll be staying home for the next two weeks. You’re going to get over it.”

         And that was it. No lecture.

         There were only a few of us who knew that Surcease Sullivan’s first name was not Circe. She had come up with that alternative name herself while still in grammar school and then proceeded to live up to her assumed identity at every opportunity, but when I first knew her she was still the more precisely alliterative Surcease and the pleasantly chubby red-headed sister of Donny Sullivan, who was a near neighbor on 6th Street. In keeping with that change of name, I know too that she never gave her parents the surcease they might have wanted when she was born in the midst of eight brothers and sisters. I assume her father had never discovered a good use for latex, or else his Catholic faith had made that solution impossible.

         Donny was okay. He was a bit quieter than me and I liked him well enough because he would listen to my reveries. But it was his sister who attracted me to their house at every opportunity. Though she was four years older, I was well aware of the physical changes that were taking place in front of my eyes.

         Donny and I were on the same Little League team. He could hit and I could run and between us we made one good utility player. Donny introduced me to the weird fantasies of Howard Philips Lovecraft and dark heroics of Robert E. Howard. I introduced him to the sea adventures of C.S. Forester and the Roman adventures of Rosemary Sutcliff and later to the derring-do and cloak and dagger of John Buchan. Donny was as chubby before puberty as his sister had been, but afterward he stayed that way, while her body fat rearranged itself. And it was that more visible truth, after Zeph moved away from the neighborhood and Donny’s house became the locus for my daily wanders from home, which brought me there. Knowing his sister was around inspired me more than a need for further literary discussion.

         I was thus a witness to a tragedy.

         The nineteen-sixties were quite cruel. The rebellion against authority was manifest in a thousand smaller revolutions. Sex and drugs were just the most visible part of that. My father’s realization of my own early profligacies resulted in a clamping down that greatly reduced my field of activities over the next years. I was suddenly not allowed to stay out after dark without a good excuse. Working odd jobs at the barbershop and the grocery became my one easy means to escape home. My television time was cut to an hour or less, depending on the night. Thus I turned more to the pages of the books I had found. And I suspect, given his belief that my reading habits had contributed to my deteriorating vision, that my father might have blamed himself a little for the result. I certainly did.

         But the Sullivan home was a different matter. Going over there was an acceptable alternative to hanging around at home, and, unlike Zeph, Donny was known to be fairly square in every visible way. (He was gay, but I don’t think my father had even considered that possibility at the time.) The place was a madhouse. All eight children, born two years apart almost like clockwork, were always in motion at once. The TV blared at all hours. Donny’s mother produced endless loaves of bread at lunch time and the largest jars of peanut butter then commercially available. I never ate dinner there that I can remember, but she had an iron pot on the stove which I was told had stew in it, and that moist smell of cooked celery and carrots and onions permeated everything in the household, year round. Mr. Sullivan worked at the Fore River Shipyard, doing I don’t know what.

         Circe would have graduated high school in 1961. But she did not.

         Her bedroom, on the third floor of their house, was no more than closet beneath the eaves, with a small window. I could see most of that window if I stood on a chair and looked out from my own bedroom between the chimney and the slanting roof at our house. I remember the yellow of it across the night, as a beacon. I can see that same window right this very minute, just by standing there, and it tells me I must have been a full foot shorter then than I am now. At least.

         I knew it was her window by some investigation, having gone up the backstairs from where Donny shared a bedroom with one of his brothers. My attraction to his sister was that strong. Because she worked afternoons when Donny and I were home from school, I knew she would not be around.

         But once, on a raining winter day just before Christmas, with the hall above nearly darkened, I crept up the stairs to look again into that narrow space as I had on several previous occasions. I don’t know what I might have been looking for other than just to see her things—magazines on the bed, lipsticks and combs jumbled on a small dresser. A picture of Elvis and another of the Everly Brothers.

         On that one day, having peeked around the open doorjamb, the covers beneath the magazines suddenly moved. She sat up.

         “What do you want?”

          “Nothing.”

         “You shouldn’t be up here.”

         Through the gloom then I saw that she was completely naked. The surprise froze me in place for an eternal instant.

          I said, “Sorry!”

         And ran away back down the stairs.

         That might have been the longest conversation I ever had with her. The image of her there, the flesh tones alive and warm even amidst the gray of the room, the curves real and three dimensional, moving with a bounce as she reached out and closed her door, was for me a gift of the ages.

         I first noticed that Circe was missing from the ranks at the Sullivan house sometime in 1964. Prior to that, I think she had been working at a beauty parlor but she was home most afternoons at five, ‘getting her make-up on’ to go out again. She was stunning, with or without makeup. She had her hair long enough then to turn up atop her head in mysterious wends and twirls. Her eyes flashed with a blue that seemed artificial. The line of her bust would have lowered the eyes of any man in the room. She was broad-hipped in a way that made pubescent boys like myself conjure endless pleasures. She seldom spoke to me, which is just as well, because in my experience many women have spoiled that illusion of perfect beauty in just that way.

         And in 1965, she was dead. A heroin overdose.

         Afterward, the stories about her grew wildly. They said she was pregnant when she died. They said she had become the girlfriend of some South Boston ‘punk hood’ (a redundancy in those days when most South Boston hoods did not live long enough to be much more than punks). But I don’t know any of that for a fact.

         What I do know is that Donny had previously given her his share of the pot we had stolen from that sailboat—as a Christmas gift, he said, but only in a mumbled excuse for not using it himself, I think. He was always and ever after that regretting any part he might have played in his sister’s tragedy. I told him he was wrong to think like that, but I have always and ever after believed in consequences.

***

8. Watson and the Shark

         “Watson is a magical name. ‘Watson, come here,’ was clearly said by Bell. ‘Elementary, my dear Watson,’ is an answer known too well. But then there’s the Watsons of IBM, and DNA to tell.”

         But for me, there is even more wizardry than that!

         Years before his invention, I was managing the fears I had for my own fate with the philosophies of Mr. Billington. A character apart. My own Montaigne. Always ready with the advice I needed to obtain. And always wise, even when he withheld his truths from me so that I might have the pleasure of discovering them for myself.

         As I say, this all began before I knew the man.

         Considering everything that happened to me in 1961, the most important thing of all occurred at the Museum of Fine Arts during a classroom expedition. And that was in turn because of something that happened to a cabin boy who had foolishly gone for a swim in Havana Harbor in 1749.

         After glassy-eyed inspection of dozens of portraits of distinguished citizens who appeared to us as dead as the still-life paintings hung between, I was not the only member of my class to stop cold and stare, as Miss Rule (this truly was her name) read from the entry in her pamphlet about a larger John Singleton Copley canvas called ‘Watson and the Shark’. The subject alone was arresting, and made cinematic by the size of the canvas. The pale naked body of a young man, foundering on his back, his long blond hair loose in the green waters, was about to be swallowed head first into the open maw of a great shark.

         But the parts of the composition begged to be studied. Above the rising shark, and the victim, a small open boat with nine people has arrived. Two of them, in the baggy white shirts of sailors of that time, are reaching for the flailing arm of the unfortunate swimmer. One is standing with his foot braced on the bulwark of the bow, grasping the pole of a grappling hook and about to plunge it into the beast. Three, seated at the center of the dinghy and another at the very fore, are attempting to row. A stout man is holding fast to the shirt of one of the two who are reaching out, and another figure is standing high to the other side, at the back of the action, observing and gesturing. Behind them on the raised horizon-line is an expanse of Havana harbor with ships at anchor. In the dark waters between, the wing of a seabird suggests another guest is coming to the feast.

         But our eyes that day were quickly drawn back to the gasping young Mr. Watson, and the small teeth of the shark with its beady eye turned toward him, then to the urgently extended fingers of the two pairs of reaching hands, and up again to the determined face of the fellow on the right, jaw clenched, and hair already flying back from his thrust with that grappling hook aimed harpoon-like down at the shark’s back. We pause longer on that, wondering if his strike will be true, or even enough. And then look behind him to the standing observer, a black man in a cream color frock coat, and on down once more to the two rowing sailors at the center of the boat, their backs to the scene, faces turned round to us but blank and trying to see over their own shoulders, perhaps unaware of the ghastliness. (Those two might be twins for the fact that they look so much alike.) The man furthest to the stern in a beige long coat and attempting to help with the rowing, has a look of hopeless concern. The man holding fast to the white shirt of one of the reaching rescuers is older, balding, and perhaps more angry than afraid. The single rower who is sitting well into the bow on the right is almost hidden beneath the legs of the man with the grappling hook. Uncomfortably so.

         The first reading of the painting in the eyes of a fourteen-year-old is one of a moment of adventure and peril. The scene is dynamic, with all of the action fashioned into a pyramid, the focal center at the top on the calm face of the black man balanced against the fierceness on the lighter face of the man to the right grasping the pole, down to the naked body of the swimmer and the shark at the base. Breathtaking.

         But fourteen-year-olds are a critical lot. We are just then reveling in our discoveries of hypocrisy, untruth, lies, and prevarication. We are not so easily persuaded by the subtle artfulness and lies of a painter when what we know is so much larger and fresh in our brains. We want certainty. Veracity. Authenticity.

         Grown up in the midst of a harbor we knew that the small boat could not be handled in the way shown and would be unbalanced by the weight of all those inside positioned so far forward, causing the stern to rise dangerously high instead. But if the rower in the bow had been moved back, he would have been unseen behind the bodies of others, and thus a lie was told for effect. The dangerous beasts of the earth are a primary focus of any boy and many girls, and we all knew a shark’s eye would not turn forward to see its prey. Another lie. The reflected light upon the seat is untrue and done again for effect.

         The painting is still one of my favorites, after more than fifty years. All that caviling has not survived the impact of that first sight, nor the many times I have seen it since, and stopped and stared, and reimagined the moment from my own store of conjured fears and anxious hopes.

         I know now that Brook Watson was an only child, had been orphaned at the age of six, and sent from Plymouth, England, to live with his uncle, a trader in Boston, Massachusetts. A mere eight years later he was cabin boy on a merchant ship in the West Indies, and it was there that he encountered the nemesis which would make him famous to other fourteen-year-olds in centuries to come.

         But the real Mr. Watson was to be renowned in his own right and not only for that bloody happenstance. One day he would be Lord Mayor of London, a Peer, a founding member of Lloyds, and a wealthy merchant. Having returned to Boston at the age of fourteen with a peg and only a single leg to stand upon, he found his uncle bankrupt and unable to support an invalid. Of necessity, that pale and drowning youth would soon be a soldier with a wooden leg.

         Those unlikely fortunes of a cabin boy were doubly inspiring to at least one South Boston kid, but not to be a merchant, or a sailor or a soldier, or a Mayor but to be a fabricator of such incident. And there are ironies to that kind of encouragement. The animus which possessed me was to be more like John Singleton Copley than Mr. Watson. To make such moments up in whole cloth from the threads of thought that entertained me. But in words, not in paint like my buddy Zeph.

         Mr. Copley had never been to Havana, nor ever seen a shark. He met Brook Watson years later when they were both well-off royalist-American expatriates living in London. He knew the power of chiaroscuro and cadmium yellow but was not familiar enough with boats to know the way they handled. But then, reconjuring that single moment in time, he had caught the imagination of those unforeseen teenagers two centuries later, just long enough in passing to suspend disbelief and allow an escape from the narrower channels of their own lives.

         On the bus home from the Museum of Fine Arts that day in 1961 the conversation amongst the gaggle of boys was all about the shark and Watson and not a word about the Rembrandts and Vermeers, or the Van Goghs, or anything else we had seen (perhaps a few elliptical comments about naked ladies, but nothing more than that because Miss Rule was there keeping watch). What an accomplishment! How could I want more attention than that?

         You must understand that making Watson the villain of that first published novel in the Mr. Billington series was not done lightly. It was simply an irresistible choice. His peg leg bumping on the cobblestones and thumping on the sidewalk boards was too perfect a way to announce the approach of danger. And if my Mr. Billington was to be a spy, he must have a worthy opponent.

         Understand, as well, that I have never liked villains who were truly evil. Not that they don’t exist. We have met enough of them. They are perhaps too painful to write about for someone such as myself who has been saved from the realities of their actions by circumstance and thus made only to imagine such beings. A reporter might tally cold facts as an impersonal exercise of historical recreation, but to write creatively about the actual human cost of monsters like Stalin or Mao is debilitating. At least to me it is, though I appreciate the need of survivors such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Nien Cheng to exorcise their demons in that way. Let the history be told. But I have never known such misery myself. Perhaps surviving such horrors does make one stronger at the broken places as Mr. Hemingway has said, but if you’ve never had to endure, does it mean you cannot imagine enduring?

         I must plead my case as a coward who cringes at the very sight of blood. As a privileged child of better times and places, I am not at all inured to it. I am not benumbed to that level of wickedness which can only depress me with horror. I have lived a fortunate life and never felt the ‘tooth of the wolf.’ My sorrows have always been within the bounds of the banal and the mundane. Thus I must invoke a mere figment of evil, having never seen its face, and this puts me to shame. Better to hide my ignorance beneath a show of the more common depravities, the viciousness of the everyday thug and the ordinary people who compromise themselves for small advantages. Having known such villains enough, I might find the degrees of that degradation more within my own abilities to write about.

         Watson is more of this kind. But perhaps worse than your neighbor who cheats on his taxes, he more actively seeks his chances. A hard businessman interested in results rather than means. A canny merchant like his uncle before him, he engages in the triangular trade of his day (in truth, a rectangular trade): sailing from Boston on the great current to England with furs and tobacco and rum to exchange for gold and silver, and from there south with the winds to Africa to buy slaves, thence west to the Indies to sell the slaves for sugar, and again north on the currents to the Carolinas and Boston to turn the sugar to rum and load once more with furs and tobacco. A rough trade. Much of it evil, but common enough in its time.

         The human cost of that business was kept well hidden from those Boston families who benefitted most by it, and few, like Watson, had ever ventured to the sources of the wealth they accumulated. Much as people today ignore the underlying cost of the toys they play with that are made in China. Always better in our own time to vacation in Amalfi than to tour a factory of fourteen-year-old workers in Shenzhen or Suzhou.

         But, of course, you understand, we are much better people now than they were then. Right?

         And this is the Watson I chose as my villain. Appreciative of his privileges, he is loyal to his King, and happy to inform the authorities about those in Boston who are fomenting rebellion. He has, in fact, set his eye on one in particular, a bookseller who, despite modest circumstances, receives regular shipments of books from all ports and appears to ship more than he receives. And yet, Watson’s secret inspections of the parcels bound for England on his own ships have turned up nothing.

         Watson pays regular visits to Mr. Billington, inquiring after this or that. The bookseller is garrulous but never careless. Though the blackguards Dr. Warren and the metalsmith Revere frequent the premises, Billington appears too innocent of their conspiracies. And the loyalist spy Dr. Church has already passed the information on that Billington is not a member of that supposed clan of snakes, ‘The Sons of Liberty.’ But that means little to such a wicked conspiracy.

         And that’s the sort of contest I can better handle.

         My Billington has already survived worse trials with the loss of the woman he loved, and, along with her, his best friend. His family history may make him suspect to some, as well as a previous charge of murder brought against him. But also, for his own part, he has always been wary of joining with others. He hasn’t his local childhood hero, Ben Franklin’s, natural friendliness, or the ability to affect that, so he has turned to the written word and the humor to be found in the commonplace. Bent on discerning the truth in things present and past, he has become something of a detective as well as an aphorist.

         For those who haven’t read it, perhaps one scene in the shop would do to explain, as Revere gives the very book to Billington that is to be shipped to their agent in England and used to reveal the secret cipher devised by Franklin and used between the rebels for the next months. It is in a volume chosen precisely because it was uncommon yet plain in appearance, and Dr. Warren’s corresponding copy was now safely put aside:

         Revere extended the psalm book to Billington in exchange for the penny that was their agreed code of acceptance, but stopped his hand midway, his eyes fixed suddenly on some mid-distance between them. Billington listened. The distant thumping against the boards fronting the near shops was enough caution, but the arrogant gait of it was the signature.

         Billington moved to raise the bar on the side door. “This way. You won’t have to deal with him if you go by the canal path by the mill.”

         “Good!”

         Revere raised his hat an inch in salute and went out the door without hesitation.

The thumping having grown louder, it now broke cadence suddenly as the walker came to the alley at the far side and then, with the ditch straddled, he began a quick crossing of the cobblestones, the iron cap on the hickory peg strapped to the stump of his left leg sounding more as if a hammer were striking a two-penny nail, right up to the bookshop door.

         The hesitation was brief, as if the man was listening for other sounds before the door opened abruptly behind a muscled hand. Mr. Watson ducked through the jamb and raised his hat immediately.

         “Good day, Mr. Billington! Has my book come?”

         The thick blond hair on Brook Watson’s head was fastened back in a bulbous queue and tied with a string of leather, not loose or fastened by a ribbon in the latest style. He was not a vain man, as he could be, given his success. His shoulders were half again wider than Billington’s and there was no stomach pressing at the buttons of his vest. He stood there with legs apart as if the floor might shift and heave with the swell of an ocean beneath. His eyes were a cold winter blue and could chill whomever they set upon if he were in the mood.

         Billington forced a smile against that. “No sir. As I said before, likely a week or more.”

         Watson waved dismissively into the air with his hand. “You could have sent to London in the time I’ve waited!”

         “The roads are dry but New York book dealers dislike catering to the Boston tastes. Perhaps you are correct and I should have sent elsewhere. But it is done.”

         “What else might you have instead for me to read?”

         “Ah, well! The new pamphlet from Samuel Johnson is in. Right off yesterday’s boat, it is. An exhortation to the electors of Britain to fulfill their inheritance I believe, but I haven’t read it so I may not comment.”

         “Fresh snake oil! Good! I’ll have that then for my wait . . . And what’s this?”

Watson’s hand dropped down to the table where Revere had left the slim volume he had delivered.

         Billington responded too quickly. “Nothing. Just a book of psalms.”

         “It’s old, I think!”

         Billington attempted to recover a calmer tone in his voice. “Done before either of us were born. In 1640 I believe. By Mr. Daye, in Cambridge then.”

         Watson leafed the pages.

         “Those fellows were a religious lot, were they not?”

         “Very.”

         “Said their prayers at every turn.”

         There was cynicism in the merchant’s voice.

         Billington averred. “Perhaps they had reason. But they had work to do. The prayers were salve for the blisters.”

         Watson smiled.

         “Better to sell books then, I think, or to manage trade from a desk, perhaps, like the two of us.”

         “You’ve done more in your life than that, I believe.”

         “A little. But it’s only the command of a desk I hold now.”

         Billington offered a skeptical smile, appropriate to such false modesty. “But one with drawers as deep as Guinea and China, I hear. You travel in your head each day more far than the most venturous of men.”

         Watson’s bushy eyebrows arose in revelation. “That is an insight you have on me then!” But there was concern on the man’s face as well, possibly over being understood in ways he would prefer to keep to himself. “Wrap the Johnson then and I’ll be on my way. And this . . .” He raised the psalm book into the air. “Perhaps a prayer will help me through these trying times.”

         Billington was caught for an excuse. “I don’t think—“

         Watson turned half away, uninterested in any refusal. “Reminds me, I need a bell repaired for the Montherlant. You haven’t seen that fellow Revere today? His shop is closed.”

         Billington wondered what the man might have seen. Had he followed Revere on the street?

         “As a matter of fact, he was just here! Rushed away saying he was late for something.”

         “Ah. Timing is everything, you know.” Watson paused, “But given enough time, everything can be yours,” and laughed this as if at a hidden joke.

         Suddenly, the side door opened and Revere stuck his broad head back in. His eyes immediately seized upon the Psalm book still in Watson’s hand.

         “Ah! Just the matter! I knew I’d left something behind!”

         Revere doffed his hat to them both as he entered and reached for the book.

         Watson pulled it back from the extended fingers. “I was just about to purchase this. But it’s good that you’ve come back. I need a ship’s bell repaired.”

         Revere nodded and smiled as he might to any unwanted customer.

         “Yes. Well, the bell is an easier matter. Leave it by at the shop and I’ll take care of it myself, though I am thoroughly tired of bells. To my alarm, I hear them now in my sleep. We have just completed the casting of three church bells in a row and testing them is the worse part of that, I’ll tell you—one bit of foam in the molten mix and the whole work is wasted. But the book, that I must have. It was my mother’s and I was only just here asking if Mr. Billington had another to give my son, because one of my daughters has already laid her hands on this one.”

         Watson’s frown turned the ends of his thick brows high. “It is yours, then?”

         “Yes. Look. My mother’s name is at the back of the title page. Deborah.”

         Mr. Billington nodded, “And I was about to say, that it was not my book to sell.”

         Watson turned the first pages, holding them at arms length to read the name inscribed. He said, “Ah well,” as he paged the remainder a moment more as if looking for something in the margins. “I suppose I have these prayers in some other book on my shelves already . . . Here it is.”

         He handed it over to metal-smith.

         Revere, “I’ll have your ship’s bell whenever you’re ready,” doffed his hat in thanks and quickly went out the door again.

         I greatly enjoyed the construction of my climax in that book, with Mr. Watson playing the shark instead, and Mr. Billington awash in other troubles of his own making, his fate finally in the hands of the recently fallen Dr. Warren and the busy Mr. Revere. But I think I enjoyed most the reaching back into a more innocent moment of my youth, to my old history teacher Mr. Pierce, so late in the game, and Miss Rule, and finding inspiration.

         And that book sold tolerably well.

***

9. Going Hemingway; on the sea of memory

         Generally speaking, I have no idea what I was doing as regards the opposite sex prior to turning sixteen. Though acutely aware of them and their shapes and sizes and colors and smells, I think I had been put off by one encounter or another highlighting the fact that I had ‘four-eyes’ and weighed less than a good lobster trap washed up on Carson Beach. Thus my few obsessions with the opposite sex until that time were mostly of an embarrassing nature and since forgotten or appropriately repressed, as in notes never taken on a journey never made.

         Mrs. Pierce, nee Hildred Lawrence, was like many teachers I have known. She had no children of her own. Probably all of thirty-eight years old at the time, she spoke and moved with the enthusiasm of a girl of twenty. She had potato eyes, small and darkly wrinkled and bright green at the center as if a bud of thought were about to sprout, but they were seemingly on all sides of her large round head and this allowed her to see everything that needed seeing. No chance to get away with a thing.

         Those small green eyes were set above broad cheeks that smiled readily, on a face parched by the fluorescent lights to a pale and blemished pink and white. She did not flush at the words and things she saw so much as splotch and stain. She sweated as freely as an athlete and easily darkened whatever fabric she wore. Her hair, thin and already marked by grey the first time I had her for a class, was cut fairly short and curled artificially so that on rainy days, by afternoon, there had been a general collapse of her morning’s artifice and what was left collected around her ears. In unnecessary embarrassment on those moist days, she would often pull her hat on long before it was time to leave. Worse, she did not have a bosom which would attract the eye of a sixteen-year-old boy, nor much of a curve that would define her hips.

         Yet, when, in June of 1964, she married Jacob Pierce, a history teacher I will mention again in reference to another matter, the whole event shocked us all. What could be the reason? Certainly not sex!

         The real problem with that shocking marriage was that half the boys in her Junior English Literature class, including myself, were in love with Miss Lawrence. Clearly this was not a matter of looks so much as personality. She was a sweetheart.

         Miss Lawrence’s first passion was hiking, which she did almost every weekend. She had managed to climb each one of the ‘Presidentials’ in New Hampshire at least once and daily referred to her experiences there to find a bit of juice for the dry text she was made to use in class. Incredibly, at least to the boys, she could shoot a gun, and did. She had shot a deer (more than one) skinned it, and eaten the remains. To this day, she is the only woman I have ever known who happily went hunting.

         Most astonishingly, this Bambi slayer and carnivore would say things like, “These are the freshets of the narrative on its way. Without them the story would become stagnant and stale. You have known its course from the start, and its destiny is the sea. These vignettes renew the text. They give that journey the color of life, and make the passage unique and a pleasure to be made.”

         If we had been more observant we would have noticed that Mr. Pierce came back to school on Mondays as splotched and mosquito bitten as his future wife. But, we were all well aware though that her second passion (I suppose, other than Mr. Pierce, but that was beyond our imaginings) was for the creative use of words.

         She said, “You will see that Nick Adams does not express his feelings. His emotions are implied by the landscape he observes. I want you to note that Mr. Hemingway breaks all the rules of good writing and then re-makes his own. Rivers are ‘big.’ How big? He leaves that for you to judge.”

         I raised my hand and she nodded at me.

         I stood, as she required of anyone who wished to speak in her class.

         “I don’t see why we should care how big the river is, and the only reason we know it has ‘two hearts’ is because of the title. ‘Nick sat down.’ ‘Nick walked.’ ‘Nick looked.’ ‘Nick watched.’ ‘Nick did not see.’ Nick is a pain. We don’t know who he is. Why should we care anything more about him than that river, unless maybe we’re a trout?”

         This was a much-calculated response. I had dreamed it up the night before, reading the assigned text and imagining a way to get Miss Lawrence’s attention.

         In that class we had those big Scribner’s paperbacks, used year upon year, that would lie out nearly flat on the desks and there was something impressive in the sight of all those books, on every desk, open to the same passage. From where I stood, they made a complimentary pattern of square white pages aside the winter-white Irish faces (some Polish, some Lithuanian, as I have previously noted) of the other students that were turned to me when I spoke. And that picture is magnified in mind just now, with Miss Lawrence at the front of it all, elbows bent and fingers clasped just below the negligible swell of her breasts. It was her voice, however, that betrayed her concern, never her face.

         “Nick is shell-shocked. He has just returned from the war. The author’s attention to the detail of the trout is part of Nick’s focus, a small grip on the reality of the present, in the midst of a world which has been burned away.”

         I objected. “But that’s not part of the story.”

         She said, “But it is context.”

         I said, “Shouldn’t the context be in the story?”

         She sighed. “Not necessarily. You can sit down now, Angus. I’ll try to cover that subject a little more later on.”

         This day was a supreme victory. She did indeed cover the subject later, though not to my satisfaction. But I had made her aware of my existence. I had given her reason to believe I had read the assignment and cared about what I read. Crucially, I had diverted her from calling upon me later with some surprise question that I might not have considered well enough in advance, or about which I might not have anything intelligible to say. Most importantly, she had taken note of me.

         But someone else had as well. Mary Ellen Radziute.

         The more subtle attractions of an older woman in that turning year of adolescence were for me soon displaced. My inconstant adult nature had begun to form. I was now to discover that love was not what they said it was.

         Ernest Hemingway used a shotgun to finish the most important job he thought he’d left unfinished in 1961—at least the last task he knew he could handle when all else was stolen from him. For a man who wrote so neatly, so cleanly, so precisely, he certainly used the wrong tool for this, which shows you, perhaps more than anything else I think, that he was crazy at the time.

         I first read about Hemingway’s death in Life magazine, while at Tim’s barbershop. I was just turned fourteen. I remember standing in the midst of the close Saturday crowd on that moist and raining summer day with broom in hand, reading the entire article. The only funny thing about this is that I also remember very well my reaction at the time: I wondered why no one had told me.

         Already then I had the man’s picture on the wall in my small third-floor bedroom. He was the writer’s writer and if I wanted to be a man like that, I had to have some icon for the fact. Though I was born the same month as Hemingway, which was also the same month that he died, in truth, I readily admit, that is about as much as we ever had in common.

         I stopped wanting to write like Hemingway very early on. Perhaps you noticed.

But that does not entail my regard for him.

         Nor does the fact that he stuck his favorite twelve-gauge shotgun in his mouth and blew out the brains that troubled him. It was within his rights to do so. We can only argue whether it was the responsibility of those who cared for him to keep it from happening. Or whether he was mean for having left this mess for his wife Mary to clean up after him. Hindsight certainly offers alternatives.

         I have a lot to say about Hemingway, most of which I will keep to myself. For instance, I am well aware that he had survived numerous concussions and this by itself might have caused some sort of dementia. Possibly. Certainly he knew what would be left from his final act for Mary to find, crazy or not, and perhaps this was an act of madness done more in anger at what he realized had actually become of himself. But I will mention a couple of other things I think are worth noting here along the way.

         I believe the man may have been suffering a severe depression due to the effects of hemochromatosis, a hereditary liver disorder common among people of Celtic origin especially, that causes an over supply of iron in the blood, and this then poisons other organs, including the brain. The disease exacerbates liver problems, as well as diabetes, high blood pressure, joint pain, heart disease and, importantly, depression. Though it was not then proved to be genetic, it was known that Hemingway’s father suffered with it, and he had also shot himself, as did his grandfather before him. Both his brother and sister committed suicide as well.

         The exact effects of the disease may be debated, but one matter cannot be disputed. Blasting the brain with a jolt of electricity will not cure it any better than using lead shot. Because he was acting erratically, the brilliant doctors at the Mayo Clinic administered electroshock therapy to Hemingway as many as 15 times, essentially, in effect, for a liver disorder which had already been diagnosed. And even though they knew about this underlying issue. Or in spite of it. And the doctors did this, twice, within a few months, to a man for whom memory was the most important tool.

         No matter what the disorder was, electroshock is a treatment which, along with bloodletting for bad humours and the administering of Ritalin to ‘hyperactive’ children (i.e., children who are not doing what they are told) and lobotomies for adults who are not co-operative, and the aborting of inconvenient children, and euthanasia for the unwanted aged, will quite justly be written about in years to come as sad proof of how primitive our society was. (Though, ironically, bloodletting would have been one of the few treatments useful for the effects of hemochromatosis.)

         In important ways, as medical practice has been subsumed by technology, what we think of as the practice of ‘medicine’ today has greatly degenerated from the age of Hippocrates. As a proof, here is just a portion of that ancient oath: “I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone. I will give no deadly medicine to any one if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; and similarly I will not give a woman a pessary to cause an abortion. But I will preserve the purity of my life and my arts. I will not cut for stone, even for patients in whom the disease is manifest; I will leave this operation to be performed by practitioners, specialists in this art. In every house where I come I will enter only for the good of my patients, keeping myself far from all intentional ill-doing and all seduction and especially from the pleasures of love with women or men, be they free or slaves. All that may come to my knowledge in the exercise of my profession or in daily commerce with men, which ought not to be spread abroad, I will keep secret and will never reveal.”

         This quote was copied by me in my school notebook in 1962 as I walked the long way home from school past a display on the history of medicine in a drugstore window. That our technology has permitted us to advance the practice of medicine despite a general failure of philosophy ‘in our time’ speaks well of our creativity, not our morals.

         The year before I graduated from high school—the same fateful year I had Miss Lawrence as a teacher, and then, chimerically and chameleon-like, transferred my affection from her to Mary Ellen Radziute—I remember reading Hemingway’s memoir of his early years in Paris, A Movable Feast. That book was the last he had finished, written just before his suicide. And one more odd thing happened then that I puzzled over for the first time: how he might he have felt about what he could not remember—what was forgotten—more than what he was able to recall. What prompted this curiosity in the mind of a raw youth, I have no idea. My few surviving notes don’t say. But that’s a particular cause that I have come to better understand today.

         I suppose I am blessed for having kept so many of my own rough scribbles and recollections through the years, and by the fact that my parents kept this house, so that those first and fresh recollections might not be thrown out as they so often are in this movable lunch of a itinerant and disposable society we live in today, so that I might now spend more time leafing through unsorted papers and trying to catalog the written piece about a past event rather than possibly confronting the truer memory of the happening itself. A mixed blessing.

         Better, I think, to try and re-remember the thing as Patrick Leigh Fermor had to do when he wrote A Time of Gifts, not as whole cloth, but as the bright and starry days and nights from his own journals, rediscovered on the rafters of a barn loft, after being lost on his own peripatetic journey, and that now will live forever in his work, so that we can know the soul that Fermor was, not only as a foolish and brave boy who got to light out for the territory of his own time, but as an aging man recalling the better youth he was, and the better place that had once been; and because he wrote it down, and then, because it could not be forgotten even when lost, he wrote it down again.

         Obviously, if we had computers, I would have been saved this inconvenience of recollection. But just as often today, on my way through bundles no longer held tight by their desiccated rubber bands, I will see some other pressed-rose of a matter, stiffened and browned, loosened petals lacking the lurid color of memory, but still with thorns that hook to the skin of my fingers and I must disengage from that before I continue, or else alter my direction to suit the new priority. Yet to me that engagement often feels as if it is just as well. A proof of my existence—that I am not merely a figment of my own imagination, but that I once had been; and not some sort of a Flatland figure trapped on the endless journey along a Mobius strip as depicted in an Escher print. Or is that a visual redundancy of some sort?

         The writer’s oath (as hypocritical as any by Hippocrates), is, I think,‘God dammit,’ much as it is the plumber’s or the auto mechanic’s when leaks persist, thumbs are bruised, or bolt threads ruined. It is a declaration of the injustice and meant to be heard by higher authority. Short, and to the point. No apologies. No pledges that might interfere with the creative impulse. No need to worry about the harm done, even perhaps about the harm others might do to you for touching on the truth. (They cut off heads these days for doing that, and in ancient times were made hemlock beverages.) Still, there are no promises made. You cannot guarantee to tell the truth you do not know, nor suppose that you might cure the ills of society you have not suffered. Society treasures its ills, anyway, or it would do away with them. It’s why they like to read about them, and watch them portrayed in movies. Your play as an author is in exposing the carbuncle to view, be it an abscess or a gem. For the interest alone. To do no harm, you would need to avoid exposing the flesh to air or the rough dome of garnet to light. Both need cutting to be cured or made better. Incision releases the ill humors but might trouble the nose as much as facets may release the imprisoned light to dazzle the eye.

         Enough of that! It is not your curse to suffer. Authors are all masochists. The point is this: it’s a job, like any other. And making more of it is up to the author.

***

10. Mary Ellen, love is not what they say it is

          I should have married Mary Ellen Radziute. Certainly her father thought so.

         Even allowing for my own Dad’s height, her father was, at least to me, enormous. A Lithuanian man, Mr. Radziute had come to America after the War with his parents but managed to retain a strong accent and a fairly small vocabulary of clipped English words which he had first learned living in an Italian neighborhood and which he spoke quickly in a sort of hatcheting cadence, all of which added to his fearsome image. He was a bricklayer by profession, at least six foot four, broad shouldered, and cast a weather-like shadow wherever he went. Mary Ellen, thankfully, looked more like her mother, tall and green-eyed and nearly blond. (Yes, many of the girls I fell for were green-eyed, you will see.)

         She and I had begun secretly dating by October of that junior year. I can’t tell you now how this began, but it was April before I managed the courage to walk her all the way home. Shortly afterward, Mary Ellen told me her father wanted to see me. Someone in the house, probably her mother, had observed me from the window.

         This is an event, the memory of which still tightens all the sphincters in my body.

         I put on a clean pair of jeans and a new shirt my mother had bought me at Jordan Marsh for Christmas but had remained in the package until that very occasion so that the creases were definitive. The day chosen was a Saturday, a half-day for her father, who would be home from work by the appointed hour. I remember choosing the time myself because the Red Sox would be on and give us a distraction if there was a lag in conversation, if some conversation were required—and Sunday, the alternative, was out of the question. On a Sunday I would have to go to Church with them or stay for the large midday family meal, which I did in fact, happily, on several later occasions.

         Mary Ellen should be described.

         She was not a beauty then. She was simply pretty. She was smart. And she had early on developed those attributes which a boy of my age felt to be more important than any others. Her ambitions in life, or at least the ones she expressed to me, were fairly straightforward. She wanted a big family. At least as large as her own. She had three brothers and four sisters. These numbers, given my own smaller clan, appeared to me enormous and beyond any reckoning.

         Our first date, the autumn before, had been a walk to Sullivan’s for frappes and hamburgers, purposely steering clear of the closer Head House Spa to avoid any comments from friends who were more likely to be hanging around there, and then a slow stroll around Castle Island. We had talked often enough before that, of course. Mostly about a movie or some event of the moment. But that day of our first official date I had waxed on poetically, I thought, about the wonders of New York City, as this happened shortly after one of my attempts to run away from home and that first taste of mighty Gotham had already resulted in an altering of my genetic code. Given that Mary Ellen was in Miss Lawrence’s English class with me, I’d already confided to her my desire to be a great and famous novelist. In retrospect, I suppose I did almost all the talking. And for whatever logic that overwhelms the reasoning power of a sixteen-year-old girl’s mind, she listened.

         Perhaps that was the cause of first attraction. A girl can predictably capture the ego of any young fellow, along with the id, by simply listening, or appearing to.

         I took her to several movies downtown that winter. I kissed her during the first one and cannot to this day recall what the movie was. She was in fact the first girl I had ever kissed outside of family requirements. We had taken to doing quite a lot of kissing by the following spring and that first meeting with her father.

         He was sitting on the stoop when we arrived. I could see him all the way from the corner, sitting there, and though I was certain he saw us, he did not turn from his chore of removing the dirt from beneath his fingernails with a short pocketknife.

         Their house was not much larger than ours, and connected to another at one side, which they owned but rented out. Indoors our homes matched almost exactly. Even to the picture of John F. Kennedy in the dining room. The biggest difference between the two houses was that her father had encased the entire first floor with a facade of yellow brick. It was most impressive. A veritable castle, I thought.

         Mr. Radziute was still in his work clothes when we arrived.  He did not offer his hand in greeting.

         He looked at his daughter and said, “Mama wants you about something.” And he hiked his thumb toward the door behind him.

         Mary Ellen took a large breath and disappeared.

         I was still standing on the sidewalk. The jeans were loose enough to hide the shiver of my kneecaps, but I remember having a facial tic that would have suited Humphrey Bogart more than myself.

         He said, “Whad’a ya doin’ there?”

         I said, “Not much.”

         He said, “Nothin’ much? Nothin’ at all.  Sit down.”

         I said, “Yes, sir.”

         I sat on a lower step where there would be some room between us, but sadly, well within the reach of his right arm.

         “You like my Mary Ellen?”

         “Yes, sir.”

         “Good. She’s a good girl. She is. B’d I wanna see her stay that way ’til she pick herself a good fella and she wanna get married.”

         This statement told me several things, the most important of which was that Mr. Radziute did not yet know the unfortunate truth. Mary Ellen and I had already gone way too far toward the imperatives of wedded bliss.

         I said, “Yes, sir.”

         “Wad’aya gonna do?”

         There were two ways to take this question. One would refer directly back to the unfortunate fact of my premature relations with his daughter. The other, to my mind, was a perfect misdirection.

         I said, “I plan to be a writer.”

         He straightened, sniffed at the air as if at a passing stink, sat back about six inches, and looked down the length of his considerable nose at me. The nose had been broken at some time in the past, and took a small deviation or two on a path to the end, but it was still pointed at me.

         He was not to be misdirected. “When you wanna get married?”

         I was still sixteen, a fact he must be aware of, so I assumed I could offer him a very rough date for the yet unproposed event which might fall sometime after graduation from High School.

         I said, “Maybe a couple of years.”

         Without missing a beat, he said, “Make sure you don’t put your dick where it don’t belong until then.”

         I think my whole body flinched. I cannot to this day remember what words exited my mouth. I suppose I said, “Yes, sir.” It would have been the safest thing.

         With that, he got up, the bulk of him blotting the light of the sky, and went into the house.

         I wandered home like a kicked dog.

         But in writing about this occurrence several times in later years, I have always suffered with the thought of what Mr. Radziute had observed down the length of that great nose.

         At sixteen I was already over six feet tall, but I weighed well less than 150 pounds. I was sporting long hair by that time, because it was the fashion, and my glasses were large and black rimmed in the style of the late Buddy Holly. I had started to shave more out of desire than need. I could not have been impressive. Mr. Radziute’s daughter, on the other hand, already looked like she could mother an army.

         Mary Ellen was cast in a dozen major fictional roles by me in the following years, often filling the Capraesque part of a Jean Arthur admonishing her man to do more, or less, to risk all, or not, and often won her hero in the end (that is, if he survived his own stupidity). She was a perfect steady foil to intemperate action and foolish endeavor. Where my character was habitually leaping to conclusions and thus causing occlusions, her hand was often the one extended for comfort.

         The single most remarkable characteristic about Mary Ellen, given her generosity, kindness and intelligence, is that she has no sense of humor. I attributed this one genetic trait to her father. All the other qualities I was instantly fond of, including her looks, had just as clearly come from her mother.

         And because I was always given to taking myself too seriously, my only defense has always been to attempt lightening this mix with the ridiculous.

         Once, she asked me, “If you are not going back to college, what will you do?”

          “I thought I would go to France.”

          “You can’t speak French.”

         “I’ll learn when I get there.”

          “You have no money. You can’t even afford a movie ticket.”

         “I thought I’d swim.”

         “It’s too far.”

          She would listen to any idea I had for yet another project, as if the previous proposal had been totally forgotten (yet she already knew that I seldom gave up on anything, no matter how outrageous).

         “I think I’d like to go to California.

         “You might need to get another pair of shoes if you do.”

         This was not a non sequitur. I had already said I wanted to walk. As of yet, I had not read Patrick Leigh Fermor and his walk across Europe in 1932. It was my own idea. Or perhaps, something acquired from the pages of National Geographic, wedged between photographs of naked native beauties. Shoes were simply Mary Ellen’s first thought—not how long it would take, or the route I was thinking of. I suppose she knew I would tell her all that as well if she just waited a moment. But I seldom budgeted for shoes.

         She asked, “What would you do in France?”

         “I’ll sit in a sidewalk café and pretend to write and watch the people go by.”

         “How will you pay for your food, or for rent?”

         “I would have to find a mistress, for that, I suppose. An older woman perhaps. Someone rich. I’ve heard that French women are enchanted by the way American men speak.”

         “Well, you have the talking part down, but I think you have the thing backwards. Isn’t it American men who are enchanted by the way French women speak?”

         “Maybe. I might have gotten that mixed up. But in the movies, Frenchmen are always trying to act like Humphrey Bogart or James Dean. Maybe that’s what they like. I’ll act like Humphrey Bogart.”

         “You’ll need horn-rimmed glasses. That’s what he wore in that movie, wasn’t it?”

         “I think so.”

         “And a hat with a wide brim you can turn up in the front.”

         “I’ve already got one of those.”

         “At least the glasses then.”

         “I need a new pair anyway.”

         “But you won’t get much writing done – just pretending and sitting in a café all day.”

         “I’ll do that at night.”

         “But you’ll be busy sleeping with your mistress then. You won’t have time.”

         “I’ll wake up early.”

         Just as I cannot tell you precisely when my infatuation with Mary Ellen began, I cannot tell you when it seemed to end. Mostly, I think, it was a matter of the time between. Absence is supposed to make the heart grow fonder, and I know that I thought of her nearly every day, but I always had other fantasies to pursue. Things to do. And women were a mystery to me that I desperately wanted to solve. I could not comprehend their motives unless I pretended that they were the same as my own. But on the face of it, that was absurd.

         After I left South Boston, our visits became less frequent. Mary Ellen was in school and away from home as well. And later she was living on her own in Weymouth with a roommate. Time then simply passed, too full of itself to account for now. But I remember very clearly seeing her during that Christmas of 1967. An awkward visit. We went out together like a couple of strangers.

         Lacking funds, the date was not elaborate. We ate Italian food in the North End, drank too much espresso, and then I walked her all the way back. I cannot remember if it was cold, but I do recall holding her hand then, better than anything else I did or said. And as usual, I did most of the talking as well. Perhaps more so because she in turn was quieter still than she usually was. I gave her a toy I had bought at Macy’s in New York. It was a monkey, caught between two sticks by string. It climbed and swung if you manipulated it just right. I cannot tell you why I chose that thing other than to say it made me laugh. I wanted to make her laugh too. And she gave me a book of poetry.

***

11. My curriculum vitae and the ossuary of truth.

         Adversely, when I turned eighteen, I tried to enlist in the Marines. My father had been in the Navy, and going for the Marines was an act to do him one better, I think. I often wonder what would have become of me if the Marines had had their way for four years or so. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your point of view concerning my career, I was rejected. I was technically blind without my glasses, had mild asthma, and several food allergies, as well as a police record for stealing a car. To my father’s everlasting disgrace, I was issued a 4-F draft classification.

         Instead, I went to college. At the insistence of the dean at South Boston High, Mr. Cunningham (who saw no hope for me otherwise), I had applied at the University of Massachusetts and been previously accepted. It was the easy option. U Mass was, at that time, a hotbed of public dissent and mostly private premarital sex. Marxism was in the air like pollen. With my allergies, I did not last long.

         The progressive mind of the moment was that dissent was fine in the streets, but not to be condoned in the classroom. By October I had established on-going arguments with the instructors in three subjects—American History, English Literature, and Political Science—all of whom signed a letter at the end of the semester suggesting I was not yet mature enough for a college environment.

         I had jobs then as well—two, actually. One was in a bookshop just off campus, unloading boxes of assigned texts and stocking shelves, and the other in the cafeteria cleaning up the messes on tables and floor left by my middle-class betters. I managed to feed my mind with a staff discount on books while feeding my body from the hot-trays at the serving counter that remained half-full after lunch hours had ended. In the evening I took advantage of the pre-marital sex offered.

         The arguments with the instructors appear to my mind now to be rather innocent.

         Surely, I said, in ‘American History/Origins,’ the tribes from Europe who invaded North America and largely  displaced those who had been here previously were doing much the same as those ‘native Americans’ were doing to each other, with the Comanche slaughtering the Navaho and the Navaho slaughtering the Hopi, Iroquois slaughtering the Delaware and Huron slaughtering the Iroquois. The tear in the eye of the aged TV Indian for all the natural beautyy that his people had lost (a sentimental image in a television commercial popular at the time) was not so different than what a Highlander might have felt for the picturesque ancestral home in ruins as he gazed over grazing sheep during ‘the clearances,’ nor the Irish Catholic harvesting rye on land that once belonged to his kin, but now was used to pay the rents on a London townhouse for a Protestant. This argument was not made to ignore the brutality of the European invader, but to recognize in context the savagery of the age. The French, who in class were being praised for their kinder relations toward the Indians, were quite busy at the time slaughtering Huguenots by the thousand on the streets of Paris. It appeared to me that racism, though always real, was less important than the more common bigotry of human stupidity and meanness.

         Rather than argue the matter, the instructor assigned me the task of writing something about it for a paper, and to otherwise keep my mouth shut.

         My English instructor was quite taken with the work of Shakespeare. Fair enough. I was too. But his harping on social themes hidden in the text at the expense of the poetry made an easy target and I was moved to note in class that ‘Shakespeare,’ the man, was likely an ill educated actor who had benefited from a chance acquaintance with the Earl of Oxford who in turn, under severe Royal scrutiny, needed an outlet for his own compulsive writing. There was no evidence that the Shakespeare of Stratford himself could sign his own name twice in the same way, much less fluently speak several languages and read Boccaccio in the original, nor gain access to the inner working of the Royal Court. I had only recently then found a copy of an old volume at the Brattle Bookshop in Boston by John Thomas Looney and discovered his thesis concerning Edward de Vere.

         I might just as well have thrown a bag of feces, if you could have seen the instructor’s face. This matter was settled! There was no room for argument. Where did I get such a preposterous theory? Well then, wasn’t the idiot’s name sufficient? Looney, for Christ’s sake!

         But, I objected, it was far from settled. This Shakespeare, the man, did not even see to it that his own daughters were able to read or write, nor could his wife have read his plays. Most of the population of England at the time was illiterate. Actors were notoriously poor, looked down upon, and beholden to rich benefactors, yet Shakespeare retired from the stage in midlife, a wealthy man.

         The instructor was not interested. I was.

         My political science instructor was quite taken at the time with the ‘Great Leap Forward’ and the revolution of Mao Zedong in China. She more than suggested a similar restructuring of American society was in order. I asked if she then favored a similar dictatorship here that could enforce such radical changes. To her credit for honesty, she actually said ‘yes,’ but softened the answer with the vague notion of a ‘popular dictatorship’ which might wrest control of the economy from the capitalists and American elites.

         This same professor was later a great proponent of the ‘Cultural Revolution’ if I remember correctly. A true ‘people’s revolution,’ she said in an article in a national magazine the following year. But that first and only September of my college career I asked about the many reports concerning mass starvation in China. She said this was American propaganda. The conversation went downhill from there. Thankfully, unlike the other two instructors, she had the pleasant habit of lowering her voice when she was angry. I at least appreciated that.

         After the first semester, I spent half an hour in January arguing with a dean over whether I should be dismissed or not. My grades were good enough, true, but I had been labeled a disruptive influence. This argument I won, temporarily. I was allowed to remain in Amherst until May, pending a second review. I can remember very clearly, at this moment, the great happiness I felt as I left that dean’s office. I actually let out a whoop. The eyes of half a dozen desk-sitters turned my way. Most of them were women and I couldn’t express aloud to them the cause of my joy. It was, of course, that the extracurricular sex would continue.

         A deal of my own disagreements in life are petty (perhaps most, in truth), involving matters such as the grammatical use of ‘that’ and ‘which,’ and cautions about the limits of clauses, rather than life or death. For all that of which I am accused, I don’t actually enjoy argument. Being attacked personally for the act of even considering an idea in writing, much less believing it, is dispiriting. Even exhausting. Too easily, I become emotionally involved in the process. As much as I love discussion, the art of actual conversation appears lost today. And for that reason I dreaded going to classes that spring. I could not sit quietly. So I became preoccupied with alternatives.

         Janik Nazaryan was my roommate at college that first and only year of my ‘higher education.’ He was a music major, studied composition, and aspired then to be a composer rather than a musician or teacher.

         His was a profession of love for a particular act of creation that I had never properly encountered before. Prior to this, my only real contact with music was what played incessantly on the radio and most of that I found both ridiculous and repetitive. The love songs were nice enough if you didn’t listen to the lyrics—lyrics that were banal at best but repeated again and again as if they were the essence of some truth the performer was trying to convince himself of as much as the listener. My favorite music as an eighteen-year-old arriving at the college was what I had heard at the movies. I thus believed that Maurice Jarre’s score for Lawrence of Arabia was the finest achievement in music known to mankind. Miklos Rozsa’s musical soundtrack for Spartacus was close behind.  

         After being rejected by the Marine Corps, I had barely gotten the final and necessary paper work in on time for admission to the University of Massachusetts.  ‘Unfortunately’, I was informed by letter, all regular dorm space had been allotted, and I would have be placed in ‘overflow’ housing . . . What I got was the former parlor to a mansard-roofed Victorian on North Pleasant Street. Compared to the best of the regular student accommodations, modernist ‘hives’ of cement and glass, it was a palace. Twenty-by-twenty, with twelve-foot ceilings and a non-functioning fireplace faced with a white marble mantle that gave the entire affair an elegance far beyond anything I had ever known before in my life.

         Two beds and two dressers had been left for us. The pale green walls smelled of recent paint and the yellow pine wood floor glowed with wax. I took one side of the room and Janik the other.

          We had arrived at the same moment, after sitting in a hallway near the admissions office with our belongings piled around us and other students coming and going with difficulty over our obstructions. A Junior finally appeared and took the sheet of paper we had each been given to complete and led us out the door and down the sidewalk, trailing like a couple of refugees hobbled by our belongings. I don’t remember the Junior offering to carry anything but he did appear impatient at our slow progress. I had a duffle, a suitcase, a backpack, and a grocery bag full of food packed by my mother. My father had left me in front of the admissions office at six o’clock that morning and driven back to Boston and to work.

         Janik had two suitcases and a trunk. He dragged the trunk by a handle on the cement because it was too heavy to lift. The hog-like sound of it echoed from every upright surface we passed.

          Once inside, the Junior handed each of us a single key and another sheet of paper, said, “Follow the instructions on that,” and left. Both of us stared at the room a moment in total silence. It was not what either of us expected. We each wondered aloud if there had been a mistake. Then we both barked a laugh, flipped a coin, and took our sides. I remember well that, simultaneously, we leapt upon our bare mattresses, lay on our backs, and giggled like little boys.

         There were minuses to the place, but those were insignificant. The high ceiling took all the heat from the radiators so we ran a table-fan almost continuously for the winter. The hot water in the bathroom ran out after about five minutes, so showers were quick and were taken at opposite ends of the day (I took the mornings). We were not expected to use the kitchen that still remained in the old house, but the students in the other rooms all did, so we joined in that until the dirty dishes in the sink made it inaccessible. The cafeteria was almost ten minutes away. We set up a hot plate on a dresser for coffee and tea and whatever. Most of the school year we were able to keep milk just outside the window until a neighborhood cat discovered the bounty.

         Janik had a small wardrobe in one of his suitcases, the trunk contained books and records, but it was his other suitcase that changed my life. For it was not a suitcase at all. It was a KLH Model 11 portable stereo record player with detachable speakers. I think I was still on my back when Janik suddenly got up, opened the magic suitcase, and put on the first record. That piece was The Mysterious Mountain by Alan Hovhaness.

         I had never thought in a musical idiom. My love for Maurice Jarre was inextricably linked to the visual images created by David Lean and the vicarious emotional experience of living through a T. E. Lawrence who was more Peter O’Toole than ‘Lawrence of Arabia‘ in the first place.

         Janik’s love of music was a radix—a root to his cultural past. I am not sure if, until that moment, I even knew what an Armenian was. More importantly, this was ‘classical’ music, the musty stuff found in the back room of the record shop. Now, with the door opened, I went through.

         Actually, I lay there without moving and saying little other than my initial question, “What is this?”

         In that one trunk, Janik had the Martha Argerich piano recordings of Chopin, the Gershwin Rhapsody played by Gershwin himself, Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto played by van Cliburn, and lots of Beethoven and Brahms, Schumann, Rachmaninoff, and Prokofiev. Because of Janik’s major, much of it was piano music and thus very accessible to someone like myself. I have been in love with Martha Argerich ever since. I did not know that ahead of me were affairs of the violin with Anne-Sophie Mutter and lately Janine Jansen, or of voice with Renee Fleming and finallyAnna Netrebko. In memory, that year was lived against a soundtrack by Beethoven, Brahms, and Chopin. Only later did I learn to truly appreciate Rachmaninov or discover the Scandinavians I relish so much today. And to think that Mahler was still ahead of me! An ode to spring, the eighth symphony by the German composer Joseph Joachim Raff plays on my computer as I write this.

         Such a list is necessarily incomplete. In the case of discovering music, it is worse than that. Despite my own specialty, I cannot conjure words to explain the first hearing (or the hundredth) of Rachmaninoff’s third piano concerto as translated by the hands and spirit of Martha Argerich, so I won’t go on about it here. The importance to note is that this discovery of joy in a medium for which I had then no preparation, and still to this day no true rational comprehension after so many years, is humbling. If I cannot begin to explain the effect of the Sibelius violin concerto on my brain, how am I to explain the other emotions which have driven so much of my life?

         But despite his fabulous gift, I was to expel Janik from our rooms on a number of occasions—the first time only a couple of weeks after our arrival. Mary Ellen had called on a Friday and announced that she was coming. She was working part-time at Filene’s Basement by then and enrolled at UMass in Park Square, but given the number of State holidays in Massachusetts, she was often free to visit. I suppose Janik’s patience with this was helped by the fact that his own girlfriend was still back home and offered him an appropriate destination.

         At this moment then, the aesthetic mind in me was torn, not to shreds, but at least apart. Suddenly I was made even more greatly aware of the near infinite variety of human pleasures. And coupling with sex and music, there was film.

         Despite the years of preparation spent in the dark at the Strand and Broadway theatres in South Boston, I will readily admit that my real seduction by and longer affair with film truly began during that same first year at college. In fact, I can testify, it began precisely the last week in September 1965, on a Friday night, some time after 8:30 pm.

         There is, or was, very little to do in Amherst on a weekend. Mary Ellen appeared with her small leather-cornered suitcase and called me from the Student Union. Rather, she called the single phone in that temporary dorm, which was a pay phone in the hall, and this was answered by a fellow upstairs who was waiting to hear from his own date and practically broke his leg getting down to answer the ring. I was already used to ignoring it.

         After settling things with Janik, who had decided it was best to take the bus on an unscheduled visit home, I opted for spending what little money I had on a feast at the most exotic restaurant within walking distance, The China Seas. I had previously noticed an AV club poster at the Student Union for the movie of the week, The Big Sleep, and never having seen it before, that sounded perfect then for my intentions with Mary Ellen.

         There is an important corollary to the axiom that people will not listen to what they do not want to hear, and that is they will not observe what they do not want to see. But there is an associated proposition that has gotten the better of me: that you will most often discover new things when you least expect it. If you are looking for something new, you are more likely to choose according to what is most familiar instead. But, like the moment when Janik put the Hovhaness Mysterious Mountain on the record player, what happened at the AV club that night was transforming. At least it was to me.

         Mary Ellen did not understand the plot of the movie. She thought Humphrey Bogart looked too old for Ms. Bacall. She thought the movie was too long. And there I was, wishing that it would never end.

         This was accomplished almost as if by misdirection. Funny moments. For instance, early in the film and to get out of the rain, Bogart had just run into a second-hand bookshop across the street from the object of his sleuthing, and there meets Dorothy Malone, a comely bookseller. Never have I ever met a bookseller quite as gorgeous. But naturally she was hiding her talents behind thick-rimmed glasses (appealing enough to me), with her hair pinned back. Superman was able to effect much the same seamless disguise by wearing glasses and a gray business suit.

         Bogart sees that he must wait awhile as he keeps an eye out through the front window of the bookshop for the suspect across the street, and after a few good moments of repartee with Malone, during which she aptly describes the suspect for Bogart, he makes an offer she couldn’t refuse.

         Bogart: You’d make a good cop.

         Malone: You gonna wait for him to come out?

         Bogart: Yeah.

         Malone: Well, they don’t close for another hour or so.  It’s raining pretty hard.

          Bogart: I got my car. [He looks over at her again ] That’s right, it is, isn’t it?  You know it just happens I got a bottle of pretty good rye in my pocket.  I’d a lot rather get wet in here.

         Malone: Well . . . [She locks the door to the shop and flips the sign over to ‘CLOSED.’]  Looks like we’re closed for the rest of the afternoon. [She takes off the glasses and pulls the pins from her hair.]

         My jaw dropped. I was breathing an air I had never known before.

         And I wanted to own my own bookshop as well.

         Later Bogart is talking to Lauren Bacall in a bistro. He has expressed an interest in her that goes beyond the case he’s working on. She clearly feels the same, but is wary of his involvement. They begin dealing words of innuendo like cards in a poker game.

         Bacall: Well, speaking of horses, I like to play them myself. But I like to see them work out a little first, see if they’re front-runners or come from behind, find out what their hole-card is. What makes them run.

         Bogart: Find out mine?

         Bacall: I think so.

         Bogart: Go ahead.

         Bacall: I’d say you don’t like to be rated. You like to get out in front, open up a lead, take a little breather in the backstretch, and then come home free.

         Bogart: You don’t like to be rated yourself.

         Bacall: I haven’t met anyone yet that can do it. Any suggestions?

         Bogart: Well, I can’t tell till I’ve seen you over a distance of ground. You’ve got a touch of class, but, uh . . . I don’t know how far you can go.

         Bacall: A lot depends on who’s in the saddle. Go ahead Marlowe, I like the way you work. In case you don’t know it, you’re doing all right.

         As usual, with the film over, I spent most of the rest of the evening talking, but this time about movies and dialog and writing. Mary Ellen was patient.

         I cannot say that any of my own screenplays written since were nearly so good as what Mr. Faulkner and Miss Brackett dreamed up to realize the confused plot of Mr. Chandler’s book. But I tried. At least the effort was appreciated at the time.

         Always the stolon, I suppose. My own roots were never deep. Instead, I travelled out along the surface from those beginnings, found my nourishment along the way, and flourished where I could. What makes a human being respond to some soil and not others? I can’t say. I’ve never seen the pattern there.

         What was it Mary Ellen saw in me, while I was falling in love with Dorothy Malone?

         Reading about the characters in mythology, we often see them act in ways that astound us. We think, why did they do that? What was their motivation? And for that very reason, myth is often rejected by academics as mere fantasy and religion—for the seeming absence of cause and effect demanded to make science from mere data. Yet in our lives, we often act in just this manner. Especially in matters of love.

         Lauren Bacall is cute, as she toys with Bogart over the unambiguous wordplay that ends with, “Depends on who’s in the saddle.”

         But my heart had already been won by the bookseller.

***

12. Reports of my survival have been exaggerated

         That May of 1966 I went home briefly to South Boston, received the blessing of my sainted mother, and the cuff of my father when I told him I was off to New York, packed his old Navy duffle with anything I imagined to be a necessity, and caught the train at South Station. (I see there the “cuff, and the ‘off’ and the ‘duffle.’ Alliteration has always been my bane—according to some. It is there because I enjoy the sounds of words and have always thought such music was part of the transfer of meaning. Poetry is the soul of all good writing, and the music of poetry is what is most wanting in what else I read today. Defensive lecture done.) My objective was even more specific than New York City. I intend to go the extra mile from the terminus at Grand Central to Pennsylvania Station. That was my touchstone.

         I’m thankful now that I had actually gotten to see the original of that grand old railroad palace. The voluminous main concourse was large enough for two Zeppelins. Steel girders, proud in their nakedness (reminding the child in me both then and now of a humongous Erector set) arose stadium-like to a sky of pale and web-faceted glass. Bold colored advertisements, billboarded with their own lights, spoke out from the walls. The smells were a musk of cigarettes, sweat, and perfume, mixed with wafted car-exhaust and raw metal. The sound was a re-echoed clatter, clash and din of hurried voices, the click of high heels and slap of shoe leather on marble, and of doors shut and opened and shut again, all background to an unintelligible drone of authority from above, announcing arrivals and departures.

         But some time before I arrived in this Batman’s Gotham to stay for good, they began tearing down the old Penn Station. Luckily, I had run away from home before, during high school. Twice I had slept on the broad oak benches there along with dozens of other waiting passengers and vagrants, and paid my quarter for use of the shower and dressing room. The first of those escapades was in 1963, and after narrowly escaping the grasp of a NYC truancy officer in the narrower concourses at Grand Central Station. This had happened almost immediately upon my first arrival and I had fortunately found my way to the even grander spaces on 33rd Street and Eighth Avenue, where that larger station was yet open and the pigeons still flew in the girdered heights within, and this had seemed to afford me some sort of greater comfort by its sheer expanse as well as safety from the weather and the random evil doer, as well as proximity to the relatively clean, white-tiled restrooms, and an even greater variety of affordable food stuffs in that age before the fast food chains had spread their mediocrity coast to coast. I thought then that its grimy, vaulted, and shadowy excellence was the most beautiful place I had ever seen. To me it was a veritable cathedral for a religion of the misbegotten.

         But by the time I returned a second time the following year, the upper reaches were closed. And when I finally arrived in New York to live, the underground of the station was already a maze of plywood channels and work lights. The great station was gone.

         Too tired to go back to the still majestic and ordered precincts of Grand Central after discovering the catastrophic destruction of Pennsylvania Station on that night, I slept in a remote remnant of the palace; a lost prince with no idea of his own loss. I was not a vagabond but a pilgrim whose holy city was the biggest brightest busiest place on Earth.

         That first night I found a remaining marble bench in a dark and narrow space behind a work structure, only a few feet from the ebb and flow of humanity and the hollow tread upon the boards that was a modern cacophony of what was, for the moment, another sort of music to my ears.

         Except for what my father still called ‘rubbers,’ and the cost of basic tuition, I had spent almost nothing of the money allowed by the student loan during the previous year. I had even returned my textbooks for cash at the bookshop the first chance I got. In addition, I had a small savings of my own from the various part-time jobs I’d started working when I was eight or so. A portion of this was on my person when I arrived in New York on that day, in the form of three one-hundred-dollar bills, which I had tucked safely, if uncomfortably, in my shoe.

         The Daily News had a list of apartments available in the classifieds, and the morning after I arrived, I scanned this while sitting over my coffee and muffin at a Chock Full o’Nuts, rejecting anything that was more than a hundred dollars a month . . . that’s right. A hundred dollars a month. In Manhattan! But I was sure I could do better still. And I did. After numerous phone calls from the dank confines of a wood trimmed booth, and repeated interruptions by a fellow who looked and smelled as if he had been sleeping in the station himself for a year without a bath, I had run out of dimes. I then picked the name of the realtor with the largest number of listings and went over to Third Avenue near Madison Square and sat in a tight and constantly busy little basement office for several hours, waiting for my turn.

         The fellow I finally saw picked up the first piece of paper on his desk and said, “I’ve got just the thing for you.”

          I said, “No. I need something cheaper.”

         He shuffled a few scraps, pulled one out and said, “How about this?”

         I said, “Cheaper.”

         He shuffled again. He pulled out a hand-written sheet on yellow paper. “I got something on Avenue A that is absolutely the cheapest thing on the market right now. Take my word for it.”

         I said, “Okay.”

         But he didn’t take me to see it. He handed me another scrap of paper with a hastily scribbled note and said, “Take that to the address on St. Mark’s Place.” As I was leaving he added, “Knock loudly. Vlad can’t hear very well. It’s the furnace.”

         I said, “Brad?”

         He said, “You can’t hear very well either, can you? You’ll make a good pair. It’s Vlad.”

         The only person I was aware of at the time with that name was ‘Vlad the Impaler’—the prototype for Count Dracula. This was not auspicious. Outside it had suddenly grown dark and stormy and it was not yet noon. As yet unsure of the subway system, I walked the twenty blocks or so in the rain. The umbrella I’d bought from a vendor at the door of Penn Station turned inside out with the first gust. It was difficult to manage holding it up, in any case, given the duffle and my backpack. The duffle weighed about seventy pounds, but felt more like what I imagined could be a dead body.

         The realtor had been correct in his guess. I rang the bell on the small exterior basement door near the corner on St. Mark’s several times. No one came. The rained poured in solid streams from roof culverts five floors above and splattered on the cement only a few feet away. I yanked at the door handle to get away from the splatter. It opened. There was a single bare light bulb in a ceiling socket about thirty feet along a narrow hall. The hall smelled of spoiled milk and cats as I followed the sound of a television until I came to a door labeled ‘Sup.’ I knocked. I knocked again. The television sound was turned down abruptly and I knocked for a third time.

         The door opened to the suffocating heat of the furnace, and the smell of cats, and sweat and boiled cabbage. Vlad himself blocked the blinding light from an unshaded lamp. He looked as if he weighed in at about three hundred pounds and appeared at the door in a ‘wife-beater’ undershirt with enough hair protruding from his armpits to give home to a nest of subterranean pigeons. Behind him, on a dramatically sagging sofa, a woman who was easily his match in size, sat with her legs splayed out before her, stretching her garment to its limits, bare feet feet jammed to the linoleum on the floor. A cat lay inopportunely in her lap. I am not sure that what she wore was actually a dress, but each seam was pulled to the limit, from her knees to the unlikely enormity of her breasts. A table fan was positioned on the floor in front of her to achieve a maximum gain from the airflow.

         I said, “I have come to see the apartment.”

         I suppose the realtor had called him to say I was coming.

         Vlad said, “Ya!” grabbed several steel rings of keys from a nail and put a work shirt on without buttoning the front. His wife continued to nod at the single word he had spoken as if in consideration of a lengthy speech.

         I later learned that Vlad had managed to reach the United States from Rumania just after the Second World War. I suspected him of being a Nazi collaborator or at least a KGB agent. In the twenty years since his arrival, he had gained an English vocabulary of just two words. But he also spoke French.

         Vlad pushed by me in the narrow basement hall with no apology. It was the greatest intimacy I had ever experienced with a strange man up to that moment in my life, other than in an altercation, and one I would use not long after in my first attempt at writing a novel. I followed him back down the passageway, noting that his head tilted to one side at just the right moment to avoid the light bulb. It was only then that I fully realized that he had to be several inches taller than myself. I was all of six foot two in my youth and I guessed that he was only an inch shorter than Mary Ellen’s father but several inches wider.

         Out the door and into the rain again, dancing through the splatter from the roof and then around the corner to Avenue A. Up the stoop and through a set of heavy double-doors. His hand tapped the tarnished brass of the mailboxes as we passed those, as if to say it was something I might want to take notice of. I did. Every one of them had been broken into and the interiors gaped behind broken tongues, the metal was clearly so abused they could not be closed shut again.

         But Vlad had not stopped his forward progress. I gripped my duffle a little tighter in front of me and lunged to fit through the closing second door just in the nick of time. Up four flights of stairs. The smells of cabbage again. Polka music. A Frank Sinatra song repeating the words “Come fly with me,” over and again in a well-established groove. The smell of pot, so familiar to me from the college dorm, increased as we ascended. Then down another shorter hall. Vlad fumbled with the keys briefly in a dark corner. Suddenly a door opened and he pressed his body unconvincingly to the side and let me slip by.

         I was met by a steely gray light from a grimy window.

         Surrounding me immediately was an eight-by-eight kitchen fully equipped with a three-burner gas stove on short cast iron legs stationed atop a battered cabinet, a Kelvinator refrigerator that might have been manufactured before World War Two, a sink darkened to several different hues of brown and green by the minerals in the water as well as the scurry of numerous small creatures, and a tallish window imprisoned by iron bars that looked directly out upon another window which appeared to match it exactly, both of these set insecurely (by the look of the crumbling cement) in the motley colored brick wall of an airshaft.

         To the left a four-by-five bathroom had been fitted into a turn of corner space which most architecture would otherwise have demanded for a pantry. This polygon contained a toilet with a partially whitish plastic seat (much of the surface of that had peeled back to a black and graying wood), and the taller metal box of a shower without a curtain which had rusted orange at the seams.

         Stepping to the right I found a second room, windowless and dark on that cloudy day, and a third and fourth room ranging beyond, each having a single window and access to an airshaft fire-escape.

         Both back rooms were about ten by ten. The measurements I remember well now because almost nothing I could acquire by way of used furniture would fit comfortably in the spaces given the massive iron steam radiators that hulked on the floor in front of each window.

         In less than the three minutes it took me to walk to the rear room, appraise the many fine appointments, and back again, Vlad used his two English words, “You willin’?”

         As he spoke I tripped over something which had been left in the second room. From the confines of a thick cardboard tomato box, a jumble of old books loomed on the scared linoleum in the half-light, apparently abandoned. Vlad’s eyes lowered with the tilt of his head and then a meaty fist arose with thumb extended and jerked over his shoulder. Clearly he had intended to throw the box away. I saw it as an omen of sorts. An augur.

         I said, “Yes. But leave the books.”

         He rubbed his stubby thumb on his forefinger. He appeared to be waiting for a gratuity. Vlad had few front teeth but the ones at the sides were dark with gold. They spread his stubbled cheeks in a smile which, to the unfamiliar eye, seemed grotesque. It was genuine, however. He always smiled in exactly the same manner afterward, whenever I delivered the rent check.

         I said, “Thank you,” and with the added space of the kitchen around us, I slipped by and made my escape.

         The rain had appeared to relent on my return walk to the realtor’s office, and I remember starting to whistle. That was another habit my father detested. It was also a jinx (which any Red Sox fan would understand, instinctively). I whistled until I was about ten blocks away from the office. And then the skies opened again in a fury.

         As I arrived back, the people waiting in the small front space at the realtors office actually got up to avoid contact with me. I was shedding water like a broken lawn sprinkler. The agent himself waved me in immediately.

         “Like it?”

         “It’s okay.”

         The realtor said, “That’ll be $55 per month. A great deal! I need the first and last and two months’ security. That’ll be $220. In advance.”

         I took off my shoe. In my memory I recall pouring out a small stream of liquid before extracting the three one hundred dollar bills with some difficulty from where they had lodged at the nether end. I handed those over in the condition I found them. The fellow unwadded them gingerly, nodding his head the whole while as if he had a palsy. I signed the paperwork in three places. He gave me two keys, a piece of paper explaining the Con Edison bill, and the change in four twenties. All of them dry. It was done.

         I think the memory of a stream of water from my shoe might be lifted from a Buster Keaton film. Likely so. It is often difficult for me to separate the reality of those years from the films I started seeing almost continuously at the time in all the old movie theaters (old movies in old buildings) scattered around town so as to avoid going home to my apartment after work in the evenings.

         On day two, I began applying for work at every venue that seemed appropriate to my superior talent and intelligence. In my previous careers I had acquired an excellent grasp of the dynamic and logic of unloading a truck, moving piles of heavy square objects, unloading and stocking shelves according to the alphabet, sweeping snipped hair from corners, mopping floors and tables, moving trays of dishes garlanded with the remains of food that had been too ugly to eat in the first place, and placing the dishes in the rack on a conveyor belt that went into a washing unit at one side and came out the other cleaned and needing to be stacked and carried to the appropriate racks in the cafeteria. There were no classifieds that day for jobs that fit any significant aspect of those aptitudes.

         Because I had had some experience with the same outfit in Boston (another story which I will leave aside for the moment), I noted the closest address for a Manpower Temporary Services office in the hopes of quick employment and managed to get there before nine AM. About one o’clock, after having held my position in a small plastic chair, in a row of small plastic chairs placed close enough together so that the legs could be locked one to the other in order to inhibit any attempt to lift the thing and throw it across the room in frustration (most of these being occupied by an ill dressed and relatively unwashed and motley crew of wannabes, has-beens and never-woulds), with all of us beneath the semi-continuous irritating buzz of long fluorescent light tubes which had needed replacing the previous year, I had lost what little patience I had inherited from my father, and left.

         I stood then at a bench in Union Square (the bench itself being festooned with what the pigeons had left behind) and ate a Sabrett hotdog which had never risen to room temperature before being placed into the inadequate cut of a thick piece of moist bread and heaped with mustard, hot sauerkraut, and onions. I distinctly remember the surprise against my tongue of the cold hotdog amidst the hot sauerkraut.

         All of this is by way of verisimilitude, the detail of which only lingers in memory now due to frequent retelling. I wrote much of it down at the time and submitted it to an alternative newspaper in Boston under the rubric ‘A Boston Boy Makes his Way in Gotham.’ This piece was, to my later surprise, actually used, though I was never paid. I spotted it at the bottom of the parakeet cage in a friend’s apartment when I visited Boston briefly to see my mother and pick up a few additional items on the 4th of July. Even  obscured by the droppings, I could tell they had edited some of my choicest descriptions.

         Standing at that bench in Union Square, surrounded by an army of pigeons while keeping one eye peeled for a sudden outburst of rain, I saw a fellow with a sandwich board advertising a new Korvettes discount department store which was opening near by. A new store might be in need of some help, I wisely thought. And they did.

         I spent most of a week there doing a job for which I had been well trained, unloading trucks of boxed goods for the imminent ‘Grand Opening,’ and at the handsome rate of two dollars and fifty cents an hour. We were paid promptly that Friday by embossed check, which I cashed immediately. But when I returned the next Monday as instructed, the backs of the trucks were closed and padlocked and several fellows from the Teamsters Union were picketing the loading dock. Undeterred, I went inside through the bay doors, wending my way through a chaos of unopened boxes and stacked racks, and inquired of the first person I found sitting at a desk, rather than actually working (assuming them to be management), if there were any other employment opportunities available. There were. For the following several weeks, rain or shine, I paced the cement squares at the north side of Union Square, wearing a sandwich board. My resume had grown by another entry.

         It is important to note here that I have never paid for sex in my life.

          This fact has often been questioned by some of my enemies and several friends with active imaginations and reports to the contrary should be disregarded. The problem first arose because of an article I had written just about this time concerning my neighbor at the far end of the same fourth floor hall in the building where I lived.

         Trudy was a decent soul in every way except for her sense of the value of her own body. She sold it very cheaply. I believe the going rate was twenty dollars but I did not include that fact in the piece, nor her actual name.

         I became aware of her existence the first night in my new home. I had no curtains. The windows in the back two rooms looked across the airshaft at her own. It was difficult for an eighteen-year-old—for I was still eighteen at the time—not to look. She preferred candles but otherwise the illumination was more than adequate when I had turned my own lights off.

         I was fairly certain she knew I could see her. And this was a level of exhibitionism that far exceeded any flaunting of assets I had witnessed that first year in college. As a point of reference, when Trudy and I later became comrades in arms (so to speak) in our protests to the building management for various improvements, such as the replacement of light bulbs in the hallways and the sweeping of those same halls when there was at last sufficient illumination to see the accumulation of detritus there, Trudy started closing her curtains before entertaining guests. Most of the time. She was a good friend.

         But I had never known a prostitute before that and talking to her about her profession became a source of raw material that I hoped would give my writing sufficient prurient value to appeal to many of the editors who might not otherwise be interested in the accounts of yet another raw youth aside the streets of New York.

         Dramatically, my first face-to-face encounter with Trudy was due to some misunderstanding between herself and a client. He appeared to want to kill her with a knife and she was most interested in avoiding that fate. She screamed.

         From my window I could see her, entirely naked, leaping across her own furniture to avoid someone who was definitely holding a sharp object. His back was to the window and the shadow he cast in the candlelight was easily the match for the cover on any old paperback mystery I had ever read.

         Another matter of note: I am not brave. Never have been. If given some time to consider the danger involved, I might easily have opted for simply yelling from my window. Which I did. But the dark figure in the windows across from me did not turn as he continued to stalk Trudy in a space no bigger than my own.

         I went out the door and down the hall in bare feet and my pajama bottoms. Because I had mistakenly left the pajama top in South Boston, I was wearing an old Boston Red Sox sweatshirt that was moderately clean.

         I got to Trudy’s door just about the time she screamed again. The door was locked, so I hit it with my fist and yelled back. I have no idea what I said. Probably, “What’s going on?” or something equally pathetic. Inside the noise of the chase stopped. Something else crashed to the floor and broke. And then the door jerked open.

         In front of me was a crazed lunatic. That’s what I saw. Actually he was a sociopath with violent tendencies who, at that moment, felt cornered. He was about six inches shorter than me, had a crew cut, and several tattoos on a muscled torso. He had his pants and shoes on, but his shirt was off and he held that in one hand along with a jacket in a defensive wad. In the other hand he had a carving knife.     

         He lunged at me with the knife as I leapt back against the wall of the hall in some manner—likely a move made with the instinctual flexing of my bare toes. He then swung the knife in the air between us and ran to the stairwell and disappeared.

         Trudy stood at the far end of her apartment, stark naked and glowing with sweat in the candlelight. That is an image I will not forget.

         Incongruously to my mind, she asked, “Are you hurt?”

          I said, “No. Are you?”

         She said, “I’m alright. Are you sure you aren’t hurt?” and pointed.

         The second question made me look down at my sweatshirt. It gaped darkly open across the middle. I pulled it up from the bottom to look at my belly. Not a scratch.

         When I wrote about the incident shortly afterward, I embellished. I think at the time I was still smarting from the rejection of my services to the Marine Corps. I needed to fortify my ego with some small bit of male heroics. But the story sold and was later anthologized and I believe it is the one primary source for those who think I frequented prostitutes in my youth. Or any other time for that matter.

         Trudy showed her thanks by buying me a new sweatshirt and becoming a good neighbor. Most importantly, by acquiring curtains.

***

13. Ben and me—at least the gist of it

         After a few weeks of getting a farmer’s tan on the streets of New York while sandwiched between two rectangles of white painted Masonite decorated with the Korvettes department store logo running corner to corner on either side, and walking around like one of the playing cards in Alice in Wonderland, I was ready for a new assignment.

         On the third floor of the building just across on Broadway from my base at the north side of Union Square, there was a another sign which I found inexplicable. Every day I had looked at the letters, each one filling a single upper pane of glass in a succession of double-hung window frames, and tried to decipher their meaning. I could have simply walked across and looked at the directory in the lobby but that would have spoiled the mystery of the matter.

         ‘GIST’ might be the suffix on the word ‘psychologist,’ or ‘neurologist,’ or ‘genealogist’ or ‘limnologist, or ‘hydrologist, all good eleven letter words when playing a game of strip-scrabble with other English majors during my brief bout of higher education at Amherst. But there were only six additional panes of glass on that floor to accommodate the letters for the root word. Mycophagist was a ten-letter favorite of mine because I had always played dirty and employed the rule that if a word is wrongly disputed, the loser must give up an additional article of clothing. Oddly spelled words were excellent for this. But I doubted its use in this case. Mushroom worshipers usually lived in wooded areas.

         For days I studied those four letters and could find no use that might especially apply to the third floor of a ten-story nineteenth century office building. I finally gave up and investigated. But the lobby directory was no better. It simply said ‘Gist 3rd Flr.’

         I leaned my sandwich board up by the elevator where it might gain some additional attention while I was negligent in my duties, and took the stairs.

         Opening the door at that third floor on that day was a wonder to my eyes.

         A couple dozen desks closely crowded one to the other, and about as many people, none apparently much older than myself, all scrambled about with sheets and scraps of paper, talking to one another, or themselves, while several bent at the waist over light-tables with their faces eerily illuminated by a green florescence. Two of them sat at bulky looking typewriters carefully tapping out copy. One was speaking to a group of three or four others, his arms gesticulating wildly. The air was filled with their words and the smell of hot wax and rubber cement, all of it with the sound of the Rolling Stones wailing from two large speakers at the far end of what appeared to be just a single room that occupied the entire floor.

         I had, it seems, not fallen through a rabbit hole in the ground, but arisen through that side door into the new world of ‘alternative’ magazine publishing. Albeit a small magazine which would be bankrupt within three years, but a fair introduction to the process. To learn more than my eyes and ears could comprehend, I tried then to speak to the best looking woman in the room. She ignored me and ran off to one of the compositors with a scrap of copy to be reset. I turned and spoke to the next person in the line of desks closest to the door, a long-haired and heavily-set fellow with glasses as thick as my own, and also the largest person in the room. That was Doug Morrissey. I have always called him ‘aka’ which I pronounce with each letter distinct, as for the abbreviation of the phrase, ‘also known as.’ His friendship has survived many trials through the years, though we seldom get to see each other these days. He changed his name not long after that to ‘Morris’ because he thought it sounded a little more Jewish than Morrissey and he works for a film production company now in Hollywood and won’t leave the West Coast for less than six figures.

         Wheeling my eyes over the display of activity, I said, “What goes on here?”

         He said, “What does it look like?”

         I said, “Controlled chaos.”

         He said, “That’s it! That’s The Gist!”

         I applied for work that day. And again the following week, when the job with the billboard ran out. The third time in the door Doug recognized my face and asked, “Can you type?”

         I must suppose that in ancient Rome, while Legions of Roman sons were dying in Illyria, the scribes spilt as much ‘ink’ over the latest social disgraces of Cillius Maximus as ours do today over the antics of a Kardashian or a Bieber.

         But I would be wrong.

         Though the first ‘news service’ might be claimed by the Romans with the ‘Acta Dirna,’ which were government bulletins on stone or metal, posted on the byways and issued by Julius Caesar primarily to acclaim his own accomplishments (closely akin in our own time to the daily product of the New York Times), the first attempt at a private ‘newspaper’ was the Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien, issued in 1605 at Strasbourg, in the Holy Roman Empire, by Johann Carolus. Thus this Mr. Carolus became the founding member of the Order of Ink Stained Wretches, beginning a proud tradition, and must rightfully be acclaimed the most profoundly important of those many relatively unknown heroes who handed us our civilization on a platter of movable type. Sadly too, he himself also represents a most obvious and glaring example of the ephemeral quality of ‘the news.’ The Relation was a quarto-sized ‘one-sheet’ and thus had a greater need of the subtitle ‘All the news that’s fit to print.’

         Our Mr. Mencken would likely claim (and proudly so) that Mr. Carolus was a man of his own German ancestry in spirit and might even have found, had he thought to look, a particular mountebank in the woodpile who sowed some actual genetic link, but the first ‘broad-sheet,’ or folded folio was, alas, to be the effort of the Dutch. (True, not far removed from the German roots. Perhaps the profligate issue of a German mountebank on holiday?) The Courante uyt Italien, Duytslandt &, was edited by Caspar van Hilten, in 1618, at Amsterdam. This sheet too was printed on only one side and thus made no pretense to offering both sides of any story. It is in this way that the foundations of our modern habits were laid down.

         The first independent (i.e. private and not government subsidized) newspaper in America, The New-England Courant, was issued in Massachusetts in 1721 by one James Franklin. James had some other issues with his younger brother Ben, but contrived to imbue the lad with the better spirit of any journalist, taught him to spell and set type, the rigors of accurate reporting, to keep those reports brief and pithy, and, most importantly, to be the servant of no man (including himself it appears). The New-England Courant managed to survive a mere five years before the colonial authorities in Olde Boston Towne shut James Franklin down. But for this effort I place that singular achievement in the pantheon of human accomplishment and happily recognize the link between the older brother’s effort and that Declaration of Independence, which our Ben was to one day collaborate on with Mr. Jefferson.

         However, in keeping with the obscurity of his spiritual ancestor, Mr. Carolus, there is no monument to James, or his workplace in Boston. (There is a brass plaque on a rather nondescript twentieth century office building noting the birthplace of Ben, which would also be, I assume, the origin of James. At least that is something, I suppose.)

         In any case, from the very beginning I made no assumptions about the role of the journalist and reporter. Most do their jobs as best they can, under difficult circumstances—commanded by the authority of others—sitting around courthouses for days on, end twiddling thumbs (I am reminded of the reports in Front Page playing cards), theirs and others, or poring over illegible or incompetent police reports, listening for hours to politicians prevaricate, or to first hand accounts offered by witnesses with the usual public school education, and then, guided by the prejudice of editors whose first interest is in never being demoted to the chores and wages of a mere reporter again, as well as the worries of advertisers who supply the monies for their salaries, they must conjure a mere précis of a given reality and capture a semblance of the truth in only a few hundred words and in sentences very much shorter than this. Whatever deeply held antipathies and aversions the reporter might harbor in his own right, he must shape his copy to suit not only the preconceptions of the editor and the demands of advertisers and the newspaper’s corporate sponsors, but to feather the nest of the political hegemony that allows them easy access to the information needed to create reports in the first place.

         I am not sure if I ever really wanted to be one those, though I did fantasize about the possibility. I watched Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in the movie version of Front Page, called His Girl Friday at least four or five times (more in awe of Ben Hecht’s words and their delivery). Thus armed with the necessary training I thought any reporter should need, I first set out, freshly certified via high school diploma, to find a job with one of the few remaining papers in Boston still surviving from the days when Kenneth Roberts had begun his illustrious career at the now defunct Boston Post. Happily, my applications at the Record American, and the Herald and The Boston Globe were overlooked. So I tried the Marines instead. But they too had found both my particulars and my prospects wanting. So as a last resort, I had resorted to college.

         In the end, however, I wanted only to write, much as Kenneth Roberts had. And though I had taken Ben Franklin as an early hero, it is noteworthy, at least in these pages, that my first awakening to that specific genius of journalism had been in the reading between the kindly drawn pictures of Robert Lawson’s Ben and Me while sitting in the children’s section at the South Boston branch of the Public Library. And then, more dramatically, in those fabulous historical novels of Kenneth Roberts like Northwest Passage, Arundel, and Rabble in Arms. Thus, Roberts had been an inspiration to me well before I read his memoir of the working life as a young reporter in I Wanted to Write.

         Actual reporting, however, eluded me. I was always far too ready to make things up if I didn’t have a first hand account. Too quickly, I lost the original context of an event in the extrapolated phantasmagoria of imagining what might be.

         I was simply far better suited to being a novelist, right from the start. But I had to learn of this distinction through some experience.

         An IBM Compositor was the miracle of small-press publishing in that hour. Slightly larger and, at a solid fifty pounds, a good deal heavier than the more common IBM Selectric, it made typesetting something that could be done at a desk in an office. It was cumbersome and the early models required typing everything twice, but it did the job well enough to pass muster—as in creating professional looking justified copy ready for paste-up.

         I had no idea at the time, having never laid eyes on one before, but this small desk machine was then state-of-the-art. Mr. Nelson, both de facto owner and office manager at The Gist, had leased two of them, albeit requiring regular visits from the uptown IBM office, but they were far less expensive than sending copy out to be set on a larger Linotype. This made it possible for an entire publication to be produced photo-ready for offset printing, in that one room. And thus it was—every Wednesday.

         For The Gist was attempting to be “The Alternative Newsweekly.”

         The threat to Time, Newsweek, and U. S News and World Report went unnoticed, if circulation figures were the judge. At the peak, with almost 120,000 copies were being shipped out to over 40,000 subscribers and about 2000 independent news dealers and bookshops, most of which seemed to be forgetful about paying for copies sold—given salaries and rent, and leases, and whatever else was involved, it was reported during the later bankruptcy that The Gist was losing about a dollar on every issue shipped. Given a cover price of $1.50 for 36 to 48 pages of white offset stock, saddle-stitched into a three-color glossy cover, there was no possibility of the magazine ever returning a profit even if all copies were sold. But that was not the objective, I suppose.

         What about advertising, you might wonder? I did too, that first week. Unfortunately, regular forms of advertising were eschewed. Disdained. Spat upon, as capitalist infestation (never mind the source of their funding through Mr. Nelson). Never mind the capitalist innovators at IBM. Never mind the small newsstand businesses that sold The Gist. The only ads to be found in The Gist were of the reciprocal trade variety with other like-minded publications, which were all losing money in the same fashion. The intention appeared to be that they could lose a little on every sale, but make it up in volume. No kidding. That idea was expressed aloud to me more than once, in several ways, when I questioned what was being done.

         I soon stopped questioning and kept my head down. I was ecstatically happy to be there. It felt as f I had somehow found the center of the universe. I was ostensibly a typist working away at one of the two IBM Compositors, but it was soon discovered that if an article came in a bit short for the allotted space, or the assigned scribe (usually a university student or reporter for another publication working under an assumed name) in Amsterdam or London had indulged himself a bit too much in ‘the spirit of place’ and missed his deadline, I could fill the difference.

         Never mind the politics. The more difficult thing for me there was to find ways not to insult the readers with Marxist claptrap. I could fabricate new reasons to rebel against authority without ever resorting to Das Kapital. I felt that I was finally doing what God had certainly ordained for me. And this too actually happened in an odd way. In retrospect, it seems inevitable, but at the time it felt like a stroke of lightning had found my shoulders.

         To avoid going home to my fifth floor penthouse on Avenue A, and playing rubberband tag with the cockroaches there, as the budget would allow two or three times a week, I was dallying on my way home and going to the older movie houses and converted theaters on Forty-Second Street. ‘Double-features’ were offered there of second-run films for seventy-five cents in the evenings. Gaudy, fabulous, wonderful Technicolor movies that might have originally lasted mere days at the box office on their first go-round. Movies like Naked Prey, starring Cornell Wilde, and Rage, featuring Glenn Ford and Stella Stevens, or Rage to Live, with Ben Gazzara and Suzanne Pleshette. I would have gone to a theatre at twice the price to see Stella Stevens or Suzanne Pleshette enraged.

         My unique stroke of genius was to write reviews of these films, for which there was no longer advertising revenue available (and thus no possibility of remuneration for such critiques). Though useless for any immediate income needs, it was done for fun and I had some idea in the back of my head of compiling a sort of anthology of such overwrought films, comparing them along the way to the latest underwrought and unintelligible efforts of Ingmar Bergman or Louis Malle or Frederico Fellini. For that supposedly more sophisticated fare, I had to pay twice the price on First Avenue, further uptown.

         When, one Wednesday afternoon, at deadline, our editor Paul Winger, asked me, “Can you draw?”

         I did not simply say ‘no,’ which would have been an admission of fact in an environment of ‘What if?’ I said “Why? What for?”

         He said, “We have half a column empty on page eight. I thought maybe we could do a cartoon. Like maybe Johnson taking a piss in a soldier’s helmet. One that has a bullet hole in it with a little leak out one side that looks like blood.”

         I said, “I can’t draw that, but I have a movie review in my pocket that compares the films of Walter Grauman and Eric Rohmer that I was going to send to a paper in Boston. How about that?”

         He said, “Let me see it!”

         I carefully unfolded a couple sheets of pilfered Gist stationary. Paul was a speed-reader. It took him about two minutes and then he started laughing. He laughed until his face turned red and then he started gasping for air. That was his asthma.

         When he finally caught a breath he said, “This is good! This is rich. I never read a movie review that was so satirical before.”

          I had written it in dead earnest, but that was how I became both a movie reviewer and a satirist in one stroke.

         The picture of President Johnson peeing into the soldier’s helmet with the bullet hole and the leaking was drawn quite professionally by another staff member and appeared on the cover of the next issue, in three colors. Two of them were black and red.

***

14. Touch and go typing

         The most important subject I studied at South Boston High School, alas, was not Miss Lawrence’s English class, but without doubt (and with nothing else coming close for comparison) Mr. Jenson’s touch-typing course in my senior year. This great boon has served me throughout my life. Forty-five words a minute with no mistakes—mostly. I’ve never gotten faster, but then, I think I reached my own maximum level of digital dexterity and quickness of thought, as well as incompetence, early on and there was no way to improve on that.

         Mr. Jenson was also the shop teacher. He is responsible for having taught me empirically that I would never qualify as a carpenter, leather worker, or an electrician. He thought plumbing might do. The parts and tools are larger, he said, and less likely to be harmed by a clumsy move, but he could not be certain because that particular course of study was not offered at South Boston High in those years. These are very good things to know at a young age before you misdirect yourself into a mediocre career making other people’s lives miserable with your shoddy work. For that knowledge alone, I owe Mr. Jenson a great deal, in retrospect.

         My first month in college I purchased an Underwood Olivetti portable, based upon a recommendation in a copy of Consumer Reports I found at the school library. For this I am also eternally grateful. Both to the library and the publication. I still own that machine, though I use a computer and keyboard now. The ‘Lettera 32’ was slim and small, never jammed, and fit into a neat blue zippered plastic case which fit very well inside my duffle when I moved to New York. By my calculations I wrote over two million words on it. The ‘F’ and the ‘J’ keys are worn blank.

         Later, when my apartment was robbed and I lost almost everything else of any value that could be easily carried away, the thieves inexplicable left the typewriter behind. It was the most valuable object in that cockroach blighted flat.

         The elemental importance to me at the time was that I could easily churn out pages of copy while sitting in my underwear at the small table I had set up in the windowless room by the kitchen where one of the few electric plugs allowed me to keep the light on late into the night without being watched through my curtainless windows, or conversely, being disturbed by Trudy’s professional activities. At least not so much.  (She told me once that she could see me wandering back and forth in the rooms in my underwear and wondered if I was crazy or just wanted to peek at what was going across the airshaft. I told her it was just my habit when I was thinking. I think we both knew that I peeked as well.)

         The Gist is a footnote in many accounts of the 1960’s, but a prided entry high on the resumes of those who worked there. The magazine had as its major fault the fact that it was against almost everything. Had it been more often for one thing or another, I think it would have survived at least the wind-down of the Vietnam War. However, that critical negative spirit came from its founder, Edgar Nelson, a grandson of the DuPont family who felt a deep-set guilt about his wealth and the family interests in the profits of war. Ancestral sin, like the original, was a common enough idea to anyone raised around Catholics, but this was a specific application of the phenomenon I had not met with before. No one I had ever known had been wealthy enough to worry about such things. Most of the staff at The Gist, however, had gone to Ivy League schools and reveled in or at least enjoyed that peculiar mixed sense of privilege and guilt.

         Yet the primary asset of the publication was not Edgar or his money. That priceless jewel was Paul Winger, the editor, a twenty-three-year old genius out of Harvard, and the originator of the essential idea for The Gist, who had convinced his then roommate, Edgar, that they could change the world together. Paul was already dying when I first knew him. If he knew his fate himself, it might have accounted for the bright burn of his mind and his tireless effort to accomplish as much as he could in the shortest period of time. But he never let on.

         Black-haired and white-skinned, at a time when long hair was a requirement of the generation, Paul had the sort of trim haircut that just left enough at the fore to hang down toward his eyes and required a regular sweep of his hand. He was no more than five foot six but always appeared taller. He did not smoke (even tobacco). He did not drink. But he used swear words as adjectives, even though his general vocabulary was superior to that of almost anyone in the office. That facility with language was bolstered by the Latin he had majored in at Harvard along with a modicum Greek. His minor had been journalism, and he had worked for three years at the school newspaper, The Crimson.

         Paul could carry on three conversations at once, sometimes in two languages if he were on a phone to Paris or Rome, while writing a diatribe against multinational corporations mining in Katanga. He was especially interested in the ongoing genocide of the Ibo in Biafra. He had never been to Africa. Nor had anyone on the staff ever been to Vietnam. But this posed no empiric handicap. They had each determined, in their own way, and based upon the most sincere engagement of their intellects with like-minded instructors at Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, U Penn, Princeton, or Columbia, that something must be done. Most importantly of all, the war in Vietnam must end. But the entire motivation for all of them was a bottomless caring for the world at large, and a concomitant hatred for the United States and what ‘Amerika’ was doing to the earth and everyone on it. And Paul, quick minded and large hearted, was their leader, their guide, and their soul in this effort.

         The kernel of Paul’s idea, the gist of The Gist, if you will, was the establishment of an ‘alternative news’ network: Gist News Network. GNN would draw selected material from alternative newspapers, from Amsterdam to San Francisco, each week to present the information that AP, UPI, CBS, NBC, and ABC were ignoring, or worse, suppressing.

         Other like-minded source publications of similar intent were mostly thin, badly designed, unbound and poorly typeset tabloids by comparison. Those flooded into the office every week from all corners, Minneapolis and Chicago, New Orleans and Kansas City, Boston and Seattle, Houston and L.A., as well as India, England and the various capital cities in Western Europe. Paul read some part of them all, daily, and picked out the best articles, translated those that were not in English, had others edit the ones containing English that was suspect, reducing them thus to the essential first paragraphs of what was then known as ‘Times speak’  (the de facto standard), and re-published the cream. In addition, because he had established a shortlist of writers at many of those journals who had a reasonable command of their language and a need for additional income, he would often assign to them a specific topic, and that would be the featured cover article that filled anywhere from six to twelve pages depending on the available photographs. It was a really marvelous idea, in theory.

         For my part, I often felt like a spy in their midst, even though I was reporting only to myself. I don’t believe I was ever actually asked if I had even gone to college while with The Gist. It was probably assumed. And if I was asked, I might have said I had gone to The University of Massachusetts, which was true as far as it went, and no more. I certainly never said I had grown up in ‘South’ Boston, though I might probably have admitted simply to Boston. But they needed a typist, in any event. And once in the door I had no interest in leaving. Even more after I had developed a strong extracurricular interest in my fellow typist, Daneen.

         Daneen Hughes was then of that tall variety of girl who looks perpetually awkward. The parts of her body did not match a Da Vinci diagram. Arms and legs too long. Akimbo was a nice old word for it. In addition, she had thick black hair she let free-fall to her rear-end (the swish of which always caught your eye as she walked away). Having gone to GW in D.C., she was one of the few non-Ivy Leaguers there, along with myself. Her mother was the daughter of a high Kuomintang official with the Chinese Republic in Taiwan and her father had been an American diplomat to China during the regime of old Chiang Kai-shek. She spoke three or four languages and would later work in the State Department. And most importantly, she too could type, which placed her squarely and directly opposite to me.

         My first interest had been, perhaps obviously those first days, in Constance Abbott, another six foot creature of Dionysus who had been born to be a model for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues, but had been re-directed by her parents to Radcliff and lesser pursuits. She had fallen in love with Paul Winger along the way, and she was, after him, the driving force in the office.

         Before I forget, I should note that a couple of years after The Gist folded, Constance and Paul did in fact finally marry. It was only months before he died, and probably a matter of making final commitments final. I was invited to the wedding, but couldn’t make it.

         But in that office, the two of them were all business. You would never assume they were a couple, especially in that Paul was six inches shorter. That is yet another prejudice of certain guys, such as myself. That and a sufficiency of head hair. There is never enough red hair.

         So, after having my initial queries to Constance rebuffed with one and two word answers, I settled in behind the Compositor. Daneen’s eyes were visible without moving my own head. And it was Daneen who was my immediate teacher as to how the metal beast worked. It was hard not to pay attention.

         It is salient to the theme of this effort that my understanding of women at that point in time had been severely limited by the nature of the brief encounters at college that I’d had managed to date, as well as the singular character of my one and only ‘girlfriend’ during high school.

         I had been living in New York about three months when Mary Ellen showed up at my apartment. Right at my apartment door. (Someone had busted the lock on the big doors downstairs several nights previously and the building thus was open to unannounced guests.) She was carrying her small leather-trimmed suitcase.

         Our relationship had continued over the year I had been away at college. Not without some small difficulties surfacing.

         Specifically she wanted to know more precisely when we would be making arrangements at St. Peter’s in South Boston for the ceremony. I had postponed the question as best I could. I had remanded it. I had adjourned it. Reassessed it. Deferred it. Stalled it, and staved it off.

         I had to finish college, of course. I had to be able to support her, didn’t I?

         I said, “I’d have to be able to earn a living for the both of us.”

          She added, “And the children,”

         “And the children,” I agreed.

         My escape to New York following the end of my freshman year of college had been as quick as I could manage. I was in South Boston for less than a day. I walked over to Athens Street from 6th to stay away from the main thoroughfares and made my way to South Station with a constant fear that Mr. Radziute might be driving home at that very moment and see me.    

         Mary Ellen’s arrival on Avenue A was about as great a surprise as I had had in my short life up to that date. She might have called in advance, if I had phone, or sent a letter. But, then again, there might have been some purpose in her tactic.

         Beauty is ephemeral, so the philosophers think. To age and ashes it tends, they say. I disagree. It is beauty that endures over time. In poetry. In art. In memory it is the beauty that we readily see in those we have loved, not their flaws. We more readily see them as they were.

         I suppose, at my best, I might have been for some brief moment, ‘cute.’ I certainly remember being told frequently enough by others, ‘Don’t be cute,’ so it must have come naturally to me for a time. For a homely fellow such as myself, it’s the best we can hope for. The closest I ever came to being handsome was in my mother’s eyes on the day of the  prom. I wore a suit for practically the first time and had on one of Tim’s best haircuts. Polished shoes instead sneakers. I’d shaved the few hairs that dared reveal themselves on my chin. Somewhere I still have the photograph of it. Because the picture was taken with Mary Ellen that day, I put it away soon afterward, here in the house, and it was never lost. She was already starting to look better than pretty. I know for certain, however, that on that night she arrived at my apartment on Avenue A, I was very much afraid. All the future I had dreamed of for myself was now at risk from what dreams she was having.

         She is still that beautiful today. Women often do that. Start out pretty and get better with age.

         When I was seventeen, beautiful was Ursula Andress and Yvette Mimieux. I hope those two women look nearly as fine right now, but I pass such visions by without the second glance these days. Oddly, I am now more often enchanted by young mothers, especially with their children. That is a perverse augur of my fate.

         When I opened the door on Mary Ellen that day in August 1966, she was stunning. This was partly because she was angry. Her anger hardened the lines of her face and hid what remained of the baby fat. She was no longer the girl I had known, but fully a woman. While I still felt like a child.

         She didn’t say a word. Her jaw was clenched against the words she wanted to speak.

         I said, “Hello.” I suppose my face said more.

         There was no need for me to guess how Mary Ellen had found me. It was my mother’s doing. I had sent a letter home with my new address.

         For my part, I tried to explain why I was there. I told Mary Ellen, likely in the most prosaic terms and for perhaps the thousandth variation on the theme, that I wanted to be a writer and that I had to strike out on my own and experience life before I could settle down. She said she understood. Clearly unconvinced. I told her I had to be able to earn a living before I could even think of having a family. She said she understood. I believe she did. She had heard it all so often, especially every time she began to talk about having children, that most of the excuse was a given. She sat there at my little table and fingered the paper protruding from the typewriter and patiently waited while I tried to excuse myself extemporaneously for having been a lout and a cad.

         And when I had at last summoned all of what I could possibly prevaricate on my own behalf, she said, “When are you coming home?”

         The determination was relentless.

         This was a young woman who had left the safe precincts she was familiar with, to chase down her own dream. And at least part of that delusion appeared to be me. To my knowledge, she had never before voyaged beyond Cape Cod or Cape Ann in her life. Her doggedness might have seemed inescapable.

         But I don’t think that inevitability occurred to me at first. What did come to mind was that I had no ‘rubbers.’

         I was truly that callous a fellow.

         That evening, I took Mary Ellen out to an Italian restaurant on Second Avenue that I had previously espied from a menu in the window as being affordable. She loves Italian food. On the way back I managed to slip into a drug store for some ‘toothpaste.’

         The talking was endless. She wanted to know all about my new job. All about what I had done when I first arrived. Or I supposed she did. At that, I managed to cover most of those subjects. Her tales were less wordy. She was working upstairs at Filene’s now. That accounted at least in small part for her new appearance. She had started two new night courses at UMass. At this point she had already surpassed me in college credits and as it happened I would never catch up on that score. She was studying English literature, along with bookkeeping. The English literature was clearly to gain some grasp of the fellow she seemed to be stuck on. The bookkeeping would make it possible for her to support herself if that fellow turned out to be the jerk he was.

         Then, out of the blue, as if it would naturally occur in our conversation, she asked me what I thought of James Joyce. She did not understand the man, and wanted my thoughts on his work.

          I told her, of course, in too many words.

         Then she asked my opinion of T. S. Eliot.

         I actually kept that short. I was not a fan, at the time.

         We talked over wine. We talked over dessert. We talked over coffee. We talked almost all the way home again, except for when I made my detour at the drugstore.

         In the small suitcase she had carried with her, Mary Ellen had very few clothes, but among those was a negligee. I had never seen her in one before. Besides the ‘heavy-petting’ done in movie theatres and once in the second balcony at the Boston Pops Christmas show, our lovemaking had always been accomplished under difficult circumstances—the uncompromising spaces of a hot or cold automobile, depending on the season, in the basement TV room at her house, or once in the shower at home when my parents were away at a funeral. (I did not know the deceased.)

         The last time we had made love was when she had come to visit me again at college and I had forced my roommate Janik out into the winter cold of a New England spring and we had played his records all night long.

         Some time shortly before midnight, after managing to get a hold again on one of her hands across the little table I had set up for writing, and getting a kiss for the effort, she stood up and told me to turn out the light. I did not object. 

         Something pale wafted in the semi-dark as I shed my own clothes. Then, unexpectedly, Mary Ellen pulled back the sheet I had tacked over the window and looked out. What I observed in the ambient light was a vision of loveliness I had never seen before. An angel of desire. An emerald green negligee barely hid what curved beneath, but more, magnified it far beyond the perfection of mere female nakedness.

         She said, “Does she do that all the time?”

         I was halted in my own reverie. I said “Who?”

         “Your neighbor.”

         I understood with no more explanation. A little humor seemed called for. I said, “Trudy is very active in community services.”

         Mary Ellen turned away and looked through the dark at me. Her eyes were dark above the gossamer of her negligee.

         “Have you met her?”

         “Yes. But not for her community services, you understand. It was only because someone was trying to kill her. I went over to try and stop it.”

         This brought a jump in her voice, “You did? What happened?”

         With this she turned on the light again. Everything I had imagined in the near darkness was true, but was now suffused with the flushed colors of the flesh beneath. I was breathless, but I managed to answer.

         I told her all about my adventure. I probably embellished slightly.

         Meanwhile, I was sitting naked in all my small glory at the side of the bed.

         I suppose this is something women get used to. Naked guys are seldom much to look at. Not like other animals. The male lion is a truly handsome beast. In the avian world, the Mr. Bird is usually the more splendid in appearance. I have often speculated that, if our species were truly capable of being rational, it would have died out long ago or else developed some religious rites whereby the male remains completely clothed during intercourse. Except of course for a few strategic openings.

         As it was, Mary Ellen stood there in the light from my writing table and easily prodded from me a complete history of the singularly heroic moment in my life. After which she rewarded me for a bravery I have often wished was truly mine.

***

15. The samurai and the tiger

          Some lines, remembered at the oddest times, make me smile in spite of myself.

         “There is no greater solitude than that of the samurai unless it is that of the tiger in the jungle . . .”

         When I first read those words captioned on the screen in a small theatre in Montreal in 1968, I started to laugh. More a guffaw, I suppose. The woman I was with actually slapped me for my sudden rudeness. I think it was the first time I had ever been slapped by a woman and it put dark thoughts into my head, which have lingered ever since. You cannot attack political heroes with abandon. Or religious figures. Or movie stars for that matter, if there is a difference.

         I remained in my seat that evening and watched the second feature, Louis Bunuel’s Belle de Jour, while my companion went back to the hotel. Watching the movements of Catherine Deneuve was as close as I was going to come to getting any sex that night.

         I was told forty years ago that I was a ‘libertarian.’ I did not then know the meaning of the word, but assumed it had some relationship with my sex life. I think I answered the comment with a ‘Thank you.’

         As it turned out, the meaning was far less specific. It covered every kind of philosophical licentiousness known to mankind, or womankind for that matter. But I happily adopted the label as a perfect cover, for all of its vagueness. At the time there were anarchists who called themselves libertarian. There were even socialists who found a way to twist the dialectic sufficiently to grab ahold of the word. There were fusionists and mutualists, agorists and consequentialists, autarchists and Objectivists. That last one is capitalized because it is the personal philosophy of Ayn Rand. Her ‘property,’ so to speak. If you call yourself an Objectivist, she owns you, or her estate does.

         My care was only that the word offered a seeming rational for my doing what I wanted to do. Nothing more. When asked for my political faith, I would answer, ‘libertarian,’ and the questioner, if they were bright, invariably turned away to the safety of another subject.

         The key for me was that under that rubric I was able to speak my mind. Right or wrong, I could freely express my opinion. It was then the season for that. But sadly, and especially over recent years, that unique liberty has slowly diminished. From the days of overt ‘fascists’ like Richard Nixon and Lyndon Baines Johnson, we have fallen on the petard of popular rule, otherwise known as the dictatorship of the lowest common denominator (they use the euphemism ‘proletariat’). It is, in fact, the primary cause of my being in a small third-floor room in South Boston on this day. Except for my extravagant purchase of a lifetime membership to the Boston Athenaeum years ago, done in a moment of ungirdled enthusiasm over finding a copy there of Head Hunters of the South Seas while first visiting with a friend, I might as well be in a prison cell. The lawyers have taken everything and the liens on my meager estate would have even appropriated this place, my father’s house; that is, if the probate court had found the time to resolve the differences between myself and my brother, Eddy.

         As a lawyer once explained to me, the laws of libel were originally meant to replace dueling. That’s why the consequences are so harsh. When I accuse an editor of my work in print of being fascist—one who may not be adequately described as a public figure—I am liable for this calumny, but if someone else accuses me of the same thing as part of a criticism of my writing, I am fair game.

         The fact that Mikael Blomkvist is thrown into prison for libel early on in the Stieg Larsson novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was what kept me reading that dark meander. Certainly not the sex, which was served cold. I wanted to see how the fellow resolved his problem. Of course, the resolution does not get him back the several months of his life he must serve in jail. Nor is the recent legal case against me waged in any part by a conspiracy. I said what I said, and wrote it for print to be sure. But the judgment was that of a court of law in a state and country where law is not meant to protect liberty but to insulate the powers that be. Nor would any legal victory get back the larger career that is now well behind me. Those times are past. The zeitgeist has changed. Safety and ‘diversity’ (by which they mean conformity and accord), have replaced the arts of living, and lying with abandon for the sake of entertainment is verboten. The Skin is Not the Flesh, a political novella I wrote a few years ago about the whole mess, found no takers. I threw it up on the internet for free and I don’t think it has been seen or heard from since.

         However, the passim references to my politics throughout this narrative are not intended to incite, but to explain. I am not seeking support, searching out followers, or begging for defenders. Most readers will not agree with me on any or all of that. I thought it important only to establish my own ground. If the work does not explain itself, there is no point to it. I am not a ‘modern’ artist open to interpretation, nor ‘post modern’ denying even the possibility of absolute truth. If you don’t understand what I am saying, the fault is not necessarily yours. It might only be the finer matter that I was not speaking to you to begin with. Let that be. Either you are entertained by what I say, agreed or not, or not.

         What disturbs me more deeply is the use of politics to determine what truth is. I enjoy the political interpolation of facts. That’s fair play. But to assess what is fact and what is not, according to a particular political faith, is outrageous.

         If the government wants to silence a writer, libel is the sure-fire means. The government can wage its case with your own tax money while you struggle to pay a lawyer who specializes in billing at the rate of five hundred dollars an hour so his research assistant can do a database search and come up with excuses for why you shouldn’t be put in prison rather than for any actual case history that might support freedom of speech. (After all, that is right there in the Constitution and would require no billable time at all to find.) Most publications would prefer to avoid the annoyance and the cost. Newspapers and magazines understand that today their readers could give a damn. They want to be entertained and unless you have excellent gallows humor, dimples beneath the stubble, or large breasts, your dire metaphysical situation will only serve as a prompt to click along to another story.

         Seriously, for the moment, one solution to the morass of libel law would be simple enough, and thus will certainly not be used. Let the loser pay. If the cost of frivolous legal actions are weighed on the shoulders of the loser in the case, fewer will be filed. I might then have some hope at the end of this lingering trial. But that’s not the way it works, in our time. I would afterward have to file a lawsuit for damages. More lawyer fees. And then file a complaint for non-payment—while the lawyers will be paid and the devil will get his due.

         Surely, I have used the internet. I use it now. It’s unavoidable. But there is no actual freedom in it. It is a virtual struggle for virtual truth, in a virtual life, and virtual defense. I must admit, perhaps, that I am more fond of the taste of my beer than of its appearance.

         While the internet has resulted in a free-for-all gabfest of opinion and diatribe, the apparent freedom is a chimera, an illusion created by mere numbers and the sheer quantity of interests. The obfuscating quantity of offerings alone insures that only those with the best publicity or most visually viral oddity are seen. Like an Italian election with a dozen candidates for a minor position. Most people, by which I mean far more than ninety percent of those who use the internet, seldom leave a few pre-selected channels except when pursuing pornographic pictures of small children. And the primary web providers, from Google and YouTube to Facebook, Amazon, and e-Bay work very hard to manage and control content. This is what prompts their rabid support of ‘net neutrality.’ That ‘Good Housekeeping seal’ offers a veneer of virtual safety which the public embraces, and allows the wolves to watch over the sheep while paying huge sums into the coffers of politicians to keep them in their control. But most of what is offered by those larger providers is garbage, just as most of what was published forty years ago with ink on paper was crap. Only then, anyone could print whatever else they wanted.

         I know about this too, of course. I produced more than a little of that myself, I think. But it is no accident that my troubles now so neatly reflect my stumbles then. It is obvious that I have learned precious little and might be having to suffer a dish of just deserts.

         A lawyer for Mr. Nelson came to my desk at The Gist one morning to first explain the rules to me. To my mind, I was only using language that was common parlance in that open office at the time when real fascists like Johnson and Nixon were in power and William F. Buckley was called a crypto-Nazi by a man who advocated the slaughter of his political enemies and ‘nigger,’ ‘wop,’ ‘spic,’ ‘kike,’ and ‘mick’ were acceptable epithets in impolite company. Only, I seldom wrote about national politics. My ‘department’ was film and theatre. Hadn’t I given Bunuel very high marks for making good use of Deneuve’s attributes as an actress? Perhaps, but I had made the mistake of using more problematic adjectives to describe the other French movie I had seen that night at that special screening in Montreal—the Melville film, Le Samourai.

         Naturally I thought I was being cute, making reference to something French that was not even available in the US at the time. (No other publication in New York would get the jump on reviewing that film for another few years, as it turned out.) I thought it relevant to make the comparison to Bonnie and Clyde, and a glorification of the killer mentality which I found disturbing. I spent more time actually comparing Alain Delon, the star, to Clint Eastwood in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

         My mistake was in casting darker allusions on a French director and its producers. The plot had been so silly I would have found it unbearable if I had not been in company with Daneen in the first place. The whole pretext of the trip to Montreal was, for me, to have my expenses covered while she and I had a good time. But she loved the film. She loved all French films, if I remember correctly, no matter how nonsensical the plots. And it was probably for this reason that she eventually married a dentist in New Jersey.

         At that time, I was only imagining old age. I am still not sure what exactly it is. Am I old yet? Certainly it is a ridiculous figure I cut now. The gangly boy has gone to paunch. The parts do not work as they once did. I am reminded once again of the Hogarth portrait of the lame and dissolute in that wondrous series of panels for the Rake’s Progress, where the fresh young country innocent, gone off to make his fame and fortune in the city, is seduced by flesh and feasting. I am more akin now to the fellow in the later panels, though I don’t believe I got my share of the flesh and feasting, and I don’t think I’ve yet qualified for the Bedlam that was his fate in the end. I will stave off total dissolution as best I can.

         Of a morning now I dress in my armor for my battles. First the back-brace, actually just a common gut container to avoid hernias and used by all the employees at Home Depot—plastic stays in a casing of black elastic fabric with Velcro swatches to fasten it around my waist and suspenders to keeping it above my hips (which are narrower now, I think, than what is left above). A sort of knight’s girdle, if you will. But it lets me sit before the altar of my computer monitor for several hours without significant back pain. Then the neck-brace, merely a shapely foam collar, which inhibits the slump of my upper vertebrae and lessens the severity of my headaches, but would obviously not effectively deflect an opponent’s sword or lance (I was always given to slumping and my father warned me of the inevitable result). Lastly the wrist support to offset the carpal tunnel burn and sting that began half a dozen years ago and comes upon me now as the organic byproduct and consequence of a human body part constantly pestering a machine, in this case a computer keyboard. (This began not long after I stopped using a typewriter because of arthritis in my knuckles.) At least my glasses are no thicker than they were, but they are now bifocals.

         This is not to notice the nifty pillow that helps keep me sitting up straight, or the chair itself which my friend Don calls ergonomic but is truly no more or less comfortable than the old four-wheeled ‘Steelcase Swiveler’ I had at The Gist, forty years ago. My butt once barely occupied half of that near mythic marvel of ample green cushions and grey metal that so often absorbed the sudden jolts of intemperate youth in my rising and falling with careless abandon, allowing me to lean all the way back to put my feet up on the desk to snooze for five minutes at a spell, with a fabric that magically repelled spilled coffee, and never protested as much as this handmade piece of the carpenter’s art I sit on now.

         But once upon a time or two, Daneen did finally succumb to my charms. As is often the case of relationships between men and women, it was more her choice than my resolution that accomplished the fact.

         Nixon was President by then and had failed to do anything to relieve the suffering of the Ibo in Nigeria. There was oil money involved in those politics which involved various European nations more than the United States, but Paul was determined that it was some hidden quid pro quo on the part of the administration which allowed America to place its newest missiles in Germany in exchange for not disturbing the cash flow from whatever faction it was that felt endangered by Ibo independence. Without skipping a beat, the cover caricatures of Lyndon Baines Johnson were replaced by Richard Milhous Nixon. The American casualties in Vietnam, which had temporarily dropped after the debacle of the Tet Offensive due to the devastating losses incurred by the Viet Cong (though the very opposite had been reported in the American press), had begun to rise again. The use of land mines had increased on heavily trafficked public roads there. Civilians were being killed and maimed by the thousand every month. All that is fresh enough in my mind even now to once again write some nasty essay about the loss of children and their childhood and those childlike beliefs we all once held. But middle age makes a chimera of us all who survive to see it, like a grotesque, worthy of Victor Hugo. And Daneen, alikened in mind now to Esmeralda, is forever young. And it even seems to be a long time ago now that I began to count up the losses that have I incurred since.

         Very few people today would remember the reviews I wrote during those few years at The Gist if some of them hadn’t been included in the Viking anthology of ’60s literature a few years back. But they played their role in what was to come.

         I was expected to critique movies where death and destruction were offered as entertainment. But this was beyond the meager talents of a raw youth attempting to deal with the conflicted interests of a newly inflated conscience, an enlarged ego, and a suddenly swollen id. I remember well comparing Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, against Henry Hathaway’s True Grit. Hathaway was and is a much under-appreciated master of art form (his hokey Trail of the Lonesome Pine and Shepherd of the Hills, filmed thirty years before, were both on my list of the better movies I had ever seen) and though this new one had its flaws, it had absorbed me far more at that time than the more recent remake by the Coen Brothers ever could. But in both cases, the lost nuances of the Charles Portis novel were my greatest beef. Good novels seldom make good films.

         I noted then, “It took a ham-fisted director to get the full flavor from a porcine actor like Ernest Borgnine, but Peckinpah’s ‘McHale the Bandito’ was not convincing as a sociopath . . . I sincerely hope that William Holden’s apparent headache cleared up soon after he left the set, but there is little hope for Robert Ryan’s perpetual scowl and sour stomach. Perhaps he should have done a few bedroom comedies when he was still young enough to pretend a better humor.”

         We received more than several letters from twits who had read the Kael review at The New York Times and decided that Peckinpah was a genius dealing in allegory and metaphor and not just “attempting to make a spaghetti western to prop up a sagging career.” I was obviously an idiot.

         John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy  disturbed me in ways no other film, excepting The Pawnbroker, had up until that time. Because I was still living in the Lower East Side, I was then a daily witness to much of what was very well recreated in that film, and the acting of Hoffman and Voight had caught me as if they were characters on the fringes of my own life. Along with a few others of the type, I knew the likes of Ratso Rizzo and Joe Buck. I saw them everyday on the street. I started my review, “I passed the salt and pepper on along the counter while eating my eggs and toast at Mom’s on the corner of Avenue A and St. Mark’s Place this morning. Ratso was there. He uses ketchup on his eggs. I turned away from his cough.” These were people I thought I knew.

         By comparison to Midnight Cowboy, Peter Fonda’s Easy Rider struck me as shallow and riddled with stereotype and caricature. The office, however, appeared to love it and several posters for the film adorned the walls for months afterward. True, the incoherent story was partly saved by the acting of someone I had never noticed before, Jack Nicholson. But I was especially and wholly unconvinced by the performance of Peter Fonda. Later that year I saw this phenomenon again with his sibling, at a screening of Sydney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? “The empty social commentary was not improved by removing Miss Fonda from her see-through plastic Barbarella suit, because she has still managed to skip her acting lessons in the mistaken idea that such talent is genetic.”

         On a different plane, Joshua Logan (who had reached the pinnacle of his career ten years before with Bus Stop and Picnic,) “had reason to indulge in a therapeutic brain rinse to check incipient dementia” after making Paint Your Wagon, which made an embarrassment of Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood. Showing my full powers of prognostication, I predicted that “Clint Eastwood’s career is for all intents and purposes over and he would best go back to the plains of Spain and pray that Sergio Leone will make it rain again.”

         True, Arthur Penn’s Alice’s Restaurant with Arlo Guthrie was not the embarrassment Joshua Logan had so recently committed. Penn had managed to make something out of nothing, a true precursor of Seinfeld, and for that magic he deserved great praise. But “another Bonnie and Clyde was what was wanted, not a fruit salad.” (Instead, a couple of years later, he gave up trying to see the world through his own eyes and gave us the Hollywood tripe and cliché of Little Big Man, which only managed to suddenly put that wunderkind Dustin Hoffman back in mortal shoes “after flying high for years on the plastic fumes of The Graduate.”)

         By that autumn, feeling the full frustration from the limitations of my position at the magazine as typist, movie maven and pot-hole filler, I wrote a lengthy piece on the effects of the politics of war on blue collar America as I understood it from the families of the dead and injured boys I’d grown up with in South Boston, rather than the much expected review of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid which had been my assignment.

         More than raindrops fell on my head from that. Paul threatened to fire me for the first time. Out loud.

         He seldom raised his voice. It was unnecessary. No one wanted to dispute his authority, and we seldom disagreed with his decisions. Usually the yelling we heard was at vendors who were late with the delivery of supplies or distributors who had dropped the magazine because of poor sales. Now he stood over me where I sat at my desk and told me I was ‘fuckin’ nuts.’ His words.

         “Everybody and his fuckin’ mother wants to write feature articles. We already have a backlog four fuckin’ months long!”

         His face had gone pink before he turned away and walked back to his office.

         I was suddenly thankful again that he needed a diligent if not always accurate typesetter.

         It was just about then that I found out that the feature articles on Vietnam, or the failures of integration in Detroit, or the plight of farm workers in California, were producing a dozen to two dozen letters a week. My filler movie review on The Wild Bunch had brought in over two hundred.

         Ostensibly I was being paid about five cents a word for my reviews. I did receive an additional check each week from Mr. Ritts, who served as both bookkeeper and accountant. But I was also working overtime to get late copy typeset and ready by Tuesday. I had even learned to do paste-up to help with the meeting of deadlines when other hands were not available. But though I always made note of the additional time on the sheet posted at Mr. Ritts’ door I never saw those hours reflected in a paycheck.

         And then, out of the blue and just before Christmas, my piece on ‘The War in America,’ showed up as the cover story for the next week’s issue. Paul walked the bookkeeper’s check over to my desk himself. Daneen had set the entire article on her Compositor and kept the secret. I was flabbergasted.

         He actually shook my hand. It was an odd gesture at the time, I thought. Not usually done. Feels odder still, now, so many years later.

         Within the hour I had invited Daneen out for dinner and a movie to celebrate. It was she who insisted I come up to her apartment afterward for a drink. Being invited up to a woman’s apartment for a drink was the most mature adventure I had ever embarked upon to that moment. I see this now as an occasion of sea-change rather than sin, yet in fact, I remember almost nothing of it. Or better understood, I recall as much of the next few hours of my life as I now do of the day I was born.

         But that handshake with Paul cannot be forgotten. It felt as if I were making a bargain for my soul. It instilled an immediate intent in me to write something more important. For the first time in my life I felt a new possession of my own self. As if the ownership of a property had been passed. A contract made which could not be broken.

         At this moment in 1967, I was twenty years old, a mere child, in fact, in the fashion of that misbegotten century, while society postponed the more necessary bar mitzvah for youth, and ignored the inevitable consequences of hormones, dispensing moral condoms on the street corners instead. Much of my brain in that moment was still occupied by the beliefs and misunderstandings that I had grown up with in the 1950s, a specific historical period that extended from some first unrecorded memory in 1949 to the Zaprudered end of 1963.

         I have several times written of my belief that the still-frames of the cheap Kodak film shot on a second rate Bell & Howell by an amateur that day in Dallas, and which so closely documented the precise end of the 1950s, were given more immediate power by the in-common experience of a television age which had already recast our brains during the years immediately before. Black frame by black frame. It was a mere show. Another entertainment. A twentieth century Viewmaster stereoscope version of an assassination. Brains bursting in air, giving proof through the night that our flag was not there.

            “And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
            That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
            A home and a country, should leave us no more?
            Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
            No refuge could save the hireling and slave
            From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:”

         We knew very well then that the Disney delusion of our childhoods was over but also, and just as surely, that we were wholly unprepared to deal with what would come next. Certainly the final refrain of the stanza was false:

            “And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,
            O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

         And in the fourth stanza of that only quarter-known anthem (had we understood even the half of it, we might have had a chance) is the motto, ‘In God is our trust.’ This is not at all the same sentiment which was assumed by the ‘In God we trust’ that emblazons our monies now. That later permutation simply begs for the Jean Shepherd addendum, “All others pay cash.”

         ‘E pluribus unum’ had been our accepted national motto before, ‘out of many, one,’ but in my childhood this tradition was changed by edict to the more fanciful slogan, ‘In God we trust,’ precisely because this was not the case by that time and everyone knew it. That was the joke, wasn’t it? What better debasement of a sentiment could there be than in holding these words on the coins in our hands as a token of the carnage they’d wrought?

         But for myself, the context of the moment was more immediate. I was given the vicarious experience of a friend’s reality to warp my own delusions.

         God, it appeared, had no mercy.

***

16. The future of the past.

         Someone once said, there are no cheap seats at a memoir. The view is the same for all, good or bad . . . Actually, that may have been me. One of my characters might have said it. Anyway, it does sound like me.

         In any case, it was some years later that this was proved to me again, at a time when the front counter of my bookshop was raised by about 10 inches so I could keep an eye on the face of things. This perspective also often gave me the sense of being on a stage, while looking out on an audience distracted by other matters. As if the stage was reversed and the audience was the play.

         Two middle-aged men stopped in front of the bookshop window and studied the display of art books I had there. The window glass there is like the head of a drum and both men had leaned in close to see better against the glare, and their conversation, though not loud, was broadcast throughout the store and difficult to ignore.

         “Look at the shvantz on that one.”

         “It’s alright, but I wouldn’t brag.”

         “Because you can’t.”

         “At least I can see mine when I look down to do my business. You haven’t seen yours in thirty years.”

         “The only reason you can see yours is because you’re pulling at it all the time to make it longer. At least I do more pushing. It may not be long but it’s got the girth to do what needs to be done.”

         There was a short silence.

         “You remember you got the splinter in your ass from the wall at the bathhouse at Coney Island when you were trying to put your swim trunks on?”

         “I do. I do . . . What?”

         “The nurse told you the next time you should just stay on top.”

         The man looked delighted with the recollection. “Ah! Yes! And I was thinking she must know something about that subject . . . Wait. How did you know about that?”

         “She told me.”

         Several customers turned from their browsing and smiled at each other.

         But the incident reminded me then of something that started well before your time, or mine. There was once a comedy team in vaudeville by the name of Smith and Dale. Their most famous routine, which you and I have never actually seen because it was a stage performance in a venue long since past by our own time, though often imitated, and later recreated on film, was known as “Dr. Kronkheit and His Only Living Patient.”

         The skit went like this: Dale, as Dr. Kronkheit, comes into the hospital room and finds his patient, Smith, in bed.

         SMITH: Are you a doctor?

         DALE: I’m a doctor.

         SMITH: I’m dubious.

         DALE: I’m glad to know you, Mr. Dubious.

         What followed was a series of questions and answers as Dr. Kronkheit attempted to determine the exact cause of the patient’s illness, with appropriate pregnant pauses to allow the audience to react. Like:

         SMITH: It’s terrible. I walk around all night.

         DALE: Ah! You’re a somnambulist!

         SMITH: No, I’m a night watchman.

         But the key moment, the key lines and the words that the audience had heard many times and repeated to one another a hundred times more, and now waited for again as if they had never heard them before was:

         SMITH: Doctor it hurts when I do this.

         DALE: Don’t do that.

         As you might see, much of vaudeville humor was in the timing and the sight gag. It reads less well than it might. Much the same can be said for the Marx Brothers or W.C. Fields, but those fellows have benefited from the immortality of their film careers. Smith and Dale were strictly vaudeville. Fortunately I had customers in Brooklyn who were old enough to remember the act and had it related to me in detail. More than once.

         In the 1960s the nation was living through a very long Smith and Dale routine which had taken a dark twist, with the national conscience ostensibly in the hands of the 6 pm CBS News with Walter Cronkite, then affectionately known as ‘Uncle Walter’ for reasons I never understood, but known to my own readers as Wally. He had a trim mustache and a comfortably jowly look, coupled with the requisite deep and authoritative voice which was de rigueur at the time (much the way the shallow tenor of our current age is the new template for earnestness), and I assumed this appearance was the reason for the popularity of his television persona and the subconscious belief that he purveyed the truth. In fact he was a partisan his whole career, no more even-handed than anyone writing at The Gist. I’ve read that he had been a fine and brave correspondent in World War Two, often serving at the front with men in battle, but he had that Midwestern small mindedness (so different than East Coast small mindedness) within him that fixes on a thing and doesn’t let it go. As is so often the case with small minds without restraints, when his power as a news anchor and national voice grew, his small and malicious nature came through.

         While reporting from Kansas City during the Roosevelt depression of the 1930s, and caught in the algae bloom of socialism of that time, he had become fond of the idea that government can solve all problems. He was a man of such enthusiasms. Like sailing his yacht on Long Island Sound or lending verbal support to a coal miner’s strike. And so it was when, later, Wally fell in love with the American space program.

         When mankind first landed on the moon, Wally was there, on the television screen, reporting every breathless moment (just as he had done for the Kennedy assassination—but that’s another story). His visible and audible devotion for the great national project was infectious and his popularity was enormous.

         As it happened, our own editor-in-chief, Paul Winger, was unsure how to handle the event. To support the ‘space race’ would mean supporting the efforts of the same government he opposed on nearly every other issue of the day. Circulation for The Gist had dropped since the Tet Offensive, and Paul was being confronted each week by Mr. Ritts, and the unfortunate figures on the bottom line.

         And as it happened, I was much against the space program, for other reasons, and had often expressed the opinion, most strongly after the deaths of Ed White, Roger Chaffee and Gus Grissom, which had occurred just after I had begun work at the magazine. In early July of 1969, preparing for the great event of mankind’s landing on the moon, and knowing my opinion, Paul asked me if I might have anything else to say.

         I plunked a 10,000 word manuscript on his desk the next morning.

         Not all of it written in haste. I had been working on something in the hope that he might like it and publish it, perhaps in a series. The idea had started, not from my dislike of the incredible waste and boondoggle at NASA, which was alone sufficient to aid me in carrying it out, but more directly from a conversation I had overheard between Mr. Ritts and Paul concerning The Gist budget, with our own Chancellor of the Exchequer informing him that there was no more money “to buy anything from anyone,” and that he would have to make do with the backlog of manuscripts already accepted until further notice.

         I was on salary. I required no additional compensation. In fact, I loved what I was doing so much, I felt overpaid. The advance publicity in other media for the landing on the moon was already non-stop, with Wally touting the tightening and turning of every $100 screw each night on the six o’clock news like a pimp on a doorstep.

         I have never carried a camera with me. My opinion is that it interferes with my own immediate appreciation of an event, which I rather want to put into words, not pictures, though I have always enjoyed the visual imagery of a Life magazine for its own sake and greatly miss that weekly display of the still-captured raw moment now, that most of all in our new age of constant re-creation and recreation through CGI. But still, I would love to have a picture of Paul’s face from that precise instant for my wall, when I dropped that manuscript on his desk. I am most proud of the memory.

         His jaw did not drop. His face was frozen in the angst of the instant ongoing just before that one, as he complained about the decreasing length of so many pieces: the average twelve to eighteen hundred word feature article had become a mere six to eight hundred as our writers produced less and less while their pay checks were delayed further and further. His eyes went briefly to my face through the splay of his forelock, without a movement of his head. There was no sweep of the hand to brush the hair back. The hand instead went forward and turned back the front page, and the next, and the next. I stood without moving for about 1200 words or so and then turned to go.

         He said, “Thanks.” He did not look back up.

         My argument was simply that the United States Government had established NASA for military purposes to counter the Soviet space program, but then, with the help of Wally and a willing press, turned it into a matter of national manifest destiny and national glory. In fact, the cost was outrageous. Budget overruns were a way of life at Houston and Cape Kennedy (in hindsight a mere speck of blood compared with the open artery we suffer from today). Texas grew rich from taxes while the Bronx festered in poverty. The cost of a single booster rocket would build and fund a large new urban grammar school for years to come. I supposed that, if the NASA budget to put a man on the moon had been used instead to rebuild that entire borough of New York as a showcase model of modern ideals and current technology, even with the overpaying of corrupt contractors for decent housing and well-lit streets, parks, playgrounds and better schools, it could have been a new ‘garden city,’ all for about the cost of that ‘great leap’ to the moon, and the children in the Bronx would not be dying of tuberculosis and eating rat feces and lead paint chips in their oatmeal. And, too, that those three brave astronauts would still be alive, no matter their own desires to be the first on the moon.

         Understand, this was not because I was against going to the moon. Just the opposite. I was begrudging the idea that it should be paid for as a national boondoggle instead of opening the thing to bid and the competition of all those companies that were happily inflating the cost of every screw.

         Paul ran the piece in parts over the next three issues with photos supplied by NASA itself. By the third installment, circulation of The Gist had doubled from a low of 60,000 copies to the all time high of 120,000. More importantly, his editorial budget had been salvaged.

         I would like to think I was the cause of this salvation. But the actual reason of the rise in circulation likely had little to do with any brilliance, grace, or edge to my writing. It was all because of a dig I had made on Uncle Wally. The first installment, appearing two weeks before the moon landing in July, had named Mr. Cronkite himself as the prime villain in the media frenzy over the moon race. The cover, a naughty piece of British style cartooning featuring a moon-faced prostitute beneath a streetlamp telling a very Wally-like looking customer what her price was, in billions, and him answering  “Sure, if that’s the way it is,” and with that imagery set against a darkly silhouetted cityscape of slum with a rat peering out at the corner of a broken fence.

         Who knew Uncle Wally even read The Gist? Perhaps it was a leftover habit from his pre-yacht proletarian protest days. But to counter the affront, in a fit of pique, and in full dudgeon, Cronkite used all of two minutes of his broadcast time that week on the ‘Evening News’ to attack The Gist as a scurrilous piece of communist agitprop. Suddenly tens of millions of people actually knew we existed.

         As Dr. Kronkheit might say, “It was a gift.”

         The Saturday night following the third installment of my attack on the profligacy and corruption of the space program, with a deluge of interest keeping the phones in the office ringing non-stop, our accountant-cum-bookkeeper, Mr. Ritts, invited us all down to his Greenwich Village apartment for a party.

         An openly gay man and secret Bohemian (the latter I suppose because it might have cast some doubt on his more hard headed accounting practices), George Ritts lived with his partner, Harold Norman, in a second floor loft above a garage near Greenwich Street, at the far western frontier of the Village. George had originally been a bookkeeper with another DuPont family interest somewhere in Delaware, but had come to The Gist along with Edgar Nelson to keep an eye on things and, likely, make sure that not too much of the family money was squandered.

         At work, Mr. Ritts wore French cuffs, silver stick-pinned ties, ancient mahogany hued wingtips with the gleam of frequent polish, and what I was to learn were called ‘bespoke’ suits made especially for him by Strawbridge’s. His speech was of the high Yankee sort you generally only hear in the suburbs of Philadelphia. His face was small and his brain large, with the skull around it balding. The brain pressed at his eyes, making them bulge. His cheeks were sallow, and with the loss of hair, made him appear unhealthy. His concave chest gave his shoulders a slight slump, and when he was unhappy and his tongue worried his teeth, as it often did when he was at a loss for words, the shoulders would slump further, giving him an awful appearance, which could not be camouflaged by his excellent hand-tailored clothes.

         George also had a wicked sense of humor and enjoyed standing by his office door at the edge of the room and commenting in sotto voce on our shenanigans. He had quickly become something of a soul mate for me in that place because I, in turn, could express my own thoughts off-the-cuff on the living theatre of what boiled before us and know that he would appreciate them. His laugher was a bit high pitched and often brought other eyes around in our direction to see what was so funny while the world was falling to pieces.

         My desk happened to be only steps from the door to his office. I think, in retrospect, that he must have read some of my pieces and had an affinity for my way of thinking more than for the general opinion of the magazine staff. But we never spoke of politics, or at least he never did. He believed that ideology and bookkeeping did not mix, any more than it did with the life-style he happily followed after hours.

         An anecdote here may make my appreciation of the situation clear. I had seen the office at the The Gist on several occasions prior to the first day I was officially employed. I had seen the way the staff dressed—guys in jeans and t-shirts, girls in jeans or flair pants and colorful frilled blouses. My contrariness was immediate. I could not give up my jeans too easily—I had two pair and only one clean at a time. But my stock of flannel shirts was not impressive, while being inadequate to the summer months. The day I was hired, I went to Korvettes and bought myself a package of two white shirts and wore one on that first day. Most of my first hour on the job was spent at the same desk I would occupy for the next three years, filling out various forms for Mr. Ritts. When I thought the blank spaces had been adequately filled, I turned and brought them to his door.

         He motioned me in, looked the forms over, squinted back at me several times as I waited, and at last said, “Did you remember to take the cardboard out of that shirt before you put it on?”

         The immediate resonance to every shirt my mother had ever bought me and that I had worn directly from the package made me feel quite at home.

         To me, then, the party at Mr. Ritts’ loft was a revelation. This single enormous second floor room atop a taxi repair shop was up a dark and narrow stairway so that the emergence into the light was doubly magnified. The first impression was as if an entire 3rd floor above had been removed leaving twenty-foot ceilings throughout. Fans turned slowly in the manner of set decoration from Casablanca. The space stretched from back to front, side to side, windows to windows, unimpeded except by various pieces of furniture chosen for the fact that none was anything like another. Heavy curtains were suspended above our heads (Harold was a stage manager for a theatre on 49th Street), or on runners in-between, and were used to break off areas when and where necessary. He said the lack of physical walls was to comply with a fire code, but it appeared to be another stroke of design genius, totally overcoming the usual cramped space of a New York apartments. Artwork was everywhere, most of it suspended mid-air, from the ceiling, and again in no particular style but representing anything George or Harold had taken a fancy to, from medieval iconography to Warhol. Music, mostly Latin jazz (and that being primarily Brazilians like guitarist Joao Gilberto and singer pianist Antonio Carlos Jobim and much of the voice of Elizete Cardoso) filled the air along with the smell of tobacco and grass and substances I had no prior knowledge of—mingled with perfumes I had never whiffed before. I had seen the film Black Orpheus only recently there in New York and the music alone was still incredibly new to me.

         I am not sure that, until that evening, I even knew George’s first name. He was always Mr. Ritts to me. But it was on the buzzer, along with that of his partner. He answered the door wearing a nearly iridescent Hawaiian shirt that hurt the eyes. He was suddenly a different man. The tie and suit were gone. And he had a smile that revealed no hint of the pain he so often suffered with witticism at the office.

         It was that very night I actually first learned about mixed drinks. I was twenty-one.

***

17. Hits and Misandries

         Some of my writing over the years has been in the form of the essay, and most of those were directed at matters of seemingly urgent interest at the time—skirmishes in that larger cultural war that was, to my mind, being so thoroughly and completely lost—but all of it of little consequence now. I have since joined the ranks of those who see the deluge coming on and have started taking swimming lessons.

         In effect, I have found new sympathy with those critics of humanity, like Mencken, Bierce and Twain, who began as commentators and became curmudgeons worried with the thought that the human race itself was the problem. Misanthropy seems justified given the slaughter and mayhem, never mind the daily ordinary meanness. But then I became anxious over the lower ranks of those I had joined. And more particularly the male of the species.

         The misandry one finds in many intellectuals is the same sort of self-hate one can often see in children. They have failed to meet some expectation, some standard set by adults, and, without fully understanding that the fair excuse for this inadequacy is their simple childhood lack of experience and education, they blame themselves for some innate flaw or larger crime. If they are observant of others around them, they may then get the idea that they are not less capable than others, and that people in general are to be loathed or feared. The hubris of believing that we can shape everything within our reach is not far off that of blaming ourselves for every failure. I have certainly been guilty of this fault in the past and perhaps still carry some of that load of mischief now.

         Another thesis of mine that caused some negative attention to be paid to The Gist was that the United States was a failed experiment: that the nation which was ours was as pitiable and stupid as a Frankenstein’s monster throwing the child into the water along with her flowers. We intended to do right, but more often did wrong. All men were created equal and endowed by ‘their creator’ with certain unalienable rights . . . that is, most all—at least, of those men who were white. Not the negroes. Not the Indians. Not women. In other words, they might have more honestly stated their position from the start that we were establishing a republic where ‘some men are created equal,’ just as the Greeks had done before them. But the language they used certainly sounded splendid. Wasn’t the language enough? Isn’t that all any politician can offer?

         The flaw in that line of thinking was clearly to ignore the presence of those words ‘their creator’ and of the word ‘God’ in that founding document. The overt statement as well as the implication throughout was that the ‘Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God’ were of higher importance than the laws of man. There was no intention by those dead white men that what they did would result in a man-made utopia, only that it would beg our attention to the ideal, as we dealt with the mundane.

Yet, I was ready to admit, the Declaration of Independence left a great obligation that no other people had so publicly incurred before, and the Constitution which followed, at least in ‘three-fifths’ part and ‘excluding Indians not taxed,’ had doubled down on that original aspiration. I gave them credit where it was due, I thought. At the historical moment in time there was no other nation on earth with as great a degree of liberty even for free white males. The foundation had at the least been set for improvement and the fallibility of human artifice was allowed for through amendment. We had then proceeded, at enormous cost to ‘our Lives, our Fortunes and sacred Honor.’

         Jacob Pierce had been the first teacher who had broken this code for me.

He was a small man in height, but burly and gave the visual impression, wearing a tie but seldom a jacket, with his hair cut to near military length, his back always straight, and his shirt crisply ironed, of being a former Marine drill sergeant. Though he had been a Marine, he had not in fact been long in that service. His own passion, other than hiking, and our beloved Miss Lawrence, was ‘history.’ Specifically American history. He had already written a book about Bunker Hill and had chosen to teach at our high school with the intention of recounting the Boston bookseller Henry Knox’s winter march with sixty tons of artillery cannon from Fort Ticonderoga in New York, over 300 frozen miles, to those very heights where we sat at our uncomfortable desks. I was fortunate to have him as a teacher during that same year he had completed the journey from Lake Champlain to Boston on foot between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. (It was the following spring that he married Miss Lawrence.)

         The book did not appear until several years after I graduated, but nonetheless, he was already something of a hero to the boys in the class simply for that initial effort. And his spirited discussion of American history in class did not suffer from it. (The substitute teacher who had filled his shoes for the four weeks between the usual school vacation breaks had often been reduced to sputtering rages in his absence. A justice retribution.)

         The strange fact which was very clear to us all then was that this powerful fellow had climbed Mt. Mitchell and Mt. Washington and a few dozen lesser peaks, had paddled the length of both the Hudson and Connecticut Rivers by canoe, and hiked the entire portion of Appalachian Trail that was then complete, but was completely unable to deal with women. He could barely look them in the eye. His voice grew weak in response to a question from the dumbest female in our class. It was inexplicable to the boys. But the stranger fact still was that, unlike the poor unfortunate substitute teacher we had manhandled at every opportunity because he could be so easily intimidated, the girls in the class did not abuse their power over Mr. Pierce. They loved his shyness. They adored him.

         What this demonstrated to me (wrongly, I will now readily admit) was that women lacked some genetic predisposition to take advantage of the weak. And it was this proposition that I worked into my essay in The Gist about those dead white males who had written the Declaration of Independence. I supposed that the country would have been remarkably different in nature if women had been given the right to vote from the very first.

         However, without Uncle Wally to promote my brilliance, this particular article produced only a few hundred pieces of hate mail. Most, given our audience, took issue not with my idea concerning the need of suffrage for women at the time of the Founding but with my giving any credit at all to those dead white bigots for their acceptance of those better obligations they aspired to. And to one letter writer it appeared that I was a traitor. America was at war with the communists in Vietnam, and such ‘fifth-column’ activity was deserving of a firing squad. (I figured this response to be from the unhappy parent of one of our staff members, as they were the only likely readers who were getting something in the mail they had not subscribed to on their own.)

         I often wondered just who the parents were of our motley crew of rich kids in jeans. How had they failed so miserably to instill in their children some sense of the values that made their comfortable lives possible? (But for a few, I never knew). Wisely, I think, I avoided arguing with our primary subscribers and chose to respond to that one odd letter, if only to make the important point that America was nearly always at war, hot or cold, and that dissent and freedom of speech were supposedly what we were fighting for.

         I did even better with the next opportunity. I attacked yet another icon. This time it was one of my own personal favorites, Mr. Lincoln.

         The idealism of the 1950s Civil Rights movement had degenerated into race riots in most major cities and a renewal of de facto segregation as white flight left many inner cities abandoned in the wake, with blacks refusing the company of whites, even in the college cafeterias of liberal universities.

         I blamed this on Abraham Lincoln.

         (This point was a stretch, so hold on and don’t lose your balance as you read along.) My thesis was simply this: with Lincoln’s assumption of federal power in waging war against the South, he had irreparably subverted the core balance of the Constitution by joining with his predecessor Jackson in raising the power of the presidency above the other co-equal branches. The states had every right to secede, as stipulated in the original document, and that it was this unique reservation of the right to secede which was the only ultimate governor on Federal usurpation. That, had the Southern states been allowed their pound of foolishness, they would have paid for their actions dearly enough, and sooner, but not with the enormous loss of life and destruction of property that occurred during the Civil War, the heightened animosities and lingering scars, nor the corruption and dissolution of the Reconstruction years, nor all of the generational aftermath and corruption of one-party rule which institutionalized so much of the depravity and deception necessary to preserve its own power. And more or most importantly without the grudging acceptance of defeat that spawned an insular culture in the South, producing such aberrations as the KKK, Jim Crow, and the rest.

         I argued that Lincoln’s role in all this, given his previous statements and beliefs, should have been more in common with the ‘copperheads.’ By using diplomacy and trade to work with British interests, for instance, the Southern economy would have been ruined and slavery made too costly. If he had indeed enforced the ideals founded ‘four score and seven years’ before, he would have achieved a far stronger union and greater victory without slaughtering the better and braver youth of the nation—those who always rose to the need in crisis while the lesser ones stayed at home to procreate and play politics. It was my hindsight that the individual states of the Confederacy, one by one, would sooner have rejoined the North, and that the negro, immediately treated then as a human being of equal rights under the law, would have more quickly achieved a fuller share of the national provenance.

Moreover, that Lincoln had fatally acquiesced to political expedience and accepted Johnson of Tennessee as his vice-presidential running mate instead of sticking by the far better Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, who might have seen the ideals of the great emancipator through to their proper ends.

         But an attack on the saintly Mr. Lincoln was simply not acceptable, even to our progressive readership. The letters—at least those without questions concerning my manhood or the animal species of my mother—could be summed up by, ‘Say what you want about Richard Nixon, but keep your stupid opinions about our saintly Captain to yourself.’

         I rejoined my attack in a follow-up by pointing out that a similar perversion of Federal authority had resulted from Andrew Jackson’s abrogation of the rights of the Cherokee Nation and a willful disregard of the Supreme Court, an action which actually reduced that branch to the peonage of interests that later produced the Dred Scott decision, and made possible Polk’s imperial pursuit of the Mexican American War (I was not against that war so much as the way it was waged). Jackson is pretty much relegated now to the heroic visage on the twenty-dollar bill, but our California and Southwestern subscribers did not appreciate my stance on Polk, nor was our editor, Paul, happy with me and he suggested that I might want to lay off those issues which too easily incurred the wrath of regional bias. Our subscriber base was small enough as it was. And I had not fully reckoned with Cesar Chavez and the interests of the United Farm Workers, then at the forefront of some newly minted Hispanic contentions which I had also failed to address.

         So I turned back then to writing about subjects a little closer to my personal experience: the ever growing drug wars and the rise of the police state empowered to enforce restrictions on our private lives, take our property, and imprison us for smoking a common roadside weed even while encouraging tobacco interests to flourish. (I had nothing against tobacco, mind you, only the disparity.) The debacle of Prohibition, I argued, had worked no better for ending the consumption of alcohol than drug laws ever would. There was simply too much money to be made from the illegal admixture of a nearly infinite variety of legal compounds and too many politicians happy to take donations for favors and permits. And now, with the combat in Vietnam dragging on overseas, there was President Johnson’s war on poverty at home, a battle being further lost all around us because of the government’s involvement in what should be a matter of individual charity and private financial interest (there was money being made either way, but in one case it serviced private citizens and the other the politicians), and with this shift of values came the loss of a social sense of responsibility for our neighbors and pervasive acceptance of the thought, ‘the government will do it.’

         I was fortunate Paul Winger was so in need of copy. 

         All the while, rejection of my first two attempts becoming the fuel for inner fires, I had also started the third of the novels I wrote while working at The Gist, and was there recollecting what personal knowledge I had about drugs and how these were ravaging my generation of ‘baby boomers.’ One of those essay pieces for Paul had been the first time I had related the story of Surcease Sullivan, using false names, of course. And this then was an easy segue each night when I went home to Avenue A to write, especially in the warmer months when my open windows offered the appropriate soundtrack.

         When I think of the twists and turns of my own life, I know that those angles are relatively few because I kept so close to my narrowed pursuit of writing, for the most part. How might I have fared in some other climate? What if I had chosen another direction in life? Could I have been a writer-adventurer, like Roy Chapman Andrews or Patrick Leigh Fermor, for instance? But I always ended with a mental image of myself wiping the mud splatters from my glasses and then giving up on the idea.

         I would have fared no better than my fears, I think. Likely worse. My glasses have always been the best metaphor for my larger blindness. I suspect I would have quickly been consumed by the lions and tigers and bears, had I not stayed on my own path.

I often imagined the same excuse that some myopic ancestor of mine might have offered when the keen-eyed went off to count coup and he stayed home to improve the architecture of the huts, or dig a better irrigation ditch, or make a better barbeque sauce. Or wrote epic poetry instead, like Mr. Homer.

***

18. Mr. Billington’s ends and beginnings

         If allowed the time, I would like to write a play about one particular historical moment. The thought surrounding the story is not new, but I have yet to find the clue to what extra matter might make it work. What was the crucial element in the chemistry of the crucial instant? What love or hate or fear made it possible. This same sort of thing happened to me with Mr. Billington, before that came together. I’m sure if I can keep at it, the day will come.

         In 1867, Sam Clemens, only recently returned from a trip East as a newfound celebrity (imagine that fantastical train ride across the prairie), was about to leave again on a voyage abroad, ostensibly on a self-styled assignment for the San Francisco Morning Call. I would like to have been present when he convinced his editor, George Barnes, of the necessity of that bit of work. Clemens had only just become famous for writing the account of a articular leaping frog and I suppose in those days, one such gold strike was enough to build a life upon. As it were. Or was.

         And as it happened, the newspaper’s office was on the third floor of a building that also contained the San Francisco branch of the U.S. Mint. That singular fact must work its way into yet another caper, but I haven’t quite cracked that case either.  (It demands a grand theft, an escape, a chase, and a determined predator from the police department who lacks any appreciation of literature). Most important to the tale, the secretary to the superintendent of the United States Mint was none other than Bret Harte. Mr. Harte was already stirring up what literary trouble he could make with a couple of his own belletristic efforts, including The Overland Monthly and The Californian, where he had published several of his friend Sam’s ‘burlesques’ under the recently assumed name of Mark Twain and in addition gave needed work to such other future literary lights of that city as Charles Henry Webb, Joaquin Miller, Ina Coolbrith, and, notably, Ambrose Bierce.

         Bierce was then working for a competing rag, The San Francisco News-letter, as managing editor and there authoring a column called ‘The Town Crier.’  He was thus in want of news. My play, when it is written, will concern one day in the lives of Harte, and Twain, and Bierce, each young and in pursuit of their own futures, jostling for position among themselves, bragging on what they might do, and doing much drinking in a nearby saloon. There must be an opportunity to rob a U.S. Mint in all that.

         If some publisher were to buy a book (or two) of mine today, I might afford a ticket on the train to San Francisco. I have an old friend there who would give me use of his couch I think. All the places that Clemens and Bierce and Harte once prowled were burnt and collapsed in the calamity of 1906, but just as you can in London, or Paris, or New York, when you can feel the presence of Boswell and Johnson on Fleet Street, or Joyce and Hemingway on the Rue de l’Odeon, or imagine the past parade of talent on Fifth Avenue in front of the old Scribner’s building, I could stand where my three characters once stood to argue their lies out to some satisfaction with the facts. There is even now a remnant of the original building that housed the Mint on Commercial Street, and the public library there has much of the original material I would need for the corroboration of my deception.

         Though, I admit, it is not just one story that intrigues me. I still haven’t written the Arthurian romance I promised to Sarah. Someday I must go to Carlisle and stand on Hadrian’s Wall and smell that air too.

         But it is only the writing that I can look forward to now. And it is most often true, I think, that I look into the past, not the present or future for the happiness I want out of that. I must try, alas, to be happy with the work in and of itself.

         As I think of it now, the fact is that I was no more pleased and happy at the accomplishment of The Stolon in 1969 than I was about one of my later published novels, What Mr. Billington Said, in 2003. The experience was new to me in the first case, of course, but the thrill and elation of having my book published was largely dampened by my inner Catholic doubts of its worth. Interestingly, it is the doubts which have since faded. Not the thrill. I still feel that, along with the memory of it. However, I care less now what others might think. Or perhaps that is not true either, in sum. But I still do often think about Mr. Billington, ten years after the fact of his last public appearance, and seldom consider that younger hero of The Stolon.

         If you missed it, the first appearance of those stories about the Boston bookseller, Mr. Billington, written shortly after the death of George Ritts, was a murder mystery set at the time of the Revolution. I readily admit to liking the story too much. It was doomed, thus, from the start and never got beyond the first printing. Deemed pretentious by some and contentious by others, Mr. Billington, my erstwhile alter ego in that case, was not only a bookseller, but a scribbler and scribe, an aphorist and humorist, who disdained both religion and hard labor at a time when each is valued at a premium. He is the seventh son of a seventh son, of the seventh generation of Billingtons in America, the earliest of whom was the first Englishman to be hung in the colonies. For murder, I remind you.

         A lover of good books and good beer, my Mr. Billington eschews the company of women, lives in the black quarter of Beacon Hill because rooms are cheaper there, and knows more than he should about things in general for the fact that his services as a scrivner are used by all—all who cannot read or write for themselves . . . and thus he is a friend to everyone, it seems, except the intolerant. He is a drinking buddy of Samuel Adams and regular acquaintance of Doctor Warren and Paul Revere. And by choice, and on Dr. Warren’s cunning advice, he is not a member of the Sons of Liberty, and thus not a suspect to be fingered by the traitorous spy Dr. Benjamin Church. But he aids the rebels nonetheless.

         His dual purposes in life are, first, to prove his ancestors’ innocence of that mortal sin (his father’s great mission, and his grandfather’s before him, and that of every prior generation of the family, all the way back to the original John Billington who was hung by Governor Bradford in Plymouth for the murder of John Newcombe in 1620), and, second, to enjoy life while he can, for any man’s days are short.

         Billington himself has been a murder suspect before and was defended then by none other than John Adams, but that incident is only alluded to and meant to be used late in the fourth of those novels—and therefore never written. In 1775, when a British captain is murdered in his bed during Washington’s siege of Boston, it is Billington who is immediately thrown in jail as the last man seen drinking with the soldier, though without sufficient evidence. Billington’s attempt to extract information from the man had been foiled by a superior who wanted the man’s silence. And after the evacuation of the British, the bookseller is believed by some to be a secret loyalist because he had stayed behind in the ‘olde towne’ during the occupation, as much for the belief that he is of a tainted family ‘known to be rough and dishonest.’  He seems to be too often to be in the midst of murder. His only real ally and alibi was Doctor Warren, by then killed at Bunker Hill. 

         Needing a model for the character, I had immediately chosen Mr. Ritts. George’s sexuality was not the matter. It was the man. A mixture of the refined and the unorthodox. As unpretty as he was witty. With John Billington, I was able to play ventriloquist—and to put words in his mouth I might have been reluctant to express otherwise. But it appears that the pot never boiled for many, and the plot didn’t play. Tom Paine was my source for Billington’s politics, and Ben Franklin for his wit, but that was not enough. Heroes are required to be handsome too. The one printing was remaindered and I bought several boxes of unsold and returned copies from the publisher, which I now have in a closet downstairs and send out to the friends who never saw the novel on the bookstore shelf, or to save for some future event that I cannot yet imagine. Still, it was so much fun to write, I could hardly wait to use him one more time.

         I wrote Billington Again, the third of those stories, in an obstinate frame of mind. If they didn’t like the first, I would foist a second on them as punishment. Perhaps. Actually, it was nearly written before the first was published. But I did finish it with a grudge. For the umpteenth time I had been confirmed in the knowledge that what entertained me was not necessarily what charmed others. The publisher passed on it, having little hope and no budget for another failure.

         With the adverse philosophy that three books about a Boston bookseller that don’t sell are better than two, I finished Mr. Billington Says during that period after September 11th when I was most desperate for escape from the present. Still, a certain hopelessness pervades the work. And the third of these historical mysteries was the more difficult because my hero had grown older and was taking his last cracks at authority. Yet barely a day goes by when I don’t come up with another worthless little ditty to add to the collection of sayings I have attributed to Mr. Billington in his time.

         Such as this: ‘The best sort of cautionary tale is told about something else entirely than the problem at hand.’ ‘Be careful not to get blood in the potatoes when you cut them. They are the last.’ ‘Indirection, always unexpected, is the shortest way to the heart of a matter and a woman.’ Or, “Things don’t always not work out. Some things have been, just as they should be. Some things have never been, just as they should not.’

         And my favorite: “The present may be the end of the story for some, and the beginning for others, but for most of us it is the muddle.”

         As I think of it, maybe I will write another.

         I see that I have gotten ahead of myself once again, but one more comment about by oddish hero. This concerns the way that Mr. Billington came to be. It’s a simple story.

         Back in those days at The Gist, when George Ritts used to stand by the open door to his office and make his comments about the ongoing antics played before us both, I used to call him ‘Mr. Billington.’ It was a natural convolution, given that he was responsible for paying all the bills. He in turn called me ‘Mr. Watch,’ as in the one who watches. This little matter confused the others in the office who overheard it, all of whom had gotten their own little nicknames over time, but also because I did not wear a watch, and then they took it for some minor irony for that reason.

         “Mr. Watch. There is a flurry of female activity at Alice’s desk over some important revelation. I think she might be pregnant.”

         “I hope her parents are that excited when she brings home the news.”

         Except for the fact that he signed my paycheck each week, I would have thought Mr. Ritts had forgotten my real name by the time the doors finally closed on The Gist for the last time.

         His manner of delivery when making comments on the others was equally as arch. It would not do to simply say, ‘Rob is pushing Paul to his limits.’ He would say, “Yale is suffering beneath the yoke of Harvard,” alluding to their respective schools. Or “Sarah Lawrence may not be represented in the office softball tournament this year,” when later making note of Alice Peters’ obvious pregnancy. (Which reminds me that it was never actually discovered who the father was, but then, Alice had her way with several of the staff.) And often, Mr. Ritts would expand on an observation, such as, “Shakespeare had a company of players he knew and understood the limits of, and he wrote the parts they played and twisted his histories accordingly, whereas Paul cannot shape the world’s news just to meet the talents or inabilities of his staff.”

         Years later, when I went to visit George in the hospital, he would usually greet me with some personal anecdote that related to those years before. But on one occasion I arrived just after his bath, and he was full of other thoughts.

         “Hello, Mr. Watch. I was thinking about you. I was wondering if you were ever going to get yourself a kid . . . Now that I’m getting used to the nurses handling my body, I’m thinking I might have done well to have had a kid myself after all. It wouldn’t have been so bad. Harold always wanted a kid. We could have found a surrogate.”

         The dark eyes glistened with the inspiration of it.

         I agreed. I told him, “You should have had a kid just so you’d have had someone to pass all your accumulated wisdom on to.”

         I called it ‘wisdom’ just to irritate him. He flinched at that. The fat was gone from his face and a mere flinch looked agonizing. His tongue moved against his teeth as if preparing the words he wanted.

         “People who most frequently give advice are often those who do not listen to others . . . I guess that would be me.”

         I said, “No. I never saw it that way. I always thought they were insightful observations. Usually good ones.”

         He dismissed that with a turn of his head. “Humph . . . So what about it? You and Sarah going to have any kids?”

         “Sarah can’t now. I would be okay with it. Adopting maybe. But she’s already raised a couple of her own. Alone. She’s been a mother ever since she was a teenager. I think she could use some time now to herself.”

         He stuck his lower jaw out at that, perhaps with a little touch of defiance. “Life molds us, you know. You have to let it do its work. Like yeast . . . But you never made bread, did you? Still don’t cook, I’ll bet? Does Sarah?”

         “No. She’s as bad as I am for that.”

         “Well. Anyway, don’t try to shape things by your own misconceptions.”

         I just smiled at that, to let him realize that he had done it again. 

         He said, “Humph,” again.

         It was exactly at that moment that I first envisaged Mr. Billington. The ‘Humph,’ was the key. Billington was of course a rascal and opposite George Ritts in a hundred obvious ways, but it was the other stuff of the man that had always caught my attention.

         I had long been a big fan of Benjamin Franklin and his Poor Richard, and had only recently discovered the story of the original Mr. Billington, who had been hung for murder in 1630 and wanted to use this basic line for a murder mystery, though I had not at that moment re-conceived the possibilities for a later member of the family. But the radix was there.

         And one more thing, now.

         Mark Twain had once written descriptively and uncharacteristically of his first meeting with Robert Louis Stevenson, where he had found the Scot sitting upon a bench in Washington Square.

         “He was most scantily furnished with flesh. His clothes seemed to fall into the hollows as if there might be nothing inside the frame for a sculptor’s statue. His long face and lank hair and dark complexion and musing and melancholy expression. . . seemed especially planned to gather the rays of your observation . . . upon Stevenson’s special distinction and commanding feature, his splendid eyes. They burned with a smoldering rich fire under the penthouse of his brows and they made him beautiful.”

         That was another distinction of Mr. Ritts and one that remained to the very end.

         Ah, and here is another scene, but this one never found its way to print.

         What was I thinking? It was set in 1787. It says that much right at the top.

Was I planning to make a play of it then? I’ve forgotten. But it fits none of the other Billington stories, and I can see it was typed on my old Hermes, which was sometime after I put the Underwood in the closet, so that makes it fairly early. I suspect it was one of the original plans for my ne’er do well bookseller, and obviously done after I opened my own shop.

         Young Samson leaned in across a stack of Bibles. [Oh, I like that touch! A nice bit of whimsy there.]

         “What then do you advocate for, Mr. Billington? What sort of nation would you have?”

         Billington looked up from his order ledger and met the earnest face.

         “The answer to that is a simple one, for a man such as myself. My wants are quaint perhaps, to more sophisticated minds. They may debate their fears in Philadelphia more than they do their dreams, but I have no such compunctions. My want is nothing less than a republic of books.”

         Samson gestured at the shelves that surrounded them.

         “Ha! You jest. I was serious, you see.”

         “No, sir, I do not! I’ll reserve my humor for lesser matters. My only hope is that you might see. I pray that you will understand one day and know that I am sincere. Liberty will only flourish in a republic of books, where mankind is free to imagine and to write out its dreams, and to publish what they envision, and to sell their work to any who might desire it, for freedom to imagine is the liberty to think what you will, and the freedom to write is the liberty to do what you want, and the freedom to publish is the liberty to make what you wish come true, and the freedom to sell your ideas is the liberty to live by your own work, and a nation where books may be bought by free choice, and kept, freely and openly, is the country for me.”

         My idealism there was on my sleeve. I suppose I might have once been embarrassed a little by such a display, and put the piece away. But no more.

***

19. Samhain and Halloween

         1963 is the year Michael’s Meat Market burned down on Halloween.

         This torch of chicken fat and 100-year-old timbers burned brightly yellow and orange through an effervescent autumn fog with the fire engines from the nearby station clogging South Boston’s  Broadway through the night, as a mist mad pearly  by the moon continued to roll in off the harbor, the flames infused the air with a half-light I have only seen once since then during a partial eclipse of the sun.

         When it started we were all out and about begging our treats in various makeshift costumes, mostly involving charcoal and old clothes torn un-artfully to achieve some unintelligible if ghastly effect but which successfully resonated nonetheless the insanity that possessed us as we danced and pranced on sidewalks, scooting in between parked cars and out into the streets, so intent on our candy spoils we had ignored the sirens and did not take notice until the catastrophic event was well along. From the time that we did finally come to our senses, and on into the small hours of the morning, a ring of children stood just ahead of a blockade of adults, forming a secondary rampart beyond the engines and flashing lights, each of us shoving chocolates and candy corn into our open mouths as we watched every move and then reporting it to each other as if one of us was not as close and might not have seen. The moist warm air smelled of beef and hams and of a shipment of fresh turkeys, all roasted at once.

         In keeping with the religious significance of that eve, one adult noted wittily that he could smell the roasting souls of those who had sinned. The hunger this comment induced caused many of us to consume the better part of our sugared booty on the spot, lest we die before this greater pleasure was indulged.

         The almost equally important event that resulted from this was to be an epic trek by our branch of the McGuire clan into the wilds of New Hampshire in search of Jason’s Turkey Farm.

         It had been our family tradition, and that of many hundreds of others in our neighborhood, to buy a fresh turkey each Thanksgiving at Michael’s Meat Market (the sign actually read ‘O’Doul’s’ but in my memory, that name was never said). A week before the event, Dad would pick the pale plucked body out from the selection of cadavers displayed in the glass case and Michael Kelly would tag it with our name and put it in the ‘cold room.’ The more promptly the pick was made, the more selection there was, so this tagging usually took place sooner than later. But that year, in 1963, there would already be no Michael’s, and thus no pale cadavers to choose from.

         Somehow, my father had formerly learned that Michael procured his excellent birds, properly stiffened, deceased, and stone dead, after they had previously pined upon the fields of New Hampshire, having spent their short plump lives at Jason’s Turkey Farm somewhere near Concord. However, Michael Kelly was nowhere to be found after the fire and so, with the immortal but pre-internet words, “We’ll look it up in the phonebook when we get there,” my father and I set out early one Saturday morning to find our Thanksgiving turkey.

         We should have left well before the crack of dawn, instead of just after. Roads of the time did not ‘by-pass’ anything. Construction of the Interstate thruway system in New England was still mired in the muck of politics and the choice of which particular unions would receive what remunerations and for how long. But for reasons I have never known, despite frequent recollections of this adventure, it is always important to stress early in the telling that my father was very sure the turkey farm was near Concord, New Hampshire. This meant cutting directly through Boston proper at that early hour, not so bad, and then catching the first leg of Route 3, up Massachusetts Avenue, on from there by the Mystic Lakes (offering no hint of their supposed spiritual aspects to the morning sun) and through beautiful downtown Billerica, and then to Lowell from which paradise we would follow the Merrimack River north into the Granite State. Given traffic lights, the clusters of cars surrounding that morning’s high school football games, Saturday shoppers (the worst, according to my father because they included the elderly and the ‘student’ drivers), a wedding with bride and groom on the steps of the church looking very severe rather than happy (and my father’s comment ‘I’ll bet the bread is in the oven’), a yard-sale by a stop-light spread with what appeared to be the entire neatly ordered contents of a house including baby crib, bassinet, stacks of children’s clothes, several bed frames, dressers, and other assorted furnishings as well as a tall dark-framed mirror which was being used by several neighbor children to make faces, and an full array of kitchen utensils laid out in the grass, followed shortly thereafter by a funeral procession of gaily colored two-tone Chevys and Fords led by a motorcycle cop in dark glasses, and then other assorted lollygaggers going God only knows where but not to church, and we crossed the Massachusetts border shortly before noon. This without running over a single child on a bicycle or realigning the chrome on any other automobile, but at the total expense of my father’s temper.

         Except during close encounters with other human beings, when my father became surly, he became silent. The questions concerning how I was doing at school, or why the Principal, Mr. Frazier, had wanted to see me on Friday afternoon, ceased. I sat well over on the opposite end of the front bench seat in our Plymouth, close enough to the window to plant my chin on my fist and my fist on the sill of metal and kept my eyes on the passing scene.

         In New Hampshire, the last leaves of crimson and gold clung to grey arches. Milk cows shouldered each other at troughs. Hawks soared against the blue.

         My mother had long since stopped going with my father on any excursion involving the automobile. If she had to, she would have walked to New Hampshire rather than deal with the inevitable train of verbal abuse uttered in frequent angry sputterings as if this particular idiot driving a green Ford just ahead was any different in kind than the ‘maroon’ (a term of art already well popularized by Bugs Bunny and not a color) in the Pontiac that had cut us off at the last stoplight before we could get through on the brief passage of the yellow. By the sound of my father’s cussing, it was just one small catastrophic event after the other.

         After getting beyond Lowell, the longer stretches of open highway were ample reason to see if our then new car might handle well at higher speeds, and I think this was the very first time I had ever seen the needle of that speedometer move over the cream enamel of number 65. The faux warmth of the wind battered at the open windows.  Naturally, the road was well posted for 50 miles per hour. The motorcycle cop who stopped us appeared to be happy to be out on such a beautiful autumn day as well. He smiled during the entire process of writing us the ticket.

         My father said, “Thank you.”

         “The cop said, “You’re welcome.”

         The decibel level of my father’s voice rose seconds later as we pulled off the gravel again and onto the macadam. I craned my neck over the seatback to see the trooper standing there, feet spread, scowling at us, and I was certain he had heard the additional words my father had uttered as we left.

         We reached the vicinity of Concord, New Hampshire about two o’clock, after stopping at The Blue Loon Diner for a hamburger. I had gotten an ice cream cone for dessert. My father had gotten the peach cobbler that beckoned to him from the glass warming case near the register. With whipped cream.

         Less that a mile further on, just beside an old brick factory building which was closed, my father suddenly jerked the car over almost to the point of scraping the blue paint from our fender on an adjacent railing and vomited the entire lunch and likely all of the remains of his breakfast all the way down to his large intestines—retching it far out onto the road where it was immediately spread in a lovely pastel graffiti by the passing traffic.

         After this military assault upon his GI tract, my father walked quietly away up the road to recover, the limp in his gait more pronounced by his sudden exhaustion and disappeared around the bend ahead. I closed the windows against the smell and pulled what book it was I was reading from my pocket and waited. After about half an hour he returned, hair still wet and matted down from the use of someone’s garden hose, a paler but wiser man.

         “I am informed by a very nice old gentleman who operates the spa just ahead that Jason’s Turkey Farm is indeed in Concord—Concord, Massachusetts.”

         He said this in the flat voice of someone becalmed by overwhelming circumstance.

         We returned much of the way we had come. A little faster perhaps, but no State Trooper detained us. We reached the outskirts of Concord, Massachusetts about 5 pm, and found Jason himself just outside of his white-painted barn at the very crepuscular moment of our arrival. His name was written in human-sized red letters across the broad barn-side, and the place was hard to miss. The shadowed slope of the hill behind him was visibly sectioned by wire fences into smaller narrower areas and each of these divisions was populated by an attentive audience of equally white turkeys. In fact, he had a dozen of these fat feathered fowls just then turned upside down in a series of evenly spaced galvanized steel funnels with their heads dropped through the narrowed openings below and I watched enrapt as he walked along the row and passed a knife at their throats and the dark blood spouted forth, falling into the metal trough beneath.

         The audience of other birds behind the fences, heads held high to see over one another, exposed their own necks in sympathy, and they sighed at the sight of the slaughter with a throaty “Oh, Oh, Oh,” of such consistency it sounded like monks at evening prayer. Or as I imagined that to be.

         Dad chose our Thanksgiving turkey from a small cluster at one nearer fence. These were waiting to be fed their last meal I suppose, and Jason took the bird with a single scooping motion of a gloved hand, looped a thick rubber band around its jerking feet, turned the creature into one of the funnels, and before I could say Jack Robinson, he had done the work once more with his knife. I have never known just who Jack Robinson was, but he must have been very quick.

         To save us the bother, Jason also scalded the bird for a few seconds in what looked like a pot of whipped steam and then put it in a sort of washing machine device with red rubber fingers at all sides that removed the feathers almost as quickly. The naked body of the former fowl was then hefted onto a raised board, trussed and tied with string, wrapped in butcher paper and carried to the back seat of our car, all of this accomplished in about twenty minutes. An hour later than that, we were home.

         I was happy enough to be eating pot roast that night.

         And this is just the sort of memory I found refuge in when I was forced to confront the ruin of my own finances. Forty years after that Halloween, perhaps I did not burn my establishment down to the ground for the insurance, but I was certainly busy with burning my bridges.

         Samhain (sah-win) marks the end of the warm weather in the Celtic year, and the beginning of the cold months. In my novel, The Long Arm of Spithridates, it is the name for the ancient Celtic celebration which has since been melded into the American Indian appreciation of good harvest. A sort of alternate universe Thanksgiving.

         Of all the small inventions I had made to make that imagined 19th century parallel to our own, with the fiercely independent Celtic city states of Northern Europe in near constant conflict with the amalgam of larger empires most often represented by Slavic Russia, and the more Byzantine-like League of Carthaginian States still dominating the Mediterranean, the one of which I was most proud was the Celtic confederacy with the tribes of North America who were themselves, in turn, fending against the encroaching empires of China and Japan on their western shores. The setting of an alternate history had allowed me to play fairly fast and loose with every human deviation and invention of good or evil, fashioned by our own genius through the middle of the 20th century, from semi-Zeppelins and steam automobiles to proto-computers and radio-telephones. Perhaps I was having a bit too much fun for my age.

         The editor assigned to my book, a woman of low heels and high ideals, didn’t like the idea that I had contrived to preserve the great American feast in this other-universe and asked me if I would be willing to alter things “just a bit” so that there would be less of a connection made to the actual holiday. I said no.

         Actually, I said a great deal more than that, but that is the sum of what I said.

         She was not happy and for a time I thought the publisher might want to close the contract according to one clause or another and ask for their advance to be returned. Not yet having spent it, I was fine with the idea. I was tired by then of editors poking fingers into the flesh of my stories. In any case, I wasn’t tickled.

         There was a meeting scheduled. An after-lunch meeting. Those are often the worst. If the news is good, they usually pay for a lunch.

         To start, we ordered drinks. The editor, Miss Benecki, and the assistant publisher, a Mr. Forbes, in some effort to put me at ease, I suppose, made small comments about this or that other matter. ‘What did I think of the new mayor?’ ‘ Wasn’t his business-like approach just what New York needed after 9-11?’ That sort of thing. Mostly the effort irritated me. I would have preferred to be back at the bookshop arguing with some fool who wanted to buy an already half-priced copy of a recent bestseller for a dollar less.

         Mr. Forbes, a thin and tallish and dark-haired fellow who was shaved but already displayed a heavy afternoon shadow on his cheeks said, “I love your book. It’s a lovely conceit. Makes you really think about why things are the way they are. You know?”

He nodded at me as if to mark the importance of that thought. I think I nodded back, to be polite. I don’t think I smiled.

         Miss Benecki, who was dressed in a dark gray pants suit and light gray blouse, black hair cut short, was a foot shorter than her companion and perhaps half again as wide, in the anorexic tradition of New York editors who speak too fast, and smoke almost continuously. The gray did not suit her. She would have needed rosy cheeks for that and I didn’t imagine that she had ever had a rosy cheek, top or bottom, at any phase of her entire life.

         She said, “I think we should get right down to it. We both love your book. That’s a given. (I should note here, that was a lie. It was my previous editor, since unhappily retired with emphysema, who had promised to take the book before it was written based on a verbal exposition one afternoon over pastrami at the Carnegie Deli.) That’s why we took it in the first place. But every novel can use some trimming or filling. (She said this too casually. as if it too were a given). It’s the nature of the beast. Authors become immersed in the detail and lose sight of the whole. And we’re faced then with trying to sell that work, as a whole, to a larger audience. It’s what we do. It’s as much how we make a living as it is for you to write it in the first place.”

         Her sophistry had me convinced I was right about the meeting, but I nodded to make my basic agreement with the premise clear. I don’t think I said a word.

         Mr. Forbes said, “The problem is that you have written a very current work, in keeping with the best of the ‘steampunk.’ An historical novel that is very up-to-date. You are touching on a hundred different aspects of our daily lives by means of comparison. You are drawing the contrasts between what we do and what we should be doing. Beautifully. And then you suddenly fall back on a rather hackneyed use of a celebration which is completely artificial—a piece of Norman Rockwell—a holiday that didn’t even exist until the Civil War. There was no separate Native American ceremony of this type that we can find a reference to. Several somewhat similar for the summer months, perhaps. Yes? One in the spring, I think. And we all know that the Puritan ceremony of Thanksgiving was a purely religious statement and presumed greatly upon the generosity of their hosts.”

         Miss Benecki said, “It’s just a small thing. Not important to the plot at all. There is no need for it. But it will turn off a lot of modern readers who find Thanksgiving obnoxious. And besides, as I’ve said before, it adds at least twenty pages to the text. It’s a tangent. The book is already over six hundred pages if we issue it in the larger nine-and-a-half-inch dimension. And you’ve already insisted on us using a Garamond typeface that takes up at least five percent more line space, but you told me you don’t want us to reduce the type size from 12 pt. and that you would even prefer the whole book to be shorter than the nine-inch format, though I don’t know why. You understand, that one section is going to run us so far over our budgeted page count, it’ll just push the cover price out of the market bracket!”

         Mr. Forbes had kept his eyes on me. “Angus, you are being rather quiet. I think the first time I met you, we never stopped talking. I’m sure you have your own thoughts on this. I’d like to hear them.”

         Miss Benecki had been ready to say something more then but beneath the table I am sure Mr. Forbes brushed her leg with his own.

         I started my defense with little enthusiasm. “There are several reasons for the scene, not the least of which is the obviousness of the connection of the celebration in that alternate history to our own. It’s a sentimental connection, granted, but as I have said already to Miss Benecki—”

         “Angus, my name is Margaret. I’ve suggested you call me Margaret on a dozen occasions. Why do you persist in calling me Miss Benecki, as if we are strangers?”

         I think the table moved due to the renewed activity of Mr. Forbes’ leg. Water sloshed in the glasses.

         Now, fully astride my high horse, I said, “Because you are a stranger. We’ve talked forty or fifty times on the phone as well, but I have never thought once that you were speaking to me. Always at me. I would actually feel uncomfortable calling you by your first name. It would sound patronizing to me. And I have in fact spoken with you about this specific vignette at least half a dozen times now, along with other editing matters. I have explained myself each time. You have ignored me, each time. So why don’t you just let me make myself clear now to Mr. Forbes.”

         She was glaring at me.

         The table shook once more. I turned more physically then to the grim-faced assistant publisher.

         “In historical fact, as I understand it, there was a feast held by most North American Indian tribes before wintering. The tribe would then break up into smaller groups in cold weather so that they could survive the lack of sufficient game in a more restricted area during those months. Whatever research assistant reported to you did not get much beyond Wikipedia, I think. The Puritan ceremony of ‘Thanksgiving’ was held for many reasons, all rather well detailed in the diaries of the participants, especially Mr. Bradford’s. Religion was a large part of that, yes. Pretending some sort of secularism at that stage of history, so close to the Reformation, would be silly.” I tried to keep any sarcasm out of my voice and likely only accomplished some level of pedantry. “Turkey, like venison, was a primary source of protein for all the tribes, from Canada to Mexico. In any alternate timeframe, it would have to be considered a bounty of nature. To this, add the fact that Samhain was the autumn ceremony of the Celts. Giving thanks to the gods before the harshness of winter was considered a proper appeasement.” I think I shook my head at myself for trying too hard in a lost cause. “But this issue between us is not about any of that. Is it? It’s really just another small symptom of the current political correctness that’s suffocating literature in our own small and peculiar moment in time. From religion, all the way down to the eating of meat—”

         Miss Benecki interrupted, “Don’t make this a political issue! This is an editorial matter!”

         Mr. Forbes said, “Angus. For me it’s about the Benjamins. Because of its length, the book is going to cost more to produce. We need to make cuts and you’ve been resistant. And if some minor issue like this gets picked up by one reviewer or another, it can be used to kill sales. Maybe that’s political. For me it’s bottom line. I want the book to make money. That’s my job. I think it’s a good premise and well written and it will sell. I just want to give it a chance.”

         I took an envelope out of my pocket and set it out on the table.

         “The odd thing is, there are a dozen issues in the book that you could have picked up on, or at least thought twice about, any one of which break far more sensitive bounds to current sensibilities. There is only one major black character, for instance. I never did find a way to place Africa in this particular world order. And there is no Moslem religion at all, because there never was a Mohammed–though I thought I neatly side-stepped that just a bit with the resurgence of Zoroastrianism. It just seems so odd to me that my little play on Thanksgiving is the one you’ve become obsessed with.” I pushed to envelope toward them. “That’s a check for the advance you gave me. You knew how long the book was the day you sent that to me. It was just over 200,000 words then and it’s a barely 180,000 now. I think I’ve carved enough off this turkey.”

         Mr. Forbes said, “Is it really important enough to sacrifice the whole book?”

         I had long since grown tired of the process. I just said, “Yes.”

         I saw a hint of smile cross Miss Benecki’s face.

***

20. At the roots of heaven, the grub worm is well fed

         Agents are an odd lot too, but I had no agent for The Long Arm of Spithridates. As with my very first, the book had been taken on directly by the publisher. The agent I had previous to that dropped me because of one thing or another, and the agent I had after that was soon happy to be rid of me for the same reasons. The naiveté of my beginnings is quaint in retrospect.

         After the bankruptcy of The Gist in December of 1969, I was hoping to live off of the earnings from my novels or the occasional article and story. Why, I cannot now imagine. Naturally, I was wrong about this as well.

         After several years of foundering, it was the bookshop that preserved me in my bad habits for the longest time. Thus blessed, I wrote what I wished. But when that grace was finally lost in 2009, a full forty years after my career as an author had begun, I was forced at last to reconsider my options. I could no longer make the claim of being even a ‘midlist’ author. Should I continue to write, or should I apply for a job at Walmart? I had written over forty books by then, with most of them published, but I didn’t have a dime. And it was in such circumstance that I wrote a piece for Harper’s that winter about the death of the book and the loss of the bookshop which reflected more bitterness than I actually feel today. Though it certainly contributed to my unpopularity in publishing circles (at least those who disagreed, or would always put a more benign mask on the truth), I think it summed the situation close enough.

         My first published novel, The Stolon, was issued by Gerard Strauss in September of 1969 after being plucked from the slush pile by Mr. Strauss himself. He wrote me a letter only three weeks after I had sent the manuscript out in the dark despair of a February ice storm. Though unlikely even then, such a thing could never happen today.

         Today, you would have to find an agent first. Having reduced costs of overhead to a neater bottom line, publishers no longer employ editors in-house as they once did to read those hopes and dreams that have overflown the transom. The agent has become the first line of defense for them. (No need of health insurance, extra office space or 401K’s.) And this search process by the author is in itself is numbing. You must first send out a query, but only after having done your research to discover who might be reading at the moment and also have a fatal predisposition to liking your particular habits with words. Twenty or fifty queries will likely be necessary, if you are deliberate, patient, and persistent, and one of these ‘literary agents’ might then deign to answer and ask to see some part of the manuscript.

         However, ‘agency’ is not what these good people are usually about. An agent’s interests are not your own, any more than a real estate broker’s purpose might be. The sale is the matter. Some are clearly better than others. The best agents are those editors previously shed by the publishers looking to cut costs and who now have a more personal investment in the process that lingers within their breasts, left over perhaps from the idealism of their own youth. Most literary agents are now mere middlemen and facilitators and the worst of them are only paper-pimps. They change their dispositions with their clothes to suit the climate. Look at what fills the shelves at Barnes and Noble to get the drift of that. Sadly, most of the best agents are long retired now, their publishing mentors long dead, and their ‘houses’ having since been traded off as nameplates for corporate avarice. Very few of the old guard remain—those willing to trade on their previous reputations. Now the best I’ve encountered are all ‘business.’ They can speaking of sex scenes like a car dealer speaks of accessories. They are oriented toward immediate results and not longer-term accomplishment—their rejections are not personal (they insist this is so while using the personal vocabulary of child psychologists to avoid confrontation), though I like to imagine there may still be one out there who holds true to some ideal rather than just mouthing the words like a punk postmodernist. I have simply never been fortunate enough to find them.

The best agent I have known was lost by me out of an unfortunate curiosity. Once again, I had actually asked, “What makes you want to keep doing it, given all the current state of the industry?”

         Excepting prevarications, that question went unanswered until one evening when the fortunate sale of my latest book had raised high hopes and opened a fresh bottle of twelve-year-old scotch. The agent and I had known each other for some years by then. I was widowed. She was divorced.

         I will call her Myrtle because I have always liked that name and it has been unfairly reduced to the currency of a Gertrude or Hortense. The bottle was half gone when I asked her my fatal question.

         Myrtle answered my verbal query with, “All the same feelings I had the very first day I started. Every single one.”

         I said, “Aren’t you jaded? At least a little? Benumbed by all the bullshit?”

         She said, “More than a little. But not enough to smother the thrill. Not as much as the fun. Where else could I earn a living doing those things I like most, and those I do best?”

         I persisted, “And you are not cynical about having to deal with the other stuff? The egos and the negotiations? The money doesn’t matter?”

         I said that knowing that she was indeed outwardly cynical. Very. But like my hero, Mencken, it was only the thin shell that protected a softer center. And I was being argumentative. Six ounces of good scotch can be very conducive.

         Myrtle was not amused. “You have no right to ask that. You’ve made your cause clear enough. Too loudly. Too often. And I’ve made you the advances in spite of yourself.”

         Earnestly drunk I said, “I just wanted to understand. You know so much about writing. The good writing and the bad. Why don’t you write yourself?”

         This caused her first hesitation. She is very glib and ready for most things. I imagined she had been asked before and would likely have a ready answer. But the whiskey had the moment.

         “I do. It keeps me sane. But not to publish. I write poetry. Just for myself. In the mornings. Most mornings.”

         “And you don’t want anyone else to see it?”

         Myrtle clinched her jaw at the idea. “No. I’d only be judged for it. Just like any other wannabe. But it’s not written for that. It’s personal. And then some twit would make use of it for their own purposes. ‘If she has the bad taste to write verse like that, how can she be the judge of others?’ Everything is so pigeonholed now. Like they do to you . . . Don’t you wish you could just write without worrying about getting it published? Without worrying about what anyone might say?”

         That answer I knew very well. “No. Mostly because I do write just what I want.  But I like the idea of the conversation too. I don’t mind the comments. Sometimes they actually get it right and more than a reader I’ve found a friend, even if I’ll never meet them.”

         “You are odd.”

         “Thank you. With that in mind, can I read one of your poems? Two?”

         “No.”

         “Is it fair that I put everything I have out there to see and you won’t?”

         She shook her head at my hopelessness. “I’m not a little boy. This is not a game of ‘I will show you mine if you show me yours.’”

         I said, illogically, “But in a better world it should be.”

         Myrtle wearied at my pursuit, “My poetry is too naked. Completely.”

         “I don’t mind. I won’t touch. I just want to look.”

         Another moment of indecision occurred, but not a word. With that she got up and went to her bedroom. When she came out again she was as nude as the verse she held up to me in several notebooks. And it was too difficult for me not to touch.

I thought her poetry was excellent, as I had anticipated it would be. But she sent me a very nice rejection letter the next day.

         As more and more agents are graduated from university programs, the process has become that much more academic, as well. In each query you have offered yourself like a submissive dog on its back in a confrontation with an alpha male. You must read each agent’s particulars in advance and only send exactly what they want in the fashion they want it. Many of them offer strict instructions, telling you not only what typeface and spacing to use, but directing you precisely on what they would like said in the letter. This is not the manuscript, you understand. This is just the begging for their indulgence to read some small portion of your life’s work if they have time and inclination. May the smile of Procrustes be upon you.

         That query letter should contain a little about yourself and a précis of your novel, boiling down all the emotional effort and the possible genius of a thousand moments scattered on several hundred pages into a couple of paragraphs. Think of it as Keats writing haiku, but without the poetry. Keep it simple, but be interesting. Tell them what is important, but be brief. (If we can’t do that in a single page, the fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars, but in yourself.) And whatever you do, don’t be a wise ass.

         In other words, after five centuries of publishing evolution, the printed word in modern literature is a mere byproduct of the convenience and chair comfort of literary agents, just as film has long been for Hollywood producers. Not the authors. Not even the publishers. Agents.

         And all this is now done by email. Mostly. No need for the additional cost of 24 lb. rag paper to give your letter the right feel. If you have attempted something original, they will probably reject it in any case, and then you must pick up the process from the start once again. That part does save some expenses at least.

         Theoretically this more instant electronic process would save time as well, avoiding the sorting and sordid mishandling of the United States Post Office, the price of postage and the passage of days for delivery, but in fact, responses are slower than ever—averaging about two months, if answered at all. But be patient, your rejection will come at last. You can send out multiple queries, but an agent who has taken their own precious time to read the damned solicitation and is then told that your work is already in other hands will likely never read anything with your name on it again.

         Nevertheless, I take that risk, though cautiously. Waiting through the rejection cycle of a single manuscript, in three-month increments, can take years. A seeming lifetime during which food must be purchased and rent paid. I usually have a dozen queries out for any one work at the same moment. (Actually so few, because I cannot keep track of any quantity of things that exceeds the number 12—the math again). I don’t look at my email until the evening of each day so as not to spoil my temporal mood by the rejections.

         Contradicting some assumptions, previously published authors are left at the bottom of any such ‘slush’ pile of submissions. If they were successful, the thought goes, they would already have an agent. The fact that they do not means that their work did not sell, or worse, that they do not work well with others. That’s only logical (a sort of ‘Catch-18’ even before the editorial revisions that will come). Authors are not intended to develop and grow into the subjects they have chosen to address their lives to. They are meant to grab for the largest audience possible at the first opportunity.

         This is again akin to the Hollywood system which gives us, each season, movies made on the model of films which succeeded during the last. This is the reason we have an endless string of cop shows now and lawyer shows ten years ago, and cowboy shows forty years ago and an unending train of mysteries today that reflect a population so murderous it is difficult to imagine they have time to read unless they are looking for ideas on how to commit their next crime. 

         Contemporary publishers are another matter, equivalently and compatibly cretinous of course. There were always too few publishers like Alfred A. Knopf or Gerard S. Strauss out there willing to ‘coddle’ two or three books in order to give an author a chance to find their own voice and their own audience. Especially not to create a following of their very own like a Don Marquis, Henry Miller, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison or J.P. Donleavy. They must always aim at a broader market. There are now only five or six conglomerates that produce more than 90% of the fiction you will see at Walmart, Barnes and Noble, or your local ‘Box Store.’ The major publishers are corporations, not ‘houses.’ There is no ‘family’ living there.

         The few exceptions to that are the smaller outfits whose efforts are guaranteed obscurity by an uninterested media. Their ideals are true, but they can’t pay the cost of the heating oil you spent while writing through a good winter. Independent publishers must feed from the wake of the larger like seagulls (sustaining but not flourishing) and beg for space at the diminishing number of independent bookshops who struggle against the discounters and the rising costs per square foot.

         In ‘the old days,’ (back when we used to walk uphill to school, both ways) a good publishing house had a vested interest in the larger body of an author’s work for their ‘backlist,’ and to secure the established integrity and good name of the firm as well as the self-image of editors who had to face their contemporaries over a dry martini, after hours. There was a continuously developed relationship with the new authors they thought might have promise. Certainly they pushed the sure bet of a Pearl Buck or a John Galsworthy to pay the printer’s bill, but they also made an investment in the young Hemingway and Faulkner as well. No longer the personal home of an individual conscience, publishing houses are now corporations with stockholders, accountants, and bottom lines. The individual designation of a person as ‘publisher’ is now only a clip-on badge. They want returns and they want them before the next catalog, this year and not next, for they may be elsewhere by then.

         What possessed John Chipman Farrar to publish Austin Tappan Wright, an already dead author with no body of work except for that one great and wonderful carcass of utopian balderdash, Islandia? What earthly reason could excuse David Nutt in London for first publishing North of Boston by Robert Frost, or Henry Holt for doing the same for that odd man’s poetry here in America? What madness made Thomas Seltzer issue the idiosyncratic verse of Tulips and Chimneys by e. e. cummings, or prompted Boni and Liveright to print that author’s first book The Enormous Room (which was yet another war memoir among the hundred about an event everyone else wanted to forget)? It certainly wasn’t the money.

         But such foresight, much less the better purpose and aesthetic judgment entailed, is unimportant, even counterproductive, to the average modern literary agent, or to the corporate publishers they must court.

         All this is only humorous if you have had sufficient beer.

         Thus, in an age of ever higher taxes, and the constant escalation of costs due to inflated currency, profits must also be ever greater, year upon year as well, and there is little desire to worry about health insurance for an overweight proofreader who now must work at home (and a little too close to the kitchen) in Levittown and beyond public scrutiny or companionship of their compatriots. Publishers don’t have the paid editorial staff these days to even return rejected manuscripts, much less read them—no matter if you’ve included a self-addressed and stamped envelope. The walk to the Post Office with the SASEs is too great a burden. And the few editors still engaged full-time, and not yet forced into self-employed ‘consulting’ status or who have become agents just so that they can be close to the work that they had set out to do in their idealistic youth, drift from one firm to the next, just as the authors do. Publishers use free lancers whenever they can to reduce overhead. The agents do all of the food tasting, while the publishers only read the stuff that the food taster has taste-tested for toxins.

         Crucially, there is no ‘midlist’ for the author who might sell only 5000 copies or less. That’s not enough of a run to feed the Walmarts, and that would be me, of course. Or was.

         And ‘loyalty’ is a word that brings a wry smile. Willa Cather was with Knopf for nearly her entire career. (Houghton Mifflin had previously been at a loss as to what to do with her.) She argued with Mr. Knopf over everything from jacket copy and cover design to book titles, printing quantities and distribution—and they remained friends. This also wouldn’t happen today. But then again, if Ted Williams were playing baseball today he probably would not have spent over twenty years working for a Yahoo like Tom Yawkey. He would more likely have been seduced by some enormous sum of cash to play for the Yankees at the first opportunity. (Remember, Harry Frazee, the former owner of the Red Sox, sold the Babe—it was not Babe Ruth who sold his soul to the Yankees for a No, No Nanette.)

         In Britain and America too, now the great race that ‘literary’ authors must enter in order to survive is winning ‘the prize’ (or at least to be shortlisted). The Pulitzer. The Costa. The National Book Award. The Mann Booker. Hollywood publishing now rules. The Academy Awards has come to the bookshelves in a dozen permutations.

         Meanwhile, and as it has always been, the reviewers all review the same authors and the same titles—depending on available ad revenues to the media that pays the critic’s salary—or at least for the assignment. A blatant pimping again. ‘Journalism’ thus remains the same. They will tell you it’s a matter of quantity (too many titles to cover) and the needs for an immediate market response, (i.e., telling their readers about the authors they already want to read). But the reviewers are no more honest than the pimp in the alley door. They plead they were assigned the specific book, so don’t blame them (but, of course, the amount of ad space purchased had nothing to do with it). They often knock books so as to secure a fragile grip on their integrity, but they will always review the latest novel by the author most likely to succeed and gladly cash the publishers check.

         Naturally, because it can be justified based on past performance, most agents are looking for what sold well last year. (Though even that puzzles me. Did they actually read that crap and like it? If so, that is a whole ‘nuther’ scary prospect to consider.) But then each agent makes their fifteen percent on the sale to the publisher. Consider that as well. The writer spends a thousand hours on a book. Does the agent put in 150 hours more? None that I’ve ever met. Yet they have no time for anything that does not fit the template of the moment. Flannery O’Connor could forget about getting published today unless she were willing to revise the first paragraph, page, and chapter to ‘grab’ the attention of the agent, or the agent’s underpaid reader, all in the space of a query, no less.

         ‘Why don’t you swing for the fence?’ one agent advised me when I said I wanted to write a book simply about walking in New York. (E .B. White had done it nicely fifty years before me with Here Is New York—time for an update, I thought.)

         Instead, fully exercising his own frustrated desire to write, he said, “Why don’t you expand the idea a little? People are used to you writing fiction. How about this—your walker could have amnesia? Right? Might even be lost. You can get your descriptions of the City out that way. But maybe his lady friend is searching for him . . . and he has a secret code implanted in his neck and he doesn’t know it and the Russian mafia are looking for him too? No? . . . You like more sentiment, I know . . . So, maybe he’s found a little kid, a girl, in an alley living in a dumpster and surviving on garbage. He’s down and out too, of course. What if the kid’s family was murdered by a rogue cop and she’s afraid of the police . . . They buddy up! You could make it another road story, but all on the streets of New York. You did a successful road story before, didn’t you? Hollywood would love it!”

         I explained to him that it was just an idea for a little book, an appreciation of the City the way I found it when I first came and what I had discovered since as I went walking in the mornings before writing. It wouldn’t cost much to publish and surely had a ready market. He told me it wasn’t something he could handle. 

         But all this was not yet the case in 1969.

         Gerard had a secretary, Miss Evers, who spent mornings opening up the day’s incoming mail and stacking the manuscripts on a small table by the window of the office as high as she could, without it falling over. I saw this mini-architectural wonder myself.

         At about 10:30 Gerard would arrive, having avoided much of the rush hour traffic on the Long Island Freeway. Standing there, overlooking Broadway and Twenty-Second Street, he would light up his first cigar of the day (that too would not be allowed in these times—at least not indoors) and begin to finger the pile from the top, reading a sentence here and a sentence there. Never the first page. He hated first pages. Most authors had terrible first pages, he said, and discarded both of mine that he published. He didn’t think much of titles either.

         First thing he said to me after we shook hands and I sat down in the fat green leather chairs he used instead of ‘office’ furniture, was, “ ‘Stolon’? What’s a ‘stolon’?”

         He knew what it was, of course. He wanted to set a marker for the start of negotiations. He just wanted to hear my defense for an abrupt title.

         Having seen as much as he wanted, he’d drop the rejects from the slush pile on the floor at his feet. That pile would then grow in mere minutes with less and less architectural precision until it was nearly as high there as it had been on the table, but for those few manuscripts that Gerard would take into his inner office with him. (He had a surprisingly small desk. And a fat green leather chair of his own. A brass floor lamp beside the chair with a rectangular shade that looked like parchment. And surrounding him, the best I could figure, about three thousand books tightly packed on floor-to-ceiling shelves in no order that I could readily discern.)

         He could go through the entire stack of manuscripts in the outer office, the hopes and dreams of several dozens of authors, in about half an hour. Maybe sixty to seventy-five of them at a time. He usually came away with two or three. Those might be rejected later in the day as well, but he would have read much more of them.

         Miss Evers was Gerard’s right-hand man. It was her contention that though it was a man’s world, she was going to have a piece of it. A lean and bony woman, husky voiced in the manner of the Greek actress Melina Mercouri, with a severe grin that bore intentions more than humor, she smoked too much and spoke in short sentences, clipped of most conjunctions, articles, and adverbs.

         “Smoke? . . .Why? . . . Do! . . . Let’s!”

         I got her to talk about her childhood once, and she used more words than I had ever heard her speak previously at any one time.

         She said, “I was alone much of my childhood. Mother worked. It’s cold in Chicago. Body warmth is important.”

         She was raised by a single mother, had gone to Northwestern through the generosity of an ‘uncle,’ and had worked for Gerard since she was my age. I believe she was just then forty. Her hair was cut short in line with her chin and was black enough to be unnatural. She had a preference for rayon and bright colors, large hats, and very high heels. I never saw her wear the same dress twice, and I suspect the heels changed as well, but I wasn’t observant of the fact.

         Her job, other than stacking restacking incoming manuscripts, answering the phone, and typing out necessary correspondence (Gerard preferred the phone and would call at almost any hour), was to sort through the discard pile on the floor, pick out anything Gerard might have missed, and then reject the rest. It was generally known that she had in fact spotted several of the firm’s best selling authors. I actually heard this bit of information from Gerard himself, so I assume it to be true.

         My first time through the door she gave me the once over like I was a chorus girl. I was twenty-one and had never encountered a woman with such direct tastes. She liked martinis before dinner, wine during, and rye after. She did not like her meat or her vegetables over-cooked. She liked French sauces, and fish. She had me out to dinner that first evening and into bed that first night.

         I was not with Gerard Strauss & Company long enough to know if Patricia Evers offered these same after-hours services to all of Gerard’s authors, male or female. The two novels of mine that he published over the following three years thankfully involved relatively few visits to his office. I had already moved across the East River by then, and though I had started publishing The Fore-edge further downtown, I was finding as few reasons as possible to linger in Manhattan.

         But this is getting ahead of myself again. At least by hours.

         That first day at the offices of Gerard Strauss, before evening martinis and white sauce on fish with a pale wine and then the rye, Gerard himself had taken me to lunch at The Four Seasons.

         I had caught his attention, he told me, with just one line that stopped the roving of his eye. ‘His father saw him as an extension of himself, while Fergus saw his father as an appendage.’ He read the entire 340 manuscript pages at home that week and contacted me after sleeping on it and considering what he might do with it.

         Firstly, he wanted to change the title.

         I refused.

         Next, he wanted to start the entire story with chapter two. I agreed to that. The first chapter had been re-written at least forty times and I was never happy with it. We compromised on the title, and that was how that subtitle came to be ‘between earth and light.’ He had found it in a line of dialog in the first chapter, which was all he wished to save from that.

         It is likely that Gerard reminded no one else of their father, except me. I believe he had five or six publicly recognized offspring but had personally cared for none. He married four times (according to the current biographical entry on Wikipedia), and five according to the obituary in the Times. He probably did not know the actual number himself. His affection for women was simply not limited to wives. Someone should write a thorough biography of the man now that he is gone and set the record straight.

         That day, he wanted to know more about me. I told him what lies were verifiable. And then, something unexpected.

         There had been a helicopter crash that week in Vietnam, and twelve Marines had died. I’d seen that at the top of a folded newspaper on his desk at the office. The words had lodged in the fore of my brain and came back at me while we were eating. It had struck me somehow that I could have been one of those Marines instead of being at the Four Seasons, celebrating, and relishing the glory of having my first book published.

         I said, “A lot of the guys I grew up with have been over there. Good guys. I’m sorry I never took my share of that. But I’m glad to be alive. Even happier now. Glad they rejected me . . . I don’t think I would have been a good soldier anyway. But the thought is there.”

         He said, “Soldiers are not good. They are necessary.”

         He addressed the guilt I felt over my own fortunes without saying so directly. The story he then told me at lunch that day ought to be in his biography.

         As an 18-year-old buck private, right out of boot camp at Ft. Edwards, “With the sour smells of the docks in Brooklyn still in my nose,” he had just been brought up as part of replacement to fill in a ‘quiet zone’ where he might ‘find his legs’ with the 424th infantry fighting then near St. Vith in December of 1944. And he had not yet fired his gun at another human being. That was a day before the Battle of the Bulge began.

         “When the Germans overran our position, I was isolated from my platoon in the dark and moved away from the flash and crack at the line of fire. I was petrified. I was cold, miserable, scared, and wanted nothing more than to live. I was lost then and I took refuge from the cut of the wind amidst some rubble of what turned out to be a ruined monastery.”

         Like my grandmother, Gerard had the disconcerting habit of looking you directly in the eye as he spoke, as if fixed on your own reaction to his words, and he was thus always ready to break a story off if you showed the least disinterest.

         He said, “I hunkered down. I could hear the approach of voices speaking German. All I could do was slip a little further into a crevice there, pulling my gear behind me to keep it hidden. Suddenly my leg broke through a makeshift obstruction and I slid down into a debris filled cellar. I was in darkness there, but not alone. I knew that instantly, though I was afraid to speak at first for fear of who else was near, and then of being overhead from above.”

         He huddled in the cold there for maybe an hour until he could distinguish the sounds of breathing close by.

         “It must have taken me several minutes just to raise the courage to whisper. A hoarse throated muttering came back. In was some sort of French. My own French was rudimentary, but I made the other voice understand. I repeated a couple of words over and again. ‘S’il vous plaît.  Aidez-moi. Je ne vous blesserai pas. J’ai eu besoin de refuge.’ Something of the sort. I just needed a place to hide . . . “

         A waiter came then, I remember, and we were interrupted by ordering our lunch. But I was already ‘on the lip,’ as he liked to say (an expression he would use to describe what was lacking when discussing the weakness of a scene in a book). I wanted to know what happened next and as unlikely as it might seem, in anticipation, I did not say a thing. He started the story again.

         “There were two women hiding there. They had survived for the previous week on the melt of snow from above and on a considerable quantity of brandy which was stored further along in the ruin beneath them. Given the dark and the grime, I could not even tell their ages in the light of a match. But they were both thoroughly drunk and suddenly began to weep at their fate, which I suppose they thought was now in my hands.”

         The Germans held the position above for almost two weeks more, during which time Gerard shared the remains of his K rations with the women, learned something of the Walloon dialect, killed several rats for food, burned one-hundred-year-old brandy in a makeshift lamp, and acquired a lifelong love for both fine brandy and courageous women. And as he said that afternoon, raising a glass over our empty plates, “I have insisted on living well ever since.”

         For years after that, I had assumed the story to be as factual as most of what I told him about myself. Then I noted in his obituary that one of Gerard’s acknowledged children does in fact live in Belgium to this day, proudly bears his name, and was a primary beneficiary in his will.

         Such fortune can favor the stupid as well as any, I suppose, but it was the making of Gerard Strauss, and thereby, through the extended decades, of my own career.

         After we returned from lunch that day, I was sent downstairs in the offices to see Emily.

         I was told, “She’s our mechanic. She can fix anything.”

         Emily Black was Gerard’s editorial assistant. In fact, she was the one who led me through the process of making my shabby mess of a manuscript into a publishable work. A portable Olivetti may not produce pretty pages of copy to begin with, but when they have been corrected and reworked as often as I had done, they become a hopeless succession of rewrites inter-paginated with the original ‘finished’ manuscript. My respect for grammar has often been called into question, but at that time it was even more purely instinctive. My spelling was then, as it is today, creative (often even intentionally) which made the proof-readers sick with headaches. Partial sentences were commonly my way of pacing the ones which were run-on for half a page. Several characters came and went without announcement after a few of the cuts I had made previously myself. Emily guided me through all that. A delicate process nearly unknown today.

         I suggested to her once that we might be cousins, and that I had a Scottish grandmother whose maiden name was Black. Emily thought I was joking. She seemed to suspect half of what I said to her as jest. And she was probably correct in doing so. Much of what I told her was in some way an excuse for my creative grammar. I never ran out of excuses.

         Gerard was right, of course, about the title. The urge of the eye to read the word as ‘stolen’ instead of ‘stolon’ was too great. Any intended subtlety was lost to ambiguity.

***

21. The ambiguities of disambiguation

         One of the worst pieces of writing I have ever read, not including my own when I’m not hitting the marks, is this paragraph:

         “Nick slipped off his pack and lay down in the shade. He lay on his back and looked up into the pine trees. His neck and the small of his back rested as he stretched. The earth felt good against his back. He looked up at the sky, through the branches, and then shut his eyes. He opened them and looked up again. There was a wind high up in the branches. He shut his eyes again and went to sleep.”

         This paragraph is much beloved by the arbiters of modern literature, and I will not examine the reasons for that or my opinion here. My subjective judgment is not the cause for mentioning it. But those who have had to read the entire short story in which that bit of exposition appears, a common school assignment in the decades that followed that writer’s meteoric ascent, will know who the author is without my mentioning him again, or that from such innocent observations he became a proto-parody of every supposedly ‘tough guy’ author for two generations and the template for Hammett’s best prose: “When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it,” and Chandler’s  “I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room,” as well as everything from Cain’s hard-boiled nihilism, and Steinbeck’s socio-sophism, to James Jones’s lost causes and Mailer’s macho. Fact is, some of these guys were actually tough. Pity is, they had to tell us about it over and again in short hard sentences to prove it to themselves. They might have done more with their talent and energy if they had devoted the time to asking themselves why their characters actually do what they do, a question left in cowardly ambiguity, instead of dwelling in the equivocations of their own self doubts. So I say.

         But the author of that story loudly and famously attested to the importance of writing what was true. Writing is a dialog with one’s self, he said. A conversation pursued with schizophrenic enterprise at best. At worst, a monologue. I have wondered many times what was in the head of a writer when he wrote a particular passage. How did he manage that? How could he have done it? What was that conversation like?

         Succumbing to the numbing buzz of nihilism that surrounds us today may be attractive to zombies, and private ‘dicks’, but the rest of humanity has to go about their daily lives and take their pleasures where they find them. The heroism of getting up in the morning and going to work may be problematic, but it is truer than any impulsive moment or knee jerk reaction. Sex is made. Babies born. Tides rise and fall. Seasons turn. It is always time for the rest of us to be getting on with it. The encouraged solipsism of filtering everything through a tight sieve of personal experience might be the gift of twentieth century art, or the curse, but somehow supposing that the values we used to judge that experience were not just as prejudiced and bigoted as those of our fathers, or as weighted by our own self-serving discriminations, is all to the worse.

         But then the twentieth century was tough on any psyche. We were on the doorstep of Utopia. Heaven on earth was finally possible without the equilibrium of a counterweight Hell. Suddenly science was permitting many more people to live beyond childhood and enjoy the comforts of technological improvements, even while that society was still engaged in the barbarism of aging empires that were commonly built on lives that were still brutish and short. It’s hard to cope with the illumination of the light bulb brought by ‘rural electrification’ while living in a shanty. Harder to ignore the filth when illuminated. It is difficult to accept the displays of privilege glaring off the magazine covers on any newsstand when you are standing in a breadline.

         Politics was the new religion of the twentieth century, and Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, and a hundred lesser despots, did not get the word out just by standing on a street corner and shouting “Hey, you! Listen!” They enlisted the writers of novels and the journalists in newspapers and magazines to do their barking for them through the use of manufactured sentiment and faux compassion. Reason and logic and fact were all set aside for the supposed need to end human suffering. Wasn’t it obvious something had to be done? Wasn’t it clear what the causes were? Some must die so that others might live.

         Truly, communication alone, the medium rather than the message, was not alone in fostering the terrors of pillage, rape and murder that were the result of imposing the new order on those unwilling to give up the old ways. Nor can we easily blame the ahistorical and circular reasoning of a ne’er-do-well nineteenth century German philosopher who never held a full-time job or made himself get up and go to work to pay the bills much less to accept for his responsibilities while he spent a lifetime sponging off of others (but seldom taking a bath), even as he saw fit to redesign the human condition according to his own myopic visions. Nor too can we accuse his born-wealthy interlocutor Mr. Engels. The two of them, in fact, reminded me very much of my friends at The Gist. True, newspapers, magazines, books and television were not the cause of anything. They simply played their part. Purveyors. Belatedly, as a member of the  third generation lost following the fall of empires in the First World War, I played mine.

         I am made now, by this reconsideration of a life spent and misspent, to wonder what might be thought by someone reading these words sixty or a hundred years hence. (Allowing for my own hubris in even permitting of the possibility of any interest.) Against the larger tapestry of punctuated misery and intermittent humane happiness, will they even care about the language we played with to delude ourselves, rather than admit to our own complicities? And what of terms like ‘internet,’ or ‘cell phone,’ or ‘Google,’ or ‘Wikipedia?’ Will they, in those future hours, have any immediate comprehension of what these things were or how they changed the world that I knew? Or even care to?

         I think not. Any more than my generation understood gaslight or travel by stagecoach apart from the movie props we frequently saw, or the generation which is now displacing mine at the head of the tables of power might understand the true nature of fascism or liberty, having for too long enjoyed their freedoms without cost; or any better than that rich fellow did who went home to the manor each evening, after his slumming, to write of the plight of the working class.

         I look up a single name on Wikipedia and note several others which are similar, and see that odd term ‘disambiguation.’  To my generation, ambiguity was a literary device, but long before that, it was the stumble and fall of Pierre: or The Ambiguities, that most misunderstood work, which Melville wrote following Moby Dick.

         Having delved into the deepest mysteries of the human heart and soul by his recounting of the legend of Mocha Dick, the ‘white whale of the Pacific,’ and wringing the juice he could from the rind of his own experience, and having this rejected as too weighty, Melville wished to write something in lighter vein. Something shorter. A farce, perhaps. Why not a tale of infidelity and possible incest, of motherly abandonment and fortunes lost, friendship betrayed, mysticism, a ménage a trois and unrequited love, artistic failure, destitution, murder, imprisonment, poisoning and triple suicide. An opera Tosca! It could even have been a musical if written a century later! Not as great perhaps as Springtime for Hitler, but at least in that mordant vein. It might only have to be improved by avoiding such weighty handles as Ahab or Ishmael, and giving the characters such brighter names as Pierre Glendinning, Delly Ulver, and Poltinus Plinlimmon. Sadly, it never made it to Broadway.

         Nor did I, for that matter. The gods of the Wiki got something wrong there as well. I wrote three plays, not just the two they cite, though none made it beyond a barn in Tarrytown. But that was all of a time much later still.

         There is a quote on the dust jacket of The Stories of Frank O’Connor which almost put me off of him, as I have often avoided books promoted by publishers with some opportunistic comparison to a previous and more successful title or author. I never intentionally read a book boasted of as the latest Catcher in the Rye, for instance, which really only means that it’s a coming of age novel; the latest Huck Finn, but without the insight, humor or natural causes.

         I once used the example in a review, “Not since Moby Dick has there been such a whale of a story,” as a bit of sarcasm before a reader sent me a clipping from his local newspaper which had used the very same line to promote a new novel about killer orcas.

         It was from that observation that I came to the entitling of this effort of my own doing and stumbled there upon the subtitle, ‘A Menckenesque’. . . You don’t say.

         Menckenesque—n. a curmudgeonly social critique; an exposition of such, as in an essay or story.

         Well, clearly Mr. Mencken would have had nothing to do with me. He had a harder nose, a sharper tooth, a fiercer tongue, and a larger grasp for things (not to mention his legendary cast-iron stomach), than I have ever managed. And please note that he was dead by 1956, when I was only nine years old. But still, it was in fact his own range of interest and purpose that finally inspired me with the thought to do this particular thing.

         As I was saying of Frank O’Connor and hyperbolic jacket blurbs, his publisher insisted upon using a quote from that even better man, William Butler Yeats, “O’Connor is doing for Ireland what Chekhov did for Russia.” And that is a fine example of just how the great can be wrong and still be right. I almost put the book back in the used bin at the thrift store, before noticing that it was published the year I was born. I have a habit of investigating things published that year by way of looking for some additional magic for my own mortal epiphany.

         O’Connor, wordsmith that he was, cannot be excused for his meanness toward his fellow Irishmen in calling to attention their faults any more than we can ignore the sardonic burlesques of the American booboisie by Mencken or the greater heart of Yeats for his apposite kindness to the Irish. And certainly Russia can no longer be defined by the poignancy of those shades of which Chekov was the master.

         Yet the greater similarity might be that these men suffered the lack of a larger audience for not writing novels or for spending the fortune of their talents on writing short stories which engage the train of our intellects for the moment but never carry us far beyond the station where we began. It’s well worth knowing that we are lost, but it is valued all the more to find a way home.

         (Sure, you will tell me that Mr. Connor wrote two novels. But no, I will answer. They were novellas and not more than short stories at greater length. And Chekov had his plays—but those are properly dependent for their whole strength, as all plays are, on the talents of actors and directors and that combined effort, which is not the point of the Yeats quote at all.)

         And another plea on my part: Mencken was an amazingly deliberate fellow who, more often than not, chose his battles too carefully. A novel or three might have been the thing to preserve him when the politics of the times had changed. (Look at the success of Tom Wolfe for an example of that!) But though he lost his brief against American entry into World War One, opposed to his beloved Germany, he won his battle for the First Amendment and the right to be wrong out loud and in print. I have simply attempted to make use of a privilege he left for me.

         And at least Mencken mostly engaged in combat worthy of himself. Many a fine author has been lost to us because they spent their blood on bar fights. What of Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd (about either of whom we actually know more than their famous contemporary, Mr. Shakespeare)? Think of poor Ambrose Bierce. As fine an imagination as any man or woman alive in his time, and a master of the wordcraft. He probably fought one too many battles for a single lifetime, and then chose to fight one more. I think perhaps he had that singular instinct for lost causes in common with Mark Twain and George Orwell.

         In fact both Bierce and Mencken, veteran newspapermen, had a great sensitivity to the language. They both wrote about proper usage. But tellingly, while Mencken’s voluminous efforts still make worthy reference, Bierce’s shorter advice, Write it Right, a catalog essay of improper usage and ‘A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults,’ is totally lost on any but the most fastidious modern authors. (Certainly it was lost on me when I first encountered it.)

         The very first entry in that shorter book is an entreaty to properly use ‘A for An,’ which then pleads, “Before an unaccented aspirant use ‘an’—the contrary usage in this country comes of too strongly stressing our aspirates.” (I suppose some of my ‘hache’ing Irish ancestors would be guilty on this count.) And, of course, aspirations have always been an American failing as well as the soul of whatever success we have managed.

         Bierce meant well, but he was ever the newspaperman looking for the clear, crisp, declarative over the sort of thing I am prone to, and at which he would blanch, no doubt, as he would at many of my other habits. He to did not write novels, but might at least have been better off writing some more of his short confabulations instead of loitering in Mexico, which was the end of him. But, as I have noted, I did not make it into the newspaper world and was thus never forced into getting the essentials into a few hundred words. That world of print, like Bierce’s own, had begun to fade before I was ready.

         Bierce advises, “Action for act . . . a blow is a reprehensible action. A blow is not an action, but an act. An action may consist of many acts.” “Admission for admitting.” “Admit for confess.” “Advisedly for advertently.” The first page of his small tome is one lost battle after another in contemporary usage. And the next. And all the pages that follow. This little book is an entire lost war, not even recalled today, as we are so much further into our decay. It is long behind us. We have fought too many other deadly battles in the meantime as well—all lost.

         The unintentional classic, English as She is Spoke by Pedro Carolino, of which Mark Twain said, “Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect,” is properly related to a nice little diatribe by Twain himself called English as She is Taught, which addresses much of the absurdity common to the teaching of the language in the schools of his time, but was still relevant to the classrooms of the 1950s and 1960s when I was coming through. Care for the language must be taken.

         The desire of the better journalist to get it right is one of the most admirable and heroic professions of purpose I know. My appreciation stems not only from my own inability to contain myself when I write, but from a Catholic guilt that I should do better, even though I would get less pleasure from it. The Hemingwayesque sentence does not occur to me except by force or accident.

         Then why eschew such brevity, you might ask, if I admire it? Because journalism is a sort of writing best suited for the exact parameters of what has been empirically observed. And that is not my own purpose or cause—any more than the way I admire the particular physical attributes of an athlete, of which I have none. I cannot, and should not, thus give up all physical activity because I am a klutz. It’s not healthy. Any more than I should give up the pleasure of walking simply because I am not the best hiker in the wood. I enjoy a good walk. And I may not be the best of lovers, but I do enjoy a good——-. Well, the point is made, and I have some stories to tell and I must tell them in my own way for them to be the stories I know.

         But back again to my abuse of Mr. Mencken by taking his name in vain with the term ‘Menckenesque.’  In the final analysis, the reason for my use of the word is simply because I liked the sound of it.

         It was Myrtle who helped me with my first real success. Unrequited had originally been entitled ‘Henry and Emily.’ She had me remove all the clothes from that pretense as well.

         I had written the account of that love affair between Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson in a matter of weeks out of the whole cloth of some research done in 1975 for another project that was coming along too slowly. My attempted technicolor portrait of those two black and white characters known to most people via high school textbook excerpts about a cabin in the woods and a few closely observed backyard creatures, was not actually a mission to give them dimension so much as to comprehend them for myself. I didn’t actually see the project as a novel until Myrtle asked what I was doing instead of what I had said I was doing. Without rewriting (but with some ulterior calculation on my part) I handed her the typed pages that began with a conjugal summer night spent in naked delight at the shore of Walden Pond, and their subsequent flight from the authorities following the discovery of their love nest in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s barn, as well as the scene in the Judge’s chamber when the forced annulment was done that would be the final ruin of Henry’s already fragile health along with the burning of the journal kept during the affair while, at the same moment, miles away in Amherst, Miss Emily’s secret poems were burned in a coal hearth. But I had actually witnessed these scenes in my own mental Technicolor, though probably inspired by my youthful absorption of such tragic films as Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, and Widerberg’s Elvira Madigan. I simply couldn’t let them die for their natural enthusiam for each other.

         I was especially fond of the somewhat irreligious baptism scene, as the laudanum-fueled Henry washes her whitened body in the moonlit water, which was taken by several academics as obscene even prior to the except in Playboy magazine. But it was, in fact, just that unsought publicity that drove sales and made their own denunciations necessary.

         Feminists were naturally appalled at the very suggestion that a man might have inspired their chaste icon, but the words, “…the two homeliest of God’s creatures made at once beautiful in His eye by the purifying waters.” were reprinted over and again in irate response to the obvious religious assumptions. And yet it was the presumptions upon the assumed innocence of Miss Emily that seemed to overwhelm many, though perhaps the worst offense to the eye of ‘authorities’ was the suggestion that Miss Emily’s miscarriage might have been the harbinger of a future decline in the just aborning American literature. Ironically, that particular foreshadowing was unintended.

***

22. Yours Trudy, truly

         In another moment of total abandon, I once stole the family car. I had actually taken it on several previous occasions without permission and therefore been forbidden to drive it again. But because my father insisted upon walking to work, there it sat in front of the house all day long throughout my childhood, and in 1964 it was a brilliant blue 1959 Plymouth Fury with fins like wings at the back, a white cap of a roof and a white flare at the side, and it was ripe exotic fruit to my eyes. Dad only drove it on weekends and it still smelled new inside. I only just had my learner’s permit at the time, but I’d completed the Driver’s Ed course at the high school and thought myself to be a regular Richard Petty. My father had had enough of it. He reported a previous unauthorized borrowing to the police, informing them of the situation. He said he would press charges next time, and did.

         I was finally caught one balmy summer evening at Duxbury Beach with Mary Ellen. I had in fact run out of gas, and had no way to get us back before my father returned home from work. The Duxbury police were very obliging.

         But it was this case against me which was noted the next year by the Marines as a good existential excuse to avoid taking on another pain-in-the-ass. My father’s attempt to sober my judgment had backfired. And thus I went to college instead.

         I suppose that most first novels are a sort of clearing of the passageways, as the literary baby, just expelled from that Eden of perfection in the womb of the mind, takes the initial breath of cold air. There might excusably be some initial anger at having lost a paradise that will never be found again in life, and a cry out at the evident imperfections that engulf him. Perhaps some questioning of identity. Certainly there is a pursuit of someone to blame for the outrageous circumstance of arrival into a state of affairs over which you have no real control and no hope of return, or eventually, of survival. And thus you may seek to identify yourself apart from those who made you, and set a course that is your own.

         All of that supposed without the inconvenience of ever having to bear a real baby or care for them afterward. But I have been thankful ever since the issuance of that first effort, that I will never write a ‘first published novel’ again.

         I may have done better had I found an Archy among the critters who scampered at all corners of my rooms in New York and just let him type out his undercapitalized thoughts on my Olivetti. But, of course, troubled enough by my own rants, I am not the sort of Mehitabal who would have tolerated such opinionation from a bug, much less the usufruct of my property or usurpation of my authority. More simply put, I always enjoyed more the process of writing than the final progeny.

         My habit was to write at night until I was too tired to keep my eyes open. Failing this, and feeling trapped by the critters who stared at me from corners, and the sounds from the airshaft (particularly during warmer weather when the windows were fully open and Trudy was especially busy) as well as the annoying fact that I had not yet actually done anything worth writing about, I would lie on my bed and imagine (lying doubly, then) some absurd reason for running away and working on a farm, or becoming a forest ranger, or joining the French Foreign Legion (because I was reliably informed by Percival Christopher Wren that they had lower standards than the Marines).

         Luckily, if Trudy saw my light on, and business was slow on her end of the hallway as well, she would come tapping at the door.

         She would sit in the only other chair I had, beneath the light shed through from the kitchen ceiling, and read what I was writing. She became my first audience. It was her input into the process that made it at all possible then. Otherwise discouraged with the progress, I actually began to write for her eyes rather than simply to please myself. I began to anticipate her reactions to the words. If it was not clear, she would buckle up her nose at it like a bad smell. If she did not grasp something, she would say so, straight forwardly.

         “How big is a yacht?” she asked one evening with her bare foot propped precariously at the edge of the small table just beyond the typewriter, from where she sat at the other side from my own chair.

         I said, “They can be as big as a tugboat, but these are smaller. We called them yachts I guess because they were all out of the Boston Yacht Club. They didn’t really qualify. They were private boats. ‘Pleasure craft,’ they call them. Mostly sailboats. In the summertime we could swim out to the moorings in the harbor at night when I was a kid, especially when the tide was low and you could practically walk on the muck. The boats were right there off-shore from the yacht clubs and they often had liquor on board. I drank my very first nip of whiskey on one of those. The first time I ever smoked pot it was from one of those boats too. And in the wintertime we used to sneak around the wall at night and into the boat yard where the ‘yachts’ were all up on blocks and go in under the tarps and smoke cigarettes.”

         She shook her head to mock me.

         “Oh, you were achin’ to be a bad boy, weren’t you?”

         “I was.”

         “Yeah!” She laughed at me “What happened? You’re not a bad boy now.”

         I made excuses for my failing, “I didn’t try hard enough, I guess. My father whipped the daylights out of me for it when I was caught. I suppose that was the deal.”

         She shrugged at the idea. “So your daddy made you. Like my momma made me.”

         That seemed right enough. “I guess so. I think my mother had a role in it, though. She never would let him spank me more than was enough, I think.”

         “That’s what this is about then. This is about those spankin’s, isn’t it?”

         “I suppose.”

         “You are damned right it is. So say it. Give credit where credit is due.”

         She was not versed in any sort of literary criticism. Her sensibility was simply straight and true. Either she understood what the hell I was saying, or she didn’t. She never understood the title. But she grasped the rest without a hitch and often had me up on my feet and walking the rooms from end to end looking for a way to make what I said a little better.

         Gerard Strauss said to me once, “How did you learn to write like this? It’s not normal.”

         He knew by then that I had only managed one year at college.

         I had no idea of course. Nor any understanding, in truth, of what he actually meant.

         Somewhat flippantly I answered, “Maybe I write it as if someone were there reading the pages as I finish them. She’s very impatient with me.”

         He said, “I thought you lived alone.”

         I said, “I do.”

         Gerard frowned but did not pry. I never explained to him about Trudy. I wish I had, when he asked about the name I had requested on dedication page.

         “Someone I know,” was my feeble response.

         Trudy was not her real name. I never knew that. I knew only that she was from Philadelphia. She had evidently been used and abused there by a pimp after getting addicted to heroin. Following a rehab, not her first, another woman in the clinic had told her that her one chance to survive was to leave. Right then. At that moment. “Don’t look back. Go on until your shoes have holes,” she said. She would just have to break her replacement addiction on the methadone, the thing that was actually keeping her there, all on her own.

         She told me one night that she had “begged the price of a ticket at the 30th Street Station and got myself all the way to New York City. As far as I could go. My shoes already had the holes.”

         I suppose working as a prostitute for herself rather than a pimp was a considerable improvement. That, and the fact that she was not then on hard drugs, though she enjoyed her pot enormously.

         I was never able to get her to tell me all of her story, but she had offered up parts. This happened in short bits and pieces after she had read something or another I had written.

         Once, after considering a description of one character she said, “It’s like my sister. She’s cruel. She’ll take anything that’s not nailed. She came back home once and stole my mamma’s clothes. I said to her, ‘Pamela, that’s okay. You look right in those. They fit you. That’s who you are. But if you take those, that’s all you’ll ever be.’ What I meant was that we was just the same as our momma and daddy—only we never knew our daddy, so Momma was the one. Pamela says back at me ‘At least I’m no whore.’ But she was. Then. And no better.”

         I had written those pages of The Stolon that Trudy held in her hands about my brother, and how he was like my father, and I was not, and how that fact had made our lives. I had put it all in what seemed to me at the time to be fiction, but it was far closer to fact than anything I’ve since imagined.

         One small incident from my childhood had served as an illustration. Once I had tried to wear some of my father’s old clothes. These were in a trunk at my grandmother’s house. They were the clothes of an eight-year-old boy of forty years before. A sort of sailor’s outfit, with knickers. I was ten, but the two years made little difference at the time. The wool fabric sagged away from the wide belt that held it in place at my waist. The shoulders were far wider than my own and the sleeves dropped beyond my fingers. And this was the way I had been discovered there in the attic by Eddy. His laugh brought a crowd. He wouldn’t let me close the door until my grandmother pulled him away. Such a small incident and yet I still feel the embarrassment.

         I imagined that nothing else in the book had even a remote resemblance to Trudy’s own life. Yet she found things.

         “My mama would wear her hair up sometimes. Way up high. In summertime. Get it up off from her neck.” She made a twirl with her fingers in the air. “Just like that.”

         In my book I had written that my mother, when she cooked, had used what looked to me to be the defensive armament of a hundred bobby pins to get her longer hair out of the way.

         I said to Trudy, “Did your mother like to cook?”

         She answered, “Not unless she could help it. There were thirty-two kinds of pizza over at Selby’s. We tried every one at some time or other.”

         I knocked on Trudy’s door one night in October 1969. I had not seen her in the weeks since I had moved across the river to Brooklyn, and I had a present for her. If I had not been drinking for most of the three hours before, I probably would have chosen a better time, but in my hand was one of the first hardbound copies of The Stolon, just in from the binder, and I had inscribed it for her beneath the dedication and wrapped it up in the comics section from the Sunday paper with the color panel from Peanuts face out on one side to insure at least some positive response. She was a big Snoopy fan and had always begged me to save that section of the newspaper for her.

         When she didn’t answer, for some reason I got to thinking the worst. She might have been busy with a client but the silence from beyond the door made me think otherwise. All of a sudden, it occurred to me that she might be there, inside, dead—even stabbed to death.

         I immediately went down to see Vlad.

         The outer basement door on St. Mark’s was locked and I had to pound on that for several minutes to get his attention. Thankfully the furnace was not on. He opened the door in his ubiquitous wife-beater undershirt and a pair of red and yellow flowered boxer shorts. His eyes were swollen with sleep. I told him I was worried. He pretended not to understand me and tried to close the door again. Then he frowned, sighed heavily, and went back to find some pants.

         He took every step up to the fourth floor at a trudge, muttering in French and not Rumanian, probably so that I might pick up on the essence of what he was saying. After pounding on the door himself and trouble finding the key on his enormous ring, he eventually opened Trudy’s lock with an international bark of announcement.

         “Ahlo? Ahlo?”

         Her rooms were empty and echoed the words back at us. She had left; moved away someplace, but to where I never learned.

         That same inscribed copy is barely an arm’s length from where I sit, as I write this now.

***

23. Titbits: Bet Flint and I contrive to write a play

         I had read Boswell’s Life of Johnson and his London Journals as well as the Tour of the Hebrides and I was unsure if I loved Samuel Johnson or only Boswell’s Johnson and wanted to read something about the Doctor that was not in Boswell’s voice to give the man a little more color. A customer at The Book Ends shop on 46th Street heard me asking the fellow there behind the desk (I mistook him for the owner) if he was aware of anything else written about Johnson by another author who knew the great man personally and that fellow did not have a clue. 

         I thought that was something any reputable bookseller ought to know. I was that raw. And I think I managed to say as much and embarrass the poor guy before the other customer, standing in a near aisle, came to the rescue.

         “Why don’t you try Fanny Burney? There is something in The Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay, I believe.”

         “Sure.” I said. I’d heard of Frances Burney. She’s mentioned in the Boswell books. So I asked, “But what does Fanny Burney have to do with Madam d’Arblay’s Diary? Did she edit it?”

         The fellow smiled. Pleasantly. I had betrayed my own ignorance in front of them both. The clerk pretended to look at some papers on his desk. I thought better of him for that, and worse of myself.

         They even had an edited version of the Diary there in the shop that the clerk snatched from the shelf an instant after I had made a fool of myself, and though it was well beyond my budget, I bought it in penance for having been rude.

         Burney tells her own story well enough, but the real importance of the event for me was in first meeting Bet Flint.

         I quote Burney as Madam d’Arblay from the Diary: “And now let me try to recollect an account [Dr. Johnson] gave of certain celebrated ladies of his acquaintance: an account in which, had you heard it from himself, would have made you die with laughing, his manner is so peculiar, and enforces his humour so originally. It was begun by Mrs. Thrale’s apologising to him for troubling him with some question she thought trifling—O, I remember! We had been talking of colours, and of the fantastic names given to them, and why the palest lilac should be called a soupir etouffe; and when Dr. Johnson came in, she applied to him.

         “Why, madam,” said he, with wonderful readiness, “it is called a stifled sigh because it is checked in its progress, and only half a colour.”

         I could not help expressing my amazement at his universal readiness upon all subjects, and Mrs. Thrale said to him, “Sir, Miss Burney wonders at your patience with such stuff, but I tell her you are used to me, for I believe I torment you with more foolish questions than anybody else dares do.”

         “No, madam,” said he; “you don’t torment me;—you teaze me, indeed, sometimes.”

         “Ay, so I do, Dr. Johnson, and I wonder you bear with my nonsense.”

         “No, madam, you never talk nonsense; you have as much sense and more wit, than any woman I know.”

         “Oh,” cried Mrs. Thrale, blushing, “it is my turn to go under the table this morning, Miss Burney!”

         “And yet,” continued the doctor with the most comical look, “I have known all the wits, from Mrs. Montagu down to Bet Flint.”

         “Bet Flint!” cried Mrs. Thrale—“Pray, who is she?”

         “Such a fine character, madam! She was habitually a slut and a drunkard, and occasionally a thief and a harlot.”

         “And, for heaven’s sake, how came you to know her?”

         “Why, madam, she figured in the literary world, too! Bet Flint wrote her own life, and called herself Cassandra, and it was in verse;—it began: ‘When Nature first ordained my birth, A diminutive I was born on earth: And then I came from a dark abode, Into a gay and gaudy world.’

         “So Bet brought me her verses to correct; but I gave her half-a-crown, and she liked it as well. Bet had a fine spirit;—she advertised for a husband, but she had no success, for she told me no man aspired to her! Then she hired very handsome lodgings and a footboy; and she got a harpsichord, but Bet could not play; however, she put herself in fine attitudes, and drummed.”

         Then he gave an account of another of these geniuses, who called herself by some fine name, I have forgotten what.

         “She had not quite the same stock of virtue,” continued he, “nor the same stock of honesty as Bet Flint; but I suppose she envied her accomplishments, for she was so little moved by the power of harmony, that while Bet Flint thought she was drumming very divinely, the other jade had her indicted for a nuisance!”

         “And pray, what became of her, sir?

         “Why, madam, she stole a quilt from the man of the house, and he had her taken up: but Bet Flint had a spirit not to be subdued; so when she found herself obliged to go to jail, she ordered a sedan chair, and bid her footboy walk before her. However, the boy proved refractory, for he was ashamed, though his mistress was not.”

         “And did she ever get out of jail again, sir?”

         “Yes, madam; when she came to her trial the judge acquitted her. ‘So now,’ she said to me, ‘the quilt is MY own, and now I’ll make a petticoat of it.’ Oh, I loved Bet Flint!” Oh, how we all laughed!

         I was about to write a play in my head before I finished the portion above. I used it word for word in the first act. I had my story before I was home that day. With Johnson as a sort of Mr. Chips. The good doctor under the influence of the profligate Mr. Boswell, has become enchanted with the harlot of his dreams. Bet Flint is in love with him and he must choose between love and passion. But as we know, his true passion was for the words.

         Even growing up as a reader on that sleeve of land dipped in the soup of Boston Harbor and so far from the heart of the matter, I knew somehow (how I have no idea now) that the greatest library in the world was not that beaux arts behemoth known as the BPL. That grand palace was just a load of marble and vaulted ceilings, with paintings that were dark and mysteriously large yet unreachable to a younger hand. The books were secondary there and not even presented in the grand entrance. No. The greatest library in the world was the smaller Athenaeum up at the top of Beacon Hill. There the books lined nearly every wall, the floors were glass and the blur of volumes below or above beckoned, the paintings of John Adams and Daniel Webster stared you right back in the eye, and ceilings were high but only to make balconies for more books. And they had the greatest of books, the folio of Audubon’s Birds and the duodecimo of the Bay Psalm Book, and the least of books, like the cynical mysteries of Edgar Box and the silly adventures of Topper and his friendly ghosts. They also had a book by a murderer that was covered, by his own request, not in leather, but with his own human skin.

         It was a private library and my first visits were with adult friends (yet another story I have to find time to tell). But my ambition was to join the ranks of the members as soon as I could, and I did at last, the year The Stolon was published, and as a reward, shortly after, I got to see my own book there on the shelves. But this particular project preceded that, when the cost of membership was still beyond my grasp.

         On my next visit home, under the false guise of being a reporter for The Gist, I found that they had a full set of Madam d’Arblay there as well as works by Johnson’s friends Addison and Steele, Richard Savage, Burke, Goldsmith, and nearly all the others I wanted.

         The idea was that I would construct my play from the actual words of Johnson, and Boswell, and their associates and friends as well, as amply reported in seemingly hundreds of such volumes. The plot was centered on Johnson’s mysterious love life, for as we know forthrightly about Boswell’s visits to the prostitutes of the time, Johnson was more circumspect. His marriage to Tetty Porter was so lacking in heat that he left her to live alone and then went to stay with his friend Henry Thrale. And it was there in the company of Mrs. Thrale  (his beloved Hester) and her salon, that he found his later voice and became the whole man that Boswell knew.

         I made at least half a dozen trips to the Athenaeum. I stopped in every time I was in town to see my mother and father for a year. Those folks, both parents and librarians, rightly wondered what kind of report I was doing that took so long. So I fabricated an alternative plot concerning the failure of American libraries and the differences between that private beacon of knowledge on the Hill and the BPL. I will mention this subject again later, I hope, but it is worth noting that I actually wrote such an article and Paul rejected it as ‘boring.’ I am sure it was. But I have no surviving copy of that manuscript to judge.

         But Bet Flint was very much written then and in the thrall, if you will, of knowing Trudy, and it was her character that spoke the eighteenth century words. And interestingly now, reading it again, I see that it was Mary Ellen who gave voice to the constant mothering of Hester Thrale.

         I loved my conceit of using the words of the actual players, turned to my own purposes, but the play was rejected by everyone who read it. The contest of wills between good Bet and the better Hester over the aging body of Dr. Johnson (a true comedy I thought) while both of them were in love with his mind (for who but an undertaker could love his lumpish body?) stirred little interest. It would be unappealing to young and old alike. ‘Pretentious’ was a common critique. And they were right, of course. I was that. Then and likely now. But I still like my play.

         For anyone who might be interested here in seeing the sort of thing I was writing at length for The Gist, I offer this. I have come across it here in a box of notes from 1968, along with my long lost play about Bet Flint and it is presented here as it was given to Paul Winger, in that year, raw and unedited. It was never titled by me but I see a marginal annotation in my hand that quotes a bit of comic verse by a Harvard man named Brossidy and was something I had grown up with: ‘And this is good old Boston / The home of the bean and the cod, / Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots, / And the Cabots talk only to God.’

         Perhaps it might have been my thought to entitle the piece something like, ‘Said God to the Cabots.’ Such a sentiment would have been ample reason for a thumbs down.

         I was much concerned with the civil unrest that was then ripping the inner cities across the nation. Paul summarily rejected it then, so there is no chance you’ve ever encountered the piece before. But over those three years at The Gist, Paul accepted more than he refused.

         (The faint of heart may skip on to the next chapter without losing any line of the narrative or a bit of sleep.)

         Christianity begins to devour itself with the imposition of the Nicene Creed.

Not unlike the great achievements of Rome following the fall of the Republic, it is of note that Christianity had great success after the usurpation of true faith by doctrine at Nicaea in the year 325. Any nation conquered by Rome after Julius Caesar could become part of the Empire, so long as it offered homage to Roman authority along with giving its sons to fight in the Roman legions and its daughters as chattel to Roman lust. It made for a specific dynamic never seen before.

         And the imposition of the Nicene Creed on Christianity brought a central authority that made the teachings of Christ, at least as interpolated by authority of that Council, a driving force that would conquer one quarter of the world over the next millennium, before failing. It was based on the example which had been set by Rome itself. Unfortunately for Roman citizens, they had lost their Republican liberties with the bargain for Empire, and with them those Greek ideals that made their ethic unique. Sadly too, by the dogma of Nicaea, the poor Christian was no longer allowed to speak directly with his God, but now required an interpreter—a priest—not for the Latin, mind you, but for the meaning. They might each and every one be a child of God, but Heaven help them if they were to speak to their father. And any who disagreed were condemned, as surely as any Celt who would not heel to Rome.

         One cannot argumentatively ask, as Dr. Johnson did of Boswell, “Why, Sir, does not God every day see things going on without preventing them?” There is no real debate in the Roman Catholic Church of that kind. It is settled dogma. We are saved if we don’t and damned if we do. Or is it the other way around? In any case, given the frailties of being human, why would I want another one of me to stand between myself and my God, or any committee of them (or Yorkshire ‘us’) to dictate how I would pray? Isn’t it enough that I have been forced to give up my mundane liberties so that one committee or another can tell me how to live my mortal life?

         “The great rabbi Maimonides had something to say to all of this, as he did to most things of any importance. But that’s another case, and not the box I’m opening here. Suffice to say, that Sephardic philosopher had resolved this riddle in God’s favor and moved on to other matters. Having given us the gift of mind so that we might think, it was up to us to save ourselves.”

         But at least, insofar as human government goes, I can ask Dr. Johnson’s question this way, “Why, Sir, does not the Government every day see things going on without preventing them?” Clearly enough, because most of the things it sees are done by and for itself. There is no business monopoly that is not licensed by the authorities, nor any poverty that is not made permanent by Government edict. The disintegration of black American society began in earnest with forced integration and the assumption of power by government as the sole arbiter of how we must treat our fellow man. Witness, following the civil right act, the increasing rate of illegitimacy among black Americans, the failing interest in marriage, the rise in crime and drug use, etc.

         The Golden Rule was apparently insufficient. House Rule 7152 was required.

The oxymoronic Civil Rights Act, which takes away our right to act, for reasons good or bad, tells us we should no longer discriminate, by law. Of course we would, and will, as we always have, but now the government can prosecute us for exercising the natural right of choosing with whom we would associate. And does. Now we must discriminate, but in reverse, surreptitiously. Under cover of fabrication.

         There wasn’t one in a hundred Americans who understood what basic freedom they had lost in 1964. Nor do they now. All for the good cause. Justification and rationalization have followed unendingly since, always with the application of some new federal imperative and the loss of one more aspect of the liberty which had once been declared ours by natural right (however flawed it was in practice, it was the very practice that might have better perfected it—had that been allowed to continue).

         The theory was, and is now, that because some men are murderers, all men must be held in contempt. That because some men were bigots, judging others by their skin or their religion, or their sex, that all men are bigots and must be forced to accept the values of all . . . but wait. If that is the case, then there is no particular value to attain, no right or wrong, not better or worse. By rule, we are all the same. We are ants, then. No! Worse. Because we have no queen!

         How is this different from Roman rule?

         Would you not rebel if told that you must live your life according to the dictate of others?

         But we will see no end to that, now. Power, once given to government, will not be relinquished peacefully. The momentum of our ideals may carry us for a time, like Roman roads carried the legions long after the time of their building, and Christianity was preached long after the heretics were burned. But just as the personal act of Christian charity has been given over to the Government dole, and the acts of our Founding Fathers reduced to mock celebration of the Fourth of July, the great machine we have made here will fail in time. Sooner than later at modern speeds. 

         As a good Celt from two fine lineages, I object. I don’t say I am better than any other man. I say that I am different. And I glory in my difference. Vive la difference!

         Reading those words over again after forty years, I can readily see how I might have improved it. Especially in the transitions. But it strikes me now, all these years later, as written by the same fellow that I am, and a fair representation of how I addressed the moment.

***

24. Antidisestablishmentarianism

         “There is a sort of simple slavery among us. A prostitution of sorts. It beggars us all. It sells the true for the false. It pretends the better for the worse. It makes a man accept what is unearned and to marry a woman for what graces she can apply.”

                   What Mr. Billington said.

         It was widely accepted, when I was a kid, that the longest word in the English language was ‘Antidisestablishmentarianism.’ Perhaps it was true at the time. But the point of fact had been made known through the pervasive ‘Wikipedia’ of that moment, network television (with only the three channels—CBS, NBC, and ABC—available), and thus it should have been rightly questioned. What of floccinaucinihilipilification? Or, was that word of no importance? Instead, the popular quiz show that put that other unusable alphamoronic portmanteau of a term in our minds infected us all with the idea that being able to spell such a monstrosity was a worthy accomplishment long after the issue of state support for the Church of England had been properly resolved.

         Someone has proposed that the most beautiful word in the English language is diarrhea. This may be (and no more relevant than the spelling of god-awful longer words). But onomatopoeia is a matter of vowels, not bowels. I am more taken by the spirits of an elixir than the dactyls of the hexameter, or by a vixen than a Xanthippe. A hoyden is better for the romp and a gamine for the game. I like the idler or dawdler better than the flaneur; the trifle better than the bauble; the labyrinthine, or Byzantine, can be more onerous than convoluted, or intricate, true, and the susurrus murmur of the wind may soothe sooner than the rustle, or the howl, or the blow. Blue is cerulean when it suits me, but I’d never wear such a suit to go out in public (though perhaps an indigo). I like the sesquipedalian word when it has consonants enough for my tongue to get betwixt the vowels on my lips. At a loss for words, I will use an elision to hide my behind, but whose ellipsis are these that I kiss? The pride of autumn color comes before the fall. The periwinkle need not apologize, but for the bustle and the pannier there is no excuse. Antimacassar is a far more slippery subject than antimatter. Nooks are better than crannies. Hearty better than hale. I’d rather be sound than safe. The ruin appeals more to me than the rack. I’ll choose dribs before drabs and take my chances on the mystery in the parcel before I would settle for a part of it, even when part and parcel are the same.

         These are the matters that matter.

         We live in this time when everything that we might do is assumed to be some sort of self-promotion. An agenda.

         It is our just reward, of course, for letting ourselves be the pawns of promotion and advertising. We wear their emblazoned tee shirts without being paid for the personal space we have sacrificed. It’s the old sow and reap thing, yet again. I am told that it is not enough that I play with the words, I must sell them.

         How will anyone know that I have written the damned book if I don’t go out there and promote it? That is not the fair question, though. The better question is, how should I promote it? I’m willing enough to bark for my attention. I’ll dance to a tune if need be. But twittering a display of my nether parts, no? (Alike the Xerox of a female’s bottom that circulated once in the office at The Gist, when speculations were rampant.) This is, of course, why younger writers receive so much more attention these days. Their nethers are more often nicer to look at.

         It is assumed that any politician is a skank—unless he pretends he is not—and then he is merely a phony skank. But a writer? An author? A wordsmith? A scribe? Must I be a skank too? Can’t I be a baker of words? A word chef? A stevedore of words? A farmer of words? A gardener, at least?

         Without launching into some great rant about all the ills of our society, can I please address those of you who care, with the simple thought that our priorities are mixed up! And, that it is up to each of us to be the baker, or the farmer, or the candlestick maker. Not for us to meet the standard of the agent, but for them, if they choose to amongst my fellow scribblers fairly and justly, to fly our standard.

         That is my agenda, then. Revealed! (Not revealed at last! because it was never hidden and has been addressed often by me before, this.) I want to ‘change priorities ahead’ as the sign shouted to us when Sarah and I were driving once into Plymouth, England, shortly after we were married.

         I even stopped and took a picture of the sign that day. It was too brilliant!

         That was it. I wanted to change priorities ahead. I did not want to fall into that cycle of writing and promotion that seemed to stifle almost every other author I knew. I simply wanted to write. That was what I wanted and that was what made me happy. If a publisher got a kick out of advertising what I did and could make a profit out of finding a way to ballyhoo my work, then let them have at it, so long as they did not pretend that I was something else than I am—a liar first and foremost—or in any way associated with, or otherwise beholden to, the work of another author except by way of admiration or homage, or to any other product of that publisher, and that the “work (excluding appendices and ancillary material) was fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or be used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.”

         Well, not entirely.

         What’s all this, then? Why have I written it? Because it pleases me. What will I get out of it? A living, I had hoped at first, and a life. But I would have done it anyway, as I have done, and found other income to keep the bread on my table and the rent paid. At least for most of my years.

         Why does the baker bake bread? What does he get out of it? If his bread is good, he makes a living. If not, he might have to eat more bread than he otherwise would. That appears true and straight enough. For me and for you. But as I said, I will dance for my supper and bark for breakfast if need be.

         Someone at Gerard Strauss set up a few readings for me to promote the book. One was in New York at the Barnes & Noble. And at least one other was in Boston. I think actually there were two there, but I cancelled the second after experiencing the first. Gerard paid for ads in both papers. The Globe review of The Stolon was short and, though not exactly negative, managed to use most of the space to take issue with my grammar and especially my syntax. I remember wondering out loud to someone, perhaps Emily, how they might have reviewed an ‘e. e. cummings’ in his time. The Herald Traveler gave it less space and said nothing bad, but nothing much more than that I was a local boy and the book was set partially in South Boston.

         More importantly, at least to my dignity at the time, was that only about twenty people showed up at the bookshop where the reading was held. Neither of my parents came (it turned out that in my worry I had forgotten to tell them and my father refused to go after being informed of the event by a neighbor who had read the notice in the newspaper), nor did Mary Ellen (I had left phone messages which she had not returned. She had moved from home by that time and her younger sister would not give me the new phone number). Two old friends from high school managed to be there, Pete Fallon and Tom Murphy, which at least gave me those sympathetic faces to focus on when I looked up from the podium, and they both laughed at my humor but then they had heard enough of that previously to know when I was trying to tell a joke. Apparently no one else did. My reading skills were primitive. My voice was poorly modulated, dropping and rising according to the degree of my distraction from the words. I thought I knew my own work, but standing in front of those faces I found myself having to read the words directly from the page. A reading is not supposed to be only an articulation, but there were few questions afterward. None of the local media took advantage of my being there to schedule an interview.

         I do not play golf. A friend once tried to teach me. I am not possessed of the patience to make the punishment of a small, hard, and already pockmarked sphere a priority. Let it live its life out unmolested in the rough. But I did once own a golf cart, the kind with two large wheels aft and one smaller one to the fore. I acquired that by accident in Brooklyn one morning on my way to work. Garbage had been set out on the curb along the street and there it was at the edge, waiting to be swallowed by the truck that was grinding along only half a block away. I took it as if my whole plan were instantly realized. But in fact, I had no idea. I just knew I needed it. I brought it back to the apartment and by that evening I had concocted the entire scenario.

         What happened was this.

         I dropped by the office of Gerard Strauss the next day to find out how my book was doing. I hadn’t heard a peep and I knew this was a bad sign. Gerard was there and immediately looked sheepish when he spotted me in the outer office talking to Miss Evers. He admitted that The Stolon was not doing well.

         It had been a strong season, he said, “but The Godfather has taken all the air out of the room. There’re eight or nine books out right now and any one of them could be in the top slot. Yours is buried . . .You saw, the Times barely gave it a mention. I called everyone. All promises. All excuses. They covered two of our other titles, so I can’t really complain about being ignored. It’s the subject matter. I guess it’s not the right time for Irish family angst. I don’t think they understand your humor.”

         I had not heard my effort summed up so succinctly before. I probably winced.

         “Are you going to need any of the advance back?”

         He was puzzled at that.

         “What? No. No. That’s yours.”

         “Good. I had an idea and I thought I could use it.”

         He sat back on the edge of his desk.

         “What are you going to do? Europe? Gonna take the tour?”

         “No . . . ” I was frankly afraid to tell him about the actual plan. The Fore-edge was still in the dreamy stage. A son does not tell a father about his own madness (any more than the father would tell the son). So I made up another idea on the spot. Practically.

         “Maybe I could sell my own book.”

         “How? Open a bookstore?”

         “On the street.”

         “You’re kidding.”

         “No . . .” He was waiting for me to tell him the rest of the joke. I asked, “Do you have any copies that’ve been returned yet?”

         “Yes. At the warehouse in New Jersey.”

         “Could I have them for a good price?”

         “You can have them.”

         “How do I get them?”

         “Come by Friday and they’re yours. Do you have a truck?”

         He still thought I was joking. He was not.

         This was along about Wednesday, December 10th. I was at the hardware store on 4th Street in Brooklyn that evening before they closed at six. I bought one 4 x 8 sheet of Masonite peg board (which they cut in half for me), and eight bucks’ worth of the metal brackets that fit into the holes, a piece of metal flashing to hold the ends together and several metal rods and washers to serve as spacers, some stainless steel nuts and bolts, a role of duct tape and four dollars’ worth of enamel paint—yellow and red. I wanted it to stand out.

         All of this I hoisted on my shoulders using some rough twine and brought back to my apartment, where I constructed my pushcart—essentially just the pegboard tented over the golf cart. It was raining the next day, so it took some extra time for the paint to dry, but I called Gerard Strauss that day, made sure the books were coming in on Friday (I had requested only four boxes: 100 copies) and asked him if he had any sway with the landlord in the building there for storing my three-wheel deal downstairs, right on Broadway. He said he did, his voice dubious, but he insisted I use a couple of the small billboard ads they’d made up for the book instead of my hand lettering. On Saturday morning I walked my pushcart from Carroll Street, across the Brooklyn Bridge, and up Broadway to 22nd. I was there by ten o’clock. I was loaded and back out on the sidewalk by eleven. I sold my first book by 11:15. I sold out the entire supply of 100 copies, all four boxes by nightfall—about 4 o’clock.

         The Gist offices were just down the street and I passed them several times in my transit around Union Square and back again. But, unlike Saturdays in previous years, only Paul was there. He actually saw me from the window, which I suppose must have meant he just happened to be looking out from there and away from the quiet of the room behind him, and he came down and bought a copy, though I had already given him one.

         Both Gerald and Miss Evers came by several times to witness the act. Neither of them were supposed to even be in town that day. My editor, Emily was there and took pictures of me with her pocket camera.

         The key break happened when a Post photographer came by and asked me a few questions. My picture made the Sunday paper on page eight.

         Then the New York Times ran the story about what I was doing on a following weekday.

         Gerald sold out the entire first printing of The Stolon by Christmas, but it was already too late by that time to order up another press run. 

         Besides all of that, I’d already begun another novel in August of that year, Head Island. This particular story attempt was for the fifth or sixth time and followed at least one misfiring. And by the week when that next effort was completed, another year had passed. It was half again longer than The Stolon, and twice as complicated to write. If my humor was ‘enigmatic’ the first time around, they would find it downright esoteric on the second go. Most of the first readers labeled the ending ambiguous, which was infuriating for the fact that this was purposely so, but they meant it critically. In that the entire story was about the ambiguities we all face in life and must deal with to get along, this might have pleased me, but not Gerard. Sales were disappointing despite a larger advertising budget and the book tour I did with Roger Terrill.

         Actually, the novel I wrote immediately after completing The Stolon was God’s Only Son Left. This was another sort of a lesson for me. I’m sure. I just don’t know yet what that lesson is or was.

         From the first, my method has always been not to announce my intention in what I wrote. I would only know if I had achieved the result I wanted in the mind of a reader if they responded afterward to those matters that concerned me when I wrote it. And it was this attitude, in fact, that made it so difficult for me to review other books. I had my own idea of what an author was up to, for sure, but why should I announce this to the world? Not only because I might be wrong, but because it might be giving away what the author had wanted the reader to earn the right to. This metaphysical ‘usufruct’ was important to me and if corrupted by sacrificing the author’s intentions on the alter of showing how smart I was in discovering it, the result could be injury by abuse. There was no need for that.

         In the vein of a seventeenth century morality tale, a sort of Pilgrims Progress if you will, I had at first named each of the supporting characters in God’s Only Son Left out of words which dealt with the very concept of ambiguity. The heroine was named Polly Semy, her rival for the affections of the hero was Ana Grahm, the villain was Ter Givers. This began as an exercise as arch as the concept—a toy to help me get beyond the stalemate I was in over the various matters I was fighting with and losing ground over on my personal Iwo Jima, Head Island. I had already given up on that several times. And then, suddenly, the essential conceit of God’s Only Son Left  broke through.

         The Hogarth prints from the Rake’s Progress became animate in my mind, and I was the Rake himself. Not exactly a young man from the provinces, I was at least the despoiled youth. In the end, of course, I had to change all the names to something more likely, lest the whole thing be taken as a joke from the start (which it was in any case, and in the worse way). We no longer live in an age sufficiently sophisticated and sure enough of itself to deal with such archetypes.

         Gerald told me that it would not sell and promptly turned it down

         I had not finished with those characters, however. They wandered in my head, responding to things I saw or said. I wanted to be done with them, however, and my second published novel, Head Island, became the actual device for that. I simply took those archetypes and placed them upon the more mundane terrain of South Boston.

         I believe that the cowardice instilled by our reduced expectations is now our curse. The bravest, most controversial, and prescient essay Henry Louis Mencken ever wrote was in the third volume of his Prejudices series. It is called On Being An American. I can think of no American writer capable of such a work today. In it, the 42-year-old iconoclast took on the establishment of his time, at all sides. In 1922, already among the brightest of the literati of his moment, Mencken risked his career, his reputation, and his future, by questioning the motives, effort, and outcome of the much ballyhooed American participation in Word War One. He dared question his nation’s patriotism, morals, and intelligence.

         For my own part, having no such position in the firmament, or at best being the froth on the head on a pint of small beer by comparison, I have little to lose here by re-calling attention to that standard of words. Certainly not my life, my fortune, or my sacred honor.

         In that essay Mencken put forward his firm belief “that the government of the United States, in both its legislative arm and its executive arm, is ignorant, incompetent, corrupt, and disgusting.” Speaking plainly and without thought of political correctness (something still possible in his day), he addressed all quarters, all beliefs, all nationalities, all religions, and all races, saying “The typical American of today has lost all the love of liberty that his forefathers had, and all their distrust of emotion, and pride in self-reliance. He is no longer led by Davy Crocketts; he is led by cheerleaders, press agents, word-mongers, uplifters,” and has become a tool of “the corsair of democracy—that is the professional mob-master, the merchant of delusions, the pumper-up of popular fears and rages.”

         By using ‘word-mongers,’ he clearly took no prisoners.

         Before the facts of history would be obvious to others, he argued that ‘The Great War’ would be the ruin of Europe and be the fertilizer for every false god of socialism, bolshevism, and the yet unnamed but well described fascism and Nazism. He correctly identified his fellow Americans as the “pliant slaves of capitalism, and ever ready to help it put down fellow-slaves who venture to revolt. But this very weakness, this very credulity and poverty of spirit, on some easily conceivable to-morrow, may convert him [the American citizen] into a rebel of a peculiarly insane kind, and so beset the Republic from within with difficulties quite as formidable as those which threaten to afflict from without.”

         Enough said.

         But Mencken was wrong (as he so dearly hoped, he was wrong on a grander scale) when he said of his fellow citizen, “He is fit for lynching-bees and heretic-hunts, but he is not fit for tight corners and desperate odds.”

         Soon enough we were to survive a depression of our own making, and another war fashioned out of the stuff from the last one, because there was still some true ‘fitness’ left.

         A common refrain from the true believer goes, “He who does not believe in God will believe in anything.” G. K. Chesterton is often accused of the quote, but I suspect it is too glib for that wonderfully wordy man. Nevertheless, the idea is there. It is a conceit held by most religions, not just Christians. A Pakistani Moslem friend repeated an almost identical phrase to me during an argument years ago. But it does not stop there. This is the same faith which underlies any Marxist as he pulls the trigger on the gun and blows the brains out of the socialist who did not toe the party line. It is also the virus which most fascists fear. The fascist will compromise almost anything to get his way. Confronted with the true-believer, the practical fascist knows instinctively that this person must be eliminated, sooner than later.

         Adversely, agnostics such as myself have commonly been drawn and quartered, burned or beheaded, and without further adieu, in that we had no following that would care about our loss and could be left to rot aside the road without fear of retaliation . . . There is that to be considered. The safety of numbers is often cause for membership in one particular club or another.

         In my experience, the most common and garden-variety absolutists are atheists. Often they are self-ascribed ‘intellectuals’ who set themselves well above the hoi polloi. Their faith, that there is no God, transcends not only reason but also their own welfare. They are often shot by other true believers with abandon. For sport. Without fear of heavenly retribution. Mere practice for the more difficult numbers to be eliminated from whatever better organized religion must be dealt with next.

         I gave a character, John Parker, this particular role ten years later, in The Right of Chance. Ostensibly he is the hero. And he is that. But the villain too. He cannot deal with the faith of others, or trust in their preconceptions. He is compelled by his humanity to do good for the right reason, but stymied by the simple fact that there is not enough time for any one human being to assess the right and the wrong of all the most important matters of the day, much less the trivial pursuits of a mundane life. He is starving physically for lack of food because he has lost every job open to him, but also emotionally for lack of love, because, as a true atheist, he is unable to trust in that most elemental blind faith.

         John Parker was inspired by Buster Keaton. I realize that no one of the few who read the book ever realized that inspiration, but it was in fact the source of the whole thing. I envisioned The Right of Chance like a silent movie. In each crisis, as John Parker hesitates to reconsider the moral consequence of his action and someone dies or is maimed as a consequence of his indecision, I imagined it like Keaton looking about on the busy street for the mother as the baby carriage rolls away, or standing on the railroad track and facing the wrong direction, with the train approaching.

         I thought I had made him enough like myself to give him sufficient flesh and blood to be believed, I believed, but I suppose I failed in that faith in some way. The book did not do well. My editor, then at Macmillan, thought it might be due to my fairly blatant attack on religion, but I suspect that I lost the chance for success by not using one of the most fundamental tried and true tricks of the trade—by failing to give John a dog. The counterpoint of all blind faith. A good mutt would have made all the difference. I said this to the editor. Had John had a scrappy hound who stuck by him throughout his ordeals, he would have been accepted for all of his other brittle parts and sharp edges. Dogs are not only a key factor in the establishment of human civilization, but elemental in the quick foundation of any character. I don’t know how I could have forgotten that.

         Probably, I suppose, because I don’t own a dog.

 ***

25. Gallimaufry, hodgepodge and calumet

         Writing is a sexual enterprise.

         I look back both fondly and with disappointment at the many unfinished works—more of those by far than the ones I’ve in fact completed. And this does not account for finished work that I could find no takers for. The unfinished are interrupted love affairs. Not ‘like’ love affairs, but actual seductions and submissions, many of them consummated, but then abandoned for reasons I cannot tell or have conveniently forgotten now. An argument dimly remembered. The anger dissipated.

         I find at least one in nearly every box I open.

         But the metaphor is not nearly complete. Sending a manuscript out to a publisher is not all that unlike a sort of pimping. She is yours and you are selling her for your own purposes. For money. For glory.

         Don’t believe any author who refers to his stories as his children. (I have thought that way myself, you see. I now recant. A man cannot sell his children.) And only a pervert would think making love to his children. And writing is an act of love. (Admittedly this does not include the sort of thing churned out by book packagers and marketers. That is the common trade of the larger brothels and chain stores, and love has nothing to do with it. Metaphors do have their limits.)

         And yet we are all capable of selling our loves. Betraying our loves. Sacrificing our loves. We writers are all pimps.

         If the idea offends some, let it be. It was just a thought.         

         A small press called me, some years ago. A chatty fellow somewhere in New Jersey. Deferential. Respectful. Knowledgeable about my work. I have gotten dozens of such calls through the years. Often from one or another of the university presses, where some recently graduated lit major has found a summer job, but more usually from some small imprint started by a former lit major with a family trust fund who could not bear the idea of nine-to-five labor, or of the drudgery of a real work.

         Their idea is usually that you have some manuscript which has not found the right publisher and is sitting in a drawer. That it may be a masterpiece, and there it is, lying in that dark compartment, unloved! Or in a box, in the closet. Beneath the bed. (Better, I think, beneath the bed, where they are closer at hand for the fondling). Would you consider, they say, letting them publish it rather than having it languish? Of course they have no money to offer in advance. Would you be willing to let them publish it for free?! They get the use of your name in the catalog, and you get nothing! A few author’s copies, of course.

         I ask you, would you give up one of your mistresses to someone like that? A veritable ‘Wimpy’ of the Casanova’s, suggesting they will gladly pay you Wednesday for a tryst today? Or worse! They may never pay at all.

         Yes? Because you are a true pimp at heart! Let them have her and maybe it will be good for business and inspire interest in the rest of your harem. Better that someone read it and perchance appreciate its charms than for that beautiful idyll to grow old without attention.

         But this is not Fantine. She will not be made to cut her hair or be abused by swine. This is not tragic Tosca. You are not giving her up to the evil Baron Scarpia.

         Nevertheless, I generally say no. But it is a matter of how they approach the subject. I don’t like cocky little publishers who think they are a gift of God (not just for their mommy’s money), because they will always screw around with the manuscript behind your back. Always. They know better, you see. They do it because they can. And I don’t like the meek ones who are afraid of offending. They are seldom up to the task of satisfying the needs of the work. However, I can be persuaded by the honest and forthright approach.

         “I’ve read some of your work and loved it . . . I have a little publishing company in New Jersey. We have sixteen good titles at present but I would like to deepen our list (a little flattery never hurts) . . . I want to know if you would consider letting me publish something of yours that didn’t get picked up by one of the bigger imprints . . . I worked at Random House as an assistant editor for twelve years, but I was downsized during the mergers . . . No. My father was a scrap metal dealer for most of his life. He hated it, but it paid the bills. Paid for my college education. He died of cancer a few years ago, just a couple of months before I was fired. He used to tell me he was very proud to have a son who was doing something he loved. When I was suddenly out of work and had the time to think about it, I realized what he had done for me. And then I didn’t want to throw it all away. I cleaned out his old warehouse in Trenton, sold off what I could, and I started my own publishing company right on the floor space there, right where they used to dump the broken motor parts. Still smells of oil. Like the ghosts of machines past. When I come to work in the morning, I can only smile like Scrooge on Christmas morning. And think of my Dad . . . the Post Office Box is over in Princeton just for effect.”

         Can’t say no to that. Not me. You can’t mind a fellow like that sleeping with your mistress. She’s in good hands.

         And stretching metaphors too far is still a specialty of mine.

         I sent that ambitious young publisher in New Jersey the manuscript for God’s Only Son Left.

         I heard nothing back from him for a month. And then a polite letter.

         He did not understand it. He was totally confused by the references and did not even know where to begin. He was very sorry but he couldn’t publish it. He would be happy, however, to look at anything else.

         I told him that if the great Gerard Strauss had not figured it out either, he should not be ashamed. It was just me. I did send him something else though, which he took.

         Meanwhile, I was using up the wick at the other end of the candle even faster. Progress at The Fore-edge was slow but promising. I was not required to do every little task, but I felt determined to understand them all so that if any member of our volunteer staff were to suddenly abandon their ideals for the mundane needs of a paycheck somewhere else, we could roll with it.

         Attacks on The Fore-edge were predictable given my own weakness for taking the easy shot. The New York Times referred to us more than once in critical articles as ‘The Fore-skin.’  This was picked up by others, and soon enough we were often being referred to by the slur rather than our actual name.

         I remember being at the large newsstand in the Pan Am building above the concourse at Grand Central Station, talking to the great manager there, Mr. Green, hoping to glean a little something more about how to get a wider distribution for our magazine  when a young woman came up to him and delicately asked, “I’m looking for a . . .  do you have a . . .  it’s called the fore-something.”

         “Fore-what?” he said, winking at me.

         She saw the wink and steeled herself, with a clinch of her jaw.

         “The Fore-skin!”

         But she said it a bit too loudly. Heads turned.

         Mr. Green never broke a smile. He said, “I’m Jewish, so I’m not the one to ask.” He hiked his thumb toward me.

         I bent down to the stack behind us and grabbed a copy and put it right in her hands. “I think you mean The Fore-edge.”

         During the final year of The Gist, I had gradually taken on a larger role, not simply for being able to bullshit my way through 800 words to fill a space when the London correspondent failed to deliver copy after the fifth week of missing his own paycheck, or turning up some new outrage from the Nixon administration (Some fact of the day that I had only just learned about by reading that morning’s Wall Street Journal, because I was the only one there who did.), but for what was called by others on the staff, my ‘sense of humor.’ There seemed to be a need for it, and I obliged. And one of those bits that temporarily survived the final demise of our small demesne as the only alternative newsweekly was the ‘animadvert.’

         I had argued with Paul repeatedly over the need for advertising revenue. An argument I always lost, and then felt bad about it each time, as if I were a picador stabbing at the bull’s shoulders just to see blood, knowing that the torero, Mr. Ritts, would be sticking the banderillas into the neck later, and the estocada was, in the end, inevitable. In frustration one day (it was just about the time that the Nixon administration started bombing Cambodia in March 1969), I inadvertently invented the ‘AnimAdvert.’ It was meant as a joke. A whimsy. I had no idea that it would go beyond Paul’s desk. In fact, I left the first one there on top of the piles of morning effluvia as a response to a previous day’s argument, and as sort of an apology—with a note: “If not that, then how about this?”

         The note was clipped to a faux ad that I had concocted from scraps, supposedly by the Chase Manhattan Bank which suggested that, in this time of national emergency, it would be in the best interests of the Nation that Chase take care of all Federal funds and be given responsibility for making government payments, and that to accomplish this, it should be put in charge of the gold supply for the Federal Reserve so that Chase would have complete authority to carry out these measures. I had been inspired by that genius of old, Jay Gould, who had once attempted to corner the gold supply early in the Grant administration, almost exactly one hundred years before.

         I do not have a copy of the ad presently. Much of that issue’s circulation was removed from the newsstands by court order because of the lawsuit Chase Manhattan filed against us for libel. As happened before, I was the last to know that Paul had actually used the joke as the back cover of the next issue. The lawsuit was dropped when Edgar Nelson pointed out to the bank’s lawyers that Chase would be suing itself, in that the DuPont family funds were in fact what kept The Gist afloat, and were held by that bank, as well as many of the deposits for other family interests which just happened to own a large stake in the bank itself.

         This was the beginning of the ‘AnimAdvert’ for which I became responsible for each of the remaining weeks. It was not enough to save our sinking magazine, but it was the band that played on, to the last, as our ship sank. ‘Drink Coca-Cola, when the water is undrinkable,’ with a picture of a child in a slum in Tegucigalpa; ‘Mercedes Benz, the absolute choice, when you have absolute power,’ with a news photo Fidel Castro behind the wheel . . . No. Now that I recall, the picture of Fidel in fatigues was replaced by one of Francisco Franco stepping into a Mercedes limousine in full dress uniform. That was Paul’s choice, of course. Fidel was his idol. And then, with The Gist no more, and in a sort of resurrection of a more literary bent, the AnimAdvert became the regular back cover to The Fore-edge.

         Naturally, I stopped making fun of political matters when we began The Fore-edge, and turned my sights directly on authors. Faux advertisements for current bestsellers were an easier target: The Day of the Seagull by Frederick Bach offered a somewhat doctored photo of a seagull soaring with Nazi symbols beneath its wings and the caption “spine tingling banalities”; Beggar Man, Thief, by John Le Cary was “The cold war novel to warm your heart”; Rabbit Raunch by John Upyurs “was an unhappy and mindless romp you can only try to forget,” and, amazingly, in several cases the faux ads were met by the actual publishers with appreciation—all publicity being to the good, I suppose, if what is being promoted is worthless to begin with.

         The sub-head for The Fore-edge was “Uncovered, Unbound.” I like it now, but that bit was not mine. I had wanted something more critical like, “All the stories that don’t fit,” or some such. But ‘The Fore-edge : Uncovered, Unbound,’ was the right touch.

         The idea for that subhead was from my assistant editor—the one person who read all that we received, which was considerable, and understood the most about what was needed, Helen Morris. And Charlie Ferraro, our poetry editor, could not muscle her on his best day.

         I can hear her in the ‘conference room’ now, saying, “What does it mean?”

         Charlie protesting, “It doesn’t have to mean anything. It’s an image.”

         “For images you go to a gallery. This is a poem. You are using words to communicate an idea. If not, use pictures, or lines. Words have meanings.”

         Helen was, by far, our best editor overall. If I had been able to dump any of the business matters on her shoulders, I would have, just because she was that capable. But she wouldn’t let that happen. She wasn’t there for that. She was there for the words. And she worked uptown at an ad agency for more than forty hours a week as it was. She didn’t have time for nuts and bolts. She hardly had any time for me.

         Instead, I managed to put some of the load off on Miles Anders. He was still working at The Village Voice then. This was well before his Pulitzer at The Wall Street Journal, and he had the time. In fact, he made time long after his circumstances had changed. He deserves that credit too.

         During the spring of 1970, when we first met at Dante’s Pizza, Miles was not yet married, though he was already living with his future wife, and six months later I was his best man. That’s how fast our friendship grew. But that first day, he stood in line with the rest of them and took his turn handing in his resume. I asked him what he did for a living before seeing the line on the sheet.

         “I’m a reporter. For the Voice.”

         “What do you cover?”

         “Mostly film and theatre.”

         I looked up at him again.

         “You wrote the piece about Midnight Cowboy?”

         “Yes.”

         I had forgotten the name. He had used my piece in The Gist as a platform, ripping me for a purely emotional review of a great film. He was right, of course.

         I said, “You’re hired.”

         “You sure? I was pretty hard on you.”

         “Thanks. What do they say: ‘Keep your enemies closer?’  Right? I think I’ll be needing you right next to me.”

         It was a good beginning, at least.

         Before the year was out he was double checking the printer’s orders, helping with paste-up, photo-copies, composition, proofreading, and finally, under duress, took a slot on the reading committee so that we could keep up with the slush pile. In fact, he took the manuscripts home and I’m fairly certain his wife, Betsy, did more of the reading. But she enjoyed that. She simply did not want to come down from Mount Vernon to attend the weekly staff sessions. And she doesn’t like pizza. Tomato sauce disagrees with her. She was a legal secretary and didn’t even want her name on the masthead, though, importantly, that little bit of ink was the sole desire of at least half of all those who volunteered at The Fore-edge over the years.

         We never set out to publish reviews. The idea was not even mentioned at our first editorial meeting. But one of us, Mimi Toliver, had her own ideas. She loved a book she had just read, 84 Charing Cross Road, and wrote an extensive review of it, which was, given the subject matter and her own enthusiasm, irresistible. Foolishly or not, I accepted it. In my own turn, I had read the new Jack Finney book, Time and Again. I still had not overcome the lasting effects of his Body Snatchers and allowed him to spirit me away once again. This put a crack in the dyke which could not be repaired. My own admonitions against playing at being arbiters of what was good and bad instead and doing our best to present what we could to the public in our own right fell to pieces under the argument that we should lead by both demonstration and example. I wrote another review shortly after of Larry Niven’s Ringworld, a wonderful book that I had temporarily overlooked months before. Miles wrote one for The Royal Flash by George MacDonald Fraser. I wrote a very critical review of Islands in the Stream with apologies to the late Mr. Hemingway for the avarice of his family in turning over his waste basket to make yet more money than was already pouring in for the countless reprints of everything he had published when he was alive.

         By that time, the review copies from the publishers were flooding in the door every day, unsolicited. As a matter of record, not one of the books we reviewed up to that time had come in over the transom. Each one had been purchased individually by the reviewer with their own hard-earned cash. Suddenly, the pickings were too easy. The colors practically whistled at you when you passed them on the office shelves. Hard not to take one of those shiny things home with you now and again and take it to bed for a good read. Some were even worth commenting on the next morning.

         And by the time my own second book appeared in the fall of ’71, that template had been set. My only choice was to see that the advance copy of Head Island went to someone who would not play favorites. And that would be Miles.

         But he liked the book. He had read it in draft. And he refused to write the review for fear that it would compromise some aspect of his integrity. (This was an eerie augur of what would one day come.) Thus, it was passed on to Barbara Singer.

         All of this was long ago, and should not matter a whit. The fact that Barbara slammed the book in my own publication should not, at this point in my life, matter. How could such a bruise remain? But it has. I wince even now. It is one of those things, like stealing my father’s car and a few dozen others that quickly flood the mind, blocking the light from every other window of rational thought. I cannot forget. These blood-bruises are part of my anatomy, and my physiognomy, as well as to my psychology.

         This too had a back-story. And if for no other reason than to rattle the skeleton for some fun, if I cannot rid myself of it, I will tell this tale now.

         It is true, as was alleged by someone who does not now need the publicity, that the review by Barbara read like the scourge and scolding of a scorned woman. For good reason! But no. Enough of that. I can yet see the head of a libel action peeking at my window sill.

 ***

26. A war of roses

         From the summer of 1969 to the summer of 1975 I rented a basement apartment on Carroll Street in Brooklyn. This is still the best place I have ever lived and is very fondly remembered. The building, a red brick and brownstone townhouse, was owned by Mr. and Mrs. Rabinowitz—Peter and Phyllis—who lived on the first of the floor. Both heavy readers, they were relatively quiet, as well as being away to their condo in Miami, Florida, for six months of the year. Living directly below them, I rarely heard a sound other than from Skippy, the terrier terrorist. Peter Rabinowitz had been a psychiatrist and his wife, Phyllis, had been a nurse. Specifically, Peter had been George Ritts’ psychiatrist, and it was through George that I heard about a space opening up and, tired of the more picaresque aspects of the East Village, I went over to Brooklyn to check it out. This transit from Manhattan to Brooklyn was new to me at the time, and a daring equivalent to travelling to a foreign country. Immediately, I discovered that there were in fact many trees still growing there. The ambient noise level on Carroll Street was half of that on Avenue A. The faces I passed regularly in the street quickly became familiar to me, and I to them, and most of them were even friendly as well.

         The apartment I saw that day had once been a maid’s quarters in a single family building with four upper floors, built at a time when Brooklyn had been a city unto itself. The moldings were deeply varnished wood. The ceilings in the basement were nine feet high and unmarked by water stains, though tracked by pipes, neat and fatted with their painted asbestos coverings. The horse-hair plaster walls were hard and flat and boring, showing few of the sort of scars and cracks and sagging lumps that looked so much like back roads on a topographical map that I used to follow endlessly while lying in my bed on Avenue A, while shooting cockroaches with stolen office rubber bands, during the the previous two years.         

         My new apartment had a single, small, dark bedroom, lighted weakly by high-set horizontal windows that opened to the alley side, and a larger and bright sitting room with full windows facing the back, as well as a kitchen large enough to eat in. To the other side, where a short hall led to a laundry room and the stairs up, there was a door out to the back and that aspect was best of all. The four windows of the kitchen and the sitting room faced a rear ‘garden’ of brick and begonias that took the sun in the late mornings. This garden space was larger than my entire apartment and thus effectively doubled it in size, at least in good weather. It was guarded by an eight-foot-high brick wall, trimmed in brownstone matching the house, but that trim was only visible in the winter because the remainder of the year it was fully cloaked by an escarpment of climbing white roses, the endless thorny stems entwined as if in hand-to-hand combat on an ancient field, the heads colliding and small leafy hands reaching in a mortal struggle for the top. The roses were functional as well as beautiful, of course. Their large thorns made the thought of a human being climbing the wall nearly impossible. Nearly.

         Mr. and Mrs. Rabinowitz could enter the garden via a cast-iron stairway from the first floor which continued upward into the fire escape, but they rarely did—preferring instead to sit on the black iron of the ‘balcony’ at the first floor level which offered a view over the garden, and the wall, and got the sun for nearly half the day.

The oil furnace for the building was at the front end of the basement, close to an original coal chute to the street, which, I discovered sometime later, was still a convenient way to get in if I had forgotten my keys. The smell of that furnace was dusky and sweet and never bothered me, nor the noise of it, because it was well baffled by the laundry room in-between. But I became somewhat attached to the flowery and sour smells of laundry as well as the roses.

         As any sane New Yorker would, I wanted the place the second I laid eyes on it. And just as surely, I knew I could not afford it. I asked. And my fear was confirmed. The rent was $350. I was then theoretically taking home $448 a month, but I would have to wait for my tax return each year to make a fact of even that much. Desperation took command of my brain. Right there, beside the laundry room, I had seen several very full plastic barrels for trash. I asked if it was possible that I could do chores and reduce the rent.

         Peter Rabinowitz had great and bushy eyebrows, which I am sure he had used effectively as he counseled his patients. He often looked more bemused as a consequence, in contrast to the dubious tone in his voice. Phyllis Rabinowitz had the sort of cheeks that knotted high on her face and she wore colorful scarves bought during an excursion, from the Indians in Peru, and this gave her the appearance of a Russian babushka. She spoke in shorter sentences than her husband and her higher voice gave her words a breathless excitement in contrast to the steady tones of her husband. Neither of them was tall. Phyllis was a bit overweight and Peter a bit thin.

They looked at each other at that moment, wordlessly, with the long study of eyes perfected in thirty years of marriage. My fate hung in the balance.

         Peter looked back. “We couldn’t pay you anything, but if you vacuumed the halls, took care of the garbage and that sort of thing, I think we could arrange something.”

         ‘That sort of thing’ soon amounted to walking Skippy every morning before I went to work, especially to avoid his use of the garden as his toilet.

         I had now joined the ranks of Vlad. In time my other responsibilities came to be the collecting of rent checks during the cold months from the six tenants on the three upper floors and sending those to Mr. and Mrs. Rabinowitz in Florida; fixing windows which had jammed (using a bar of soap—something I had learned from my father at an early age), minor repairs on leaky toilets using parts of wire coat hangers or else calling the plumber, replacing light bulbs or calling the electrician,  and nagging the furnace man when it was something I couldn’t handle by flipping the switch and hitting the reset button a few times (contrary to the instructions affixed there). All of it never amounted to more than five or six hours or so a week, even during the dog-walking months. But I was soon, in effect, earning more as a ‘building superintendent’ than I was as a member of the staff of The Gist.

         At Carroll Street., my relationship with Mr. and Mrs. Rabinowitz became rather intimate over time. Because they were both retired, they had the freedom to pay attention to the small things going on about them. For her part, Phyllis exercised much of the devotion of a mother toward her tenants, and perhaps more especially, me. She was concerned about what I ate (too much pizza), how I dressed (‘even the Romans had irons to deal with the wrinkles in their clothes’), how much sleep I got (never enough), and who I was sleeping with (more on that elsewhere). Peter’s concerns were more specific.

         “A stubborn and ardent clinging to one’s opinion is the best proof of stupidity.”

         It took me a while before I came to realize that his sharpest vocal criticism of my behavior were not always his alone, but often a combined assault reinforced by the wisdom of his favorite philosopher, Montaigne.

         This attention, always carefully administered, only became worse after the third year of my residence there. I had written an essay, published in Harper’s, which had focused on the voodoo and charlatanism of Freudian psychiatry. The piece stemmed most directly and ostensibly from a recent biography of the original fraud himself, but was a project actually taken on because of a published criticism of The Stolon in which my own motives were questioned on Freudian grounds. I was not about to directly answer the critic herself, but I could certainly tug at the rug on which she was standing.

         Peter Rabinowitz appeared at my door one evening, holding the issue of Harper’s in question, and asked if he could speak with me. His eyebrows were lowered. His face was grim.

         One immutable law of the universe, akin to the fact that when at sea level, water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, or that books burn at 451 (also variable to the dispositions of density, altitude, age, chemical additives, and the mood of the moment), is that one should never criticize the religion of your boss or your landlord.

         He said, “What’s this all about?” Holding up the offending issue as evidence.

         I was young enough then and still sufficiently cocky in my self-righteous ways that I said, “I thought you’d like it.”

         Peter was a better man than me. He knew hubris when he saw it. The eyebrows tilted off at either side with his sufferance.

         “I did. I found it quite amusing. I just thought I should point out to you a few things you might have overlooked. Do you have a moment?”

         ‘A moment’ extended into the late hours of that night. Peter was a thin man with a pronounced stoop by the time I knew him. His back had been arrow straight when he had been photographed as a young doctor in his Captain’s uniform during World War Two, holding hands with his pretty bride in her nurse whites.

         Bits and pieces of that conversation found their way into The Unfortunate Happiness of Peter Brim, and can be read there, but let a few examples suffice.

         He said, “Why do you sound so bitter?”

         I said, “If I do, then I totally failed. I was trying to be humorous.”

         “What is so humorous to you about human suffering?”

         “Why would you think it is the suffering I am poking fun at, and not the causes?”

         “Perhaps you were not sufficiently clear.”

         “Apparently so. I know I still have a lot to learn about writing well.”

         “Yes . . . Well, what was the point you thought you were making?”

         “Just that there are, at any instant, an unquantifiable number of stimuli to a human brain—to a dog’s brain for that matter—and to judge a priori that one is more important than another, or that this one is key and all the others are not, is a task science is not up to yet, much less accounting for the natural changes of those catalysts from moment to moment. It is like mistaking climate for weather.”

         At that moment there were many dire predictions of the Earth freezing over. I already knew he subscribed to some of that.

         He shook the added issue away, “In your example, you placed food above sex. Can’t they be manifestations of the same drive?”

         I said, “Not in my experience, though I am often very hungry after sex. I was simply making the case that a particular guy might have had his mind on a pepperoni pizza, but if it’s a hot day and his girlfriend takes her clothes off before sitting down to dinner, he might find himself in a quandary. Most guys I know will eat the pizza and then make love. It’s like a twofer. Dinner and dessert.”

         I had thought this exchange to be hilarious. Peter could not reduce a lifetime’s devotion to the practice of psychiatry to mere metaphor and simile.

         “You are missing the point. Sex is the overriding drive. It can be delayed or postponed, but it will dominate.”

         I nodded agreement. “I hope so. I have never actually had a pizza that good.”

         This brought a heavy sigh and a shake of the head.

         “I read your book. Your novel. And the review. I think the critic you are aiming at had a point. You sublimate your hatred for your father in rebellion.” there was no change of inflection here, “ . . . Did your father ever hit your mother?”

         Now, this was tantamount to free psychiatric ministration for which Peter was usually paid a very large hourly fee. I leapt at the chance for the freebie.

         “Not to my knowledge. Not really. But I saw him give her a slap on the butt once. She yelped at that, I can tell you.”

         “Did he mistreat her in any other ways?”

         “Definitely. He refused to stop playing cards down at the L Street Bathhouse on Saturday afternoons. She wanted him to go shopping with her. He hated shopping.”

         “No!… You know what I mean!”

         I had to be more careful with my flippancy. Peter would tire of such answers.

         “He yelled when he was angry. Which was often. He was not a happy man.”

         “Why do you think was he unhappy?”

         “I don’t know.”

         “Was it sexual frustration?”

         “Certainly sounded like that to me. But he never really liked the work he did. He should have been a carpenter.”

         Peter rolled his eyes up toward the jungle of his eyebrows.  

         “Look. You know me. Do you think I am a stupid man?”

         That was an easy parry. “If I thought you were, I wouldn’t tell you. I love living here too much. But in truth, I don’t. Not at all.”

         “Then why do you think I would have spent forty years of my life practicing a profession which is so false as the one you describe?”

         Such a question was at the heart of what I had been trying to say, and clearly failed to accomplish in my article.

         “I suppose, for the same reason my father calls himself a Catholic, despite the Inquisition and the stone churches and the gold chalices and all the sordid inequities and contradictions. He was born human and, without the core belief that there was some deeper rhyme or reason otherwise, he would feel helpless in a world so mad as this.”

         I give myself the last word in my account of this conversation, because I don’t remember what Peter said to that, nor did I write it down afterward—perhaps that was in my own self-interest.

         No. As I think of it now, the last word would have been had by Montaigne.

         Peter loved the essays of Michel de la Montaigne. I had never read them until that first year and then I read them all and most of them again.

         Naturally, Peter read them in the original French. I settled for the two-volume Oxford translation. He was unfond of that edition, thinking it lacked a sense of the poetry in the original words and always corrected my attempts at quotation, usually from memory. Lacking the linguistic acumen, I persisted with the Oxford, if for no other reason than just to hear Peter’s corrections and emendations.

         But per our disagreements concerning Freud, Peter thought Montaigne was most prescient concerning the subject of sex, and often quoted the Frenchman for support. Concerning my own view of my parents’ marriage, I will guess Montaigne might have offered this: “A good marriage is between a deaf husband and a blind wife.” 

         Then again, he would not have said that unless Phyllis were present. He always liked to provoke her in that way with a more metaphorical slap on the rear.

         I have been challenged by relatives and others concerning my agnosticism. Atheists are peeved with me for not simply concluding that there is no God. I find their faith in this matter to be more religious than most of the people I know who call themselves Christians or Jews. How they presume to prove a negative is beyond any form of reasoning I am familiar with. On the other hand, those who practice one faith or another have often seen me, the uncommitted voter, so to speak, as a juicy target for their ministrations. In that guise, I have had a question put to me on several occasions, which I find more interesting than simply writing off my conversion to some or another form of intellectual blindness. That is, if there is no God, how did life, or that pattern of things we see around us come to be? . . . I think about this a lot. But I have no answer. Mankind has a short history in the midst of all of this splendor of fact and it is likely we haven’t a good clue yet how anything really works. Exactly what is gravity after all? Yet nothing we know of in our lives can exist without it.

         Another interesting question is this, put to me by a child (my niece) and a better question by far than anything I’ve encountered from anyone else: “If you could imagine your very own religion, what would it be?”

         I first had to decide why there was a need for religion in the first place. I needed a cause in order to judge an appropriate effect. I said, “Why do you think we need religion?”

         My niece, Antsy, said (with obvious overtones of her Christian underpinnings), “So that you will be saved.”

         Actually, not a bad answer when you think about it. Salvation is indeed a worthy cause for religion. The thought that our own spark is no more than the momentary ephemera of a grind of metal against the stone does not inspire me to better efforts. So, after that, and for several days, I went around town and about my business and tried to imagine my salvation. What would it in fact be like?

         And this forced me back again to the original query.

         My niece was not patient with my taking the time. She wanted an answer  immediately if not sooner. She will one day be a good wife and responsible for keeping some lout or another in line. She will get her answers, or there will be hell to pay. She made me promise to call her when I had my report.

         I wondered first just how a God might be. How might this God be both omniscient and omnipotent as any good God ought to be? After a while I settled on this: that we are all a little bit of the whole. That God is omniscient because he sees through the eyes, hears through the ears, and feels through the skin of each of us. (My later proposition in fiction that our individual pain, misery, and death was the origin of the metaphor of crucifixion had not yet occurred to me.) God is omnipotent because things are exactly as he has made them to be, and perhaps the gravity we have so much trouble identifying properly, even though it holds everything together, may simply be his will.

         It took some explaining to do, but my niece, who shows every sign of being a genius for even bothering to test me with these questions, listened to all of it with little debate. Then she said, “How about whiskers?”

         I told her, “I cut them myself.”

         She said, “No. My dog. Is he a part of this God?”

         This aspect had not really occurred to me either. I suddenly felt embarrassed, like I had tried to get by on the cheap. But I thought about it quickly. I said, “He has to be. Otherwise God would not be omniscient. Whiskers could bury the soup bone at night and God would not have a clue.”

         We had been on the phone for nearly an hour then and her mother made her get off. My brother’s wife Nancy is patient with me but that is probably due to the fact that she doesn’t know me except as her husband’s poor and ne’er-do-well brother. Christian charity demanded patience, even with a heathen.

         Antsy called me back a week later.

         Immediately, she asked, “Why does your God kill babies?”

         She said this with a hard edge. Clearly something had happened to her and she was not pleased. But that answer was fairly easy. I told her, “People killed babies. Viruses killed babies. Gravity killed babies. All part of the same mix. If we are all a part of this God, he feels the pain too. But why did you ask that?”

         But she was only ready to deal with my answer, “So why do it? Why bother? What difference does it make if we all die and this God just makes a new batch of us then like a bunch of cookies?”

         I wanted to kiss her for her integrity of thought, but I could only say, “That would be boring. Wouldn’t it? I mean, this God knows everything that is or has been, but not what has not happened.”

         She objected, “Father Murphy says that God knows everything, including what will happen next.”

         “Who is Father Murphy?”

         “Cataclysm class. I’m going to be confirmed in June.”

         I imagined her in the sort of Catechism class I had been made to endure preparing for my own Confirmation. We used to call it ‘cataclysm’ class as well.

I said, “This is my religion I am imagining. Not the Pope’s. I cannot be held responsible for what Father Murphy says. What I say is, that this God I’ve conjured up to meet your original inquiry to me is still learning new stuff every instant, every hour of every day. Omniscience does not require knowledge of what hasn’t happened. That’s ridiculous. And omnipotence offers the chance to manipulate the heavens, but if he does that, he will necessarily be interfering with the life he has made to be his eyes, and ears, and skin, so he had better do it very selectively, like on special occasions. Maybe at a crucifixion. Something big like that.”

         About a week later I got a call from her father.

         Eddy asked, “What the hell are you doing?”

         “I’m drinking a beer and listening to Sibelius.”

         “You are talking to Antsy about God. I just finished talking to Father Murphy. Her head is filled with all kinds of garbage. He does not even think he should rightfully allow her to go to the Confirmation ceremony if her head is screwed up like this. What did you tell her?”

         I started to tell him. He interrupted me after about two sentences, pretty much like he always did.

         “I don’t give a crap about all that. Stop talking to Antsy.”

         “Do you mean that?”

         This made him pause. He knew what he was saying and at least he had the second thought about it.

         “What I mean is, stop talking about religion with her.”

         “And if she asks another question?”

         “Tell her I told you to keep it to yourself.”

         “I can do that.”

         In those better days of the 1970s, when the economy was yet again collapsing beneath the weight of regulation and taxation, and mediocrity had risen like fat, as it always will, to the seats of power (oh yes, not so different than the present), I had been unaware of the greater dangers that threatened my very existence because of the simple comforting pleasure of being able to sit out on the brick behind my basement apartment and debate Peter Rabinowitz on the matters of life and death until the wee hours of the morning. Such an open study of philosophy focuses the mind away from the petty and the mundane. It easily deflects the blunt edge of banality.

         But I was unable to deal with any of that for some years afterward. The Unfortunate Happiness of Peter Brim had used up what strength I felt on the matter. And then, suddenly, I awoke one morning in the narrowed space of the loft at the bookshop and an entire story had filled the air so heavily I could not breathe but had to get down the ladder to my office beneath, and, sitting in my underwear, I wrote the basic outline and first scene of Ehrlichman in New York, and suddenly felt I understood something of that ‘evil of banality.’

         You must appreciate the importance of Hannah Arendt in the sixties and seventies. She was a comet that circled the intellectual planet of New York. Wrong or right. The intellectual left despised her for not following the rules. The intellectual right feared her because she had opened a particular box of individual conscience and responsibility that they would have preferred to leave closed, and the tendency of the weak-minded was to attack the woman herself—the ad hominem attack, then as now, being the accepted tactic for savaging any opponent who was your superior. I suppose she was human enough to have more than her fair share of faults. But her thesis concerning the ‘banality of evil’ was not to be denied.

         All in all, I would wager that Arendt’s name came up more than half the times that Peter and I sat out on the bricks at the back; with the roses rising on the walls around into the perpetual dusk of city night and me with my beer or bourbon and Peter with his wine in hand, and Phyllis above us on the first level of the fire escape reading her novels by the light of the window to their living room and chipping in a word in now and again, just like you see a golfer do with a little white ball from the sand trap.

         But banality is a difficult thesis to portray in fiction, with all the ‘matters of importance’ so present in our lives, and the evil of conformity and mass culture was even more so. Sinclair Lewis had tried it. But I find I can’t read him now. How do you dramatize such a gargoyle of inverted ugliness without imitating the dark jewel of a Victor Hugo character, or dealing in bathos as Dickens so often did? I have always had a dislike of that outrageous comedy that resorted to fat ladies and bad singing for humor. I wanted something better. And then the inspiration came to me right out of my glove.

         I had come in the night before and unconsciously taken that glove off and tossed it with the other one up to my sleeping loft. The next morning, awaking to some sound or another in the building, my weak eyes were staring at the damned thing within six inches of my face there on the mattress. What was it? An animal skin? And the seams turned inside-out were certainly clear enough to me. In my stupor I lay there staring at it as the oddity it was until I suddenly knew that this was the means of my story. I must turn the story inside out so that the seams were quite visible. There should not be any subtlety to what was going on. No hidden agenda. The truth of what was happening must be clear from the start and the story must be in the effort of the hero to survive the expected onslaught.

         Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem required an argument of proof that there was not so much a condensed evil that lurked among us, as merely the tendency to do what was expected, to obey orders, and to avoid asking questions. To move with the crowd. My own young hero, John Ehrlichman, is a New York lawyer, a graduate of Stanford, class of ’69, on his way to a promising career when he is suddenly beset by the mistaken identity caused by his very name and the calamity created by confusing him with the paunchy middle-aged political gangster who had been part of the banal exercise of government that was the Nixon administration.

         The Mr. Ehrlichman of the Nixon administration had long been an object of fascination to me. He was a legitimate war hero who had earned the Distinguished Flying Cross. He had gone to college on the G. I. Bill and worked his way up as a respected lawyer in Seattle. He had even been an Eagle Scout. What had inspired such a man to create the ‘plumbers’ and caused him to believe that those ends justified the means?

         The plot of my story was obvious to me within five minutes of the first realization. Of course, my character was the innocent. It was the public who jumped to conclusions and hounded him out of a job, and a home, his marriage and his friendships. All the while he clings to the belief that the truth will triumph and the good will out. Right there in the broad daylight of New York, New York. It is the public who has condemned him for nothing more than his name. A mere coincidence. To what purpose? Only to exorcise some demon which they themselves had been responsible for creating? It displayed both the fear and anger of the lynch mob and the assumption of a ‘free press,’ uneducated to the matters they presumed to report upon, who always jumped to conclusions and seldom admitted mistakes.

         In my story, it is years later, when he is out of prison for assaulting a police officer in his own defense, and is sitting in Bryant Park behind the New York Public Library, where he has finally been reading the records of the man he was confused with, when a elderly fellow who looks like Richard Nixon sits down on a bench a few feet away and begins feeding the pigeons. They talk about the habits of pigeons, and of evil, and of Hannah Arendt. They actually have a conversation much like those I had with Peter Rabinowitz years before.

         Out on a walk once, I had asked my friend about the pigeons who pestered our feet, “Why do they cluster?”

         Peter had said, as if he knew, ”The safety of numbers.”

         “But there’s no safety there. The ones at the back will starve. There’s no chance they will ever get to the food. Why not look elsewhere?”

         “An ancient reflex of the brain, perhaps.”

         “You’d think it would’ve resulted in a dead end for them long ago and the ones who set out on their own would have long since passed on some genetic imperative to be independent.”

         Without a change of voice, Peter had said, ”You’re rationalizing. You see the result and assume the correct means. All those pigeons understand is that there is the possibility of food in one direction or the other. Or danger, for that matter. Just like a school of fish. Reacting in common has proven successful over time. The imperative is really quite simple. And the ones who survive do the breeding.”

         “So, do you see your patients that way? Food first. Then sex?”

         “I suspect that the genetic code of a pigeon is not far off from that of a human being. A few tweaks, maybe. Fingers instead of wings.”

         “So why all the fuss over the arts and law and mathematics? Shouldn’t we just eat and breed?”

         “It’s all really an accident, I think. The other stuff is just window dressing. Maybe a flourish to attract a sex partner. All we were ever meant to do is eat and breed, but some one fellow came along who had a little bigger brain and he was able to figure out where the food and the girls would be before the others. We are an accident of nature. The crude result of the joke that is at the heart of Darwinism.”

         “And you are satisfied with that explanation?”

         “No. I’m not. But then I’m just rationalizing the situation as well. Does it matter that I’m happy with it? I just have to get along with it the way it is.”

         “And if you are right, what’s the harm then in going your own way? You have the brain to rationalize the effort. Why not make it?”

         “You wouldn’t breed. You won’t eat.”

         “Maybe. Maybe not. But the living may be better.”

         Peter stopped walking a moment, and then started again.

         “That may be right.”

         “Three years! You have never said I was right!”

         “Don’t let it go to your head. The last time that happened, I had to marry her.”

         One additional note on all that, which I, at least, find amusing—like a joke overheard on the steps to the gallows. My publisher for Ehrlichman in New York was soon after out of business, absorbed by another, and the undistributed portion of the print runs either pulped or remaindered. I don’t think they made back their advance. Thankfully they didn’t ask for it back. I’d spent it. But of the twelve or thirteen publishers who have handled my work through the years, that was the briefest association of all. Before the title had even appeared, the editor who had taken the project over from the one who had been fired in the takeover said to me point blank in his office, “Who the hell okayed this? Nobody knows who the hell John Fuckin’ Ehrlichman is. That’s history. We don’t fuckin’ publish history.” As it happened, that editor was a former lawyer himself and a graduate of Stanford Law School, where I assume they don’t teach the finer arts of the spoken tongue.

***

27. Solipsism and the banality of good housekeeping

Just one other crime I committed more than once in those moments of misspent youth was my failed attempt to reach some level of nirvana by the use of smoke and mirrors. Marijuana was far more common at college than it had been in South Boston, and pretty much a ubiquitous requirement at any party I attended in New York later on. But the fact that I never actually used any hard drugs was not for lack of wanting. I was curious. But it was a matter of budget.

         A ‘nickel bag’ of grass was the equivalent of two really good dinners. Given my gourmand tastes, that was an easy mark. And costly enough. And the once when I had managed to be in the vicinity of a quantity of cocaine which had been put out for all present to use, I had spoiled the event by saying something stupid to Daneen, who promptly wanted to leave and I had to trail after her to see that she got home safely.

         Now, considering this at a safe distance, I can say that it is more likely that Daneen did not want to play with that fire and chose one of my not infrequent graceless remarks as a means of escape. She was already more mature than I, and a better judge of circumstances. For my part, I was anxious for a new experience that might be a useful touch of color to one story or another.   

         Nevertheless, I wrote several pieces in The Gist, over the three years I was there, which were more advocacy than news. And while on this subject I should note, though I have publicly supported a few politicians who do support drug laws, primarily because they in turn support or oppose other measures of even greater importance to me, I have never advocated laws against drugs, even the most harmful of them. This is not hypocrisy, as has been charged against me, if that word still has a worthy meaning. There is no need for a law against a thousand other household chemicals, because they will kill you (bleach? ammonia? How about alcohol?) as hard drugs will do. Or destroy your brain and ruin what’s left of you. Just as jumping from high places can do. More people drown in water, but there is no urgency to ban it. And certainly alcohol was and is the death and ruin of more of the citizenry than all the other liquid, powdered, or inhalant drugs combined. And the prohibition of that beverage was a fiasco worthy of a thousand operas, of the ‘soap’ variety and otherwise.

         It was already my belief at the time, as it is now, in keeping with the best of classical economics, that the primary purpose of drug laws is not to protect the youth in any case, but to establish a scarcity, which magnifies value for the commodity, so that it will produce greater revenue to the criminal, limit competition, and open a source of political funding in one stroke. An A-K 47 is not a cheap device. Like hemp, cocaine grows freely over large portions of the earth. If it costs about the same as the clippings in your compost pile, there would be little profit or incentive in selling it. Simple enough. Even Marx understood scarcity. Ipso facto. Much of government only serves the purpose of creating a need for more government, not protecting its citizens.

         I wrote about this in an article for The Gist in 1968. It was well received by the readership, and got picked up elsewhere. Now, of course, after so many years of drug prohibition ripping nations apart (Mexico, Afghanistan, Colombia) killing millions (of people, not numbers), destroying more millions of lives in inner cities as well as suburbs, while  eviscerating rural youth, I am being told that my position is outdated.

         One small personal irony I should mention here is that my brother Eddy, the health nut, got himself arrested about that time for smoking pot on Carson Beach one night while celebrating his release from the Service. At least the magistrate had been lenient, giving him a five hundred dollar fine, probation, and the record cleared if he stayed out of trouble for five years. I was not present for my father’s wrath, but Eddy paid up, and then left for Texas and a job promised to him there by a Navy buddy. It was probably the best move of his life.

         Soon after I began work at The Gist, I went through a period of wanting to be a real journalist. This was thankfully brief. This delusion had been part of the genesis of the first piece I wrote on the ‘War in America,’ as well as my essays on what was then known as the ‘War on Poverty,’ and ‘The War on Drugs,’ (war seemed to be in the air, everywhere) but the effort had been greatly fostered by reading a paperback copy of Alistair Cooke’s Vintage Mencken and the early essays by Tom Wolfe in Esquire and Rolling Stone. Mencken had already become a hero of mine, and the Wolfe pieces, like Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, gave me the false sense that there was more room for this sort of thing. But the problem I faced was simple logistics. No one actually wanted someone else to kick them in the butt for their stupidity. They wanted someone to kick the other guy. And ultimately, there weren’t any other guys. All the wars, and all the death and misery had been reduced to mere politics. With Vietnam and then Watergate, American journalism had become a one-note samba, and there was no ‘news’ in that as far as I was concerned. Follow the money. If you want to know why the largest and most powerful military on the face of the earth might go to war against a desert country the size of one of our a smaller western states, follow the oil pipeline.

         It says enough, I think, that the Mencken Chair at the Columbia School of Journalism was never funded, but I will say more here now, if only for a bit of home therapy.

         I have met many politicians through the years, some good (in the sense that they were at least not bad), but most of them bad, and never one of them that I wanted to have reign over my life, or that had a better idea of how I should be spending my income, or even trust with a pizza order, much less to tell me what to write. The math of assuming that a gathering of such human beings could better determine right from wrong than any single one of them, troubled me. It assumes, in essence, that the mob should rule. But this was the very basis of democracy, was it not? And if we accept the idea that such a gathering should be invested with the power to determine the course of our lives, should we then object when they choose to kill us to achieve some national goal? Socrates was willing to accept this fate, but I was not—and am not so disposed, even now. Should we have protested if our politicians agree to use our taxes to build battleships to send to the Tonkin Gulf and blow holes in the lives of a people we did not know and who did not know us? Should we condemn them for simply doing what they have been elected to do if the national mind was on some abhorrent manifest destiny?

         But the newspapers have never been better than their readers. The newspapers loudly supported Jefferson’s taking of the Louisiana Purchase, divided on the War of 1812, but supported Jackson’s removal of the Cherokee Nation from their home in the Carolinas. Journalists rallied to the war with Mexico, and for the most part thought slavery was an acceptable social flaw before the Civil War, but then lost heart in the middle of that conflict (as they always do), and later ballyhooed the genocide and internment of the Native Americans in reservations, as the way of the progress they envisioned. They even thought it was a great idea to take possession of the sovereign Kingdom of Hawaii rather than protect it as those people had hoped, and to make the Philippines, half a world away, a possession. Then they took sides in World War One without compunction as to what was right or wrong and made up excuses for our not cleaning up the mess that we had made, afterward. Most newspapers pretended that there was no problem with the usurpation of federal power during the 1930’s, and rallied blatantly behind their new leader, even to putting the symbol of National Recovery Administration (the original NRA) on the covers of popular magazines. But they turned on a dime and opposed the oppression and slaughter of Hitler as if it had sprung from some new impulse and not the very same inspirations of authority they had supported here.

         Most of the ‘journalism’ in our past has appeared, as it does today, to be concerned primarily with politics, as if politics was a virtuous pursuit, even while history continues to be piled upon itself, body upon body, as seen in the films of every death camp, and deliberately ignores consequences lest it teach us something else again. When I realized that being a journalist would require me to eat and sleep with such common criminals, plagiarists, and hypocrites (as guilty as the getaway driver to a bank robbery), or to report on their words as if they were worth repeating, or on their actions as if they deserved anything more than immediate arrest for larceny and fraud and complicity to murder, I dropped the idea.

         I did not stop writing my essays. Those were often a laboratory for the stories I wanted to tell. But I did stop pretending these articles were ‘journalism’ and looked further back to the essays of the Spectator and the work of Addison and Steele for self-confirmation. Worse, I became something of a fan boy for Edmund Burke and I see quotes from him in several of the things I wrote at the time.

         But there was a limit to this that I quickly met with. I could write all I wanted about the stupidity of invading a country half a world away, as Edmund Burke had once done about sending British troops to the Colonies, even if in this case to keep them from becoming communist outposts. (And even though the original predicate was that communism didn’t work anyway, thus begging the question, so why bother?) The Vietnamese would soon enough find out the pleasures of the absolute socialist state on their own, I proposed, without killing off or maiming every brave American lad who tried to do his duty for his own country, but to criticize the ‘War on Poverty,’ which was then already creating a permanent and festering underclass dependent on welfare, even as the integrity of black families was undermined by a globulous federal tit, and the while giving the government more power over the lives of every citizen in the process, was not acceptable to the same recalcitrant editorial minds. Nor was my unhappiness with the dependency of certain black ‘leaders’ upon drug money and drug culture. Worse still, when I wrote an indictment of what ‘whores and pimps’ some Civil Rights leaders had become (with apologies to the hookers but not the hustlers) following the death of Martin Luther King, and noting that their subsequent scramble was not to affirm the ideals of that man but to replace him so they might become the key dispensers of government largess and thereby institutionalize their willfully ghettoed constituencies, I was immediately accused of racism by another member of our own staff and Paul withdrew the piece before it appeared. (I sent that article elsewhere.)

         I note now that the very last issue of The Gist was only twenty-four pages long—not only because of the financial matters that already doomed us, but at least in part because of yet another feature I had written which had been pulled at the last minute.

         That essay, on the increased government power inherent in laws passed ostensibly for the public welfare but which instead fueled a burgeoning and bloated bureaucracy that used up far more money in feeding itself than it did on the poor it was meant to help, was entitled ‘Screwing Ourselves to Death.’ It picked up directly from themes set out by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his book on The Negro Family, which I had just finished reading in some awkward attempt to understand my frequent evening visitor, Trudy. (Awkward because almost nothing in her life seemed to mesh with the sociology of the black families that Mr. Moynihan was describing. I did not yet comprehend just how fast that world was changing).

         In an attempt to help Paul, the piece was written over one weekend after discovering that The Gist had lost two previously scheduled features because we still owed them for previous efforts. My essay later appeared in the Times Sunday Magazine. Having been created almost entirely out of facts offered in the New York Times World Almanac, I sent it to them shortly after Paul had rejected it, with the footnoting attached, and I suppose this might have been their reason for accepting it. However, they haven’t published another article by me since, despite dozens of submissions.

         Another result of all that was tied to the fact that soon after the appearance of ‘Screwing Ourselves to Death’, a self-described ‘journalist’ at the Times took it upon himself to attack my thesis, and they ran that screw as follow-up. Up to that moment I had always written such pieces out of a commonsense outrage when confronted with the abject stupidity of one specific government maneuver or another. Now I was being called to task for my premise, for it appeared I was criticizing the very ‘foundations of democracy,’ that we were our brother’s keepers, and thus, in their eyes, the good intentions of people so obviously better than myself.

         In response I decided to do some self-education at the New York Public Library. This then produced the article ‘Between the Lions,’ which ran in The City Journal. To a much smaller audience, I noted there Joseph Pulitzer’s lost keystone to modern journalism: “It is the idea of work for the community, not commerce, not for one’s self, but primarily for the public, that needs to be taught. The School of Journalism is to be, in my conception, not only not commercial, but anticommercial.” I parsed that statement easily enough, every part of it being equivocal and ladened with ulterior motive. What community? Was not journalism engaged inextricably in commerce? If a matter was not of self-interest, what would be the cause to write about it? How was the interest of some other party determined? What ‘public’ is served? Who does the teaching and for what purpose? And most critically, ‘anticommercial’? Does not your newspaper accept advertising? Are your journalists not paid via that same revenue stream to serve the interests of your publication?

         The indictment was ignored. It certainly changed nothing. More importantly, for someone who had only recently become addicted to seeing his words in ink, I saw that the source of intoxication (ink having become my own drug of choice) was suddenly endangered as rejections increased.

         I always had a hankering for breaking the law. To be a bad boy, as Trudy had surmised. Means, motive and opportunity are the keys. I only had two of the three. Nevertheless, I often did so, but alas, only in the fiction that I wrote. Somehow I always seemed to miss out on actual opportunities. In keeping with the themes of rejection, my favorite of those schemes of mayhem did not occur until years later, in the second of the Billington stories, Billington Again. This novel has only been read by a dozen agents and three publishers, but it is my favorite of the three. In it, I commit murder. In print, I often engaged in illegal and illicit activities, broke the law willfully, and sought justice on my own terms. But that novel was the only occasion of murder that was not in self-defense, but an ideological execution, and I was left unpunished.

         The mystery at the center of the story concerned both treason and murder, but I played that out in parallel subplots as I have often enjoyed doing, each reflecting the other. When John Billington dispatches the slave owner Macauber using the man’s own weapon, it was not a subtle restatement of the immortal words written by David Mamet for Sean Connery in the film The Untouchables, “They pull a knife, you pull a gun.” I had done my best to make Henry Macauber a sort of bad Thomas Jefferson, a very bright opportunist who will compromise any ideal to gain advantage. And the idea of killing such an evil twin was delightful.

         As much fun as that conceit was, however, the true philosophy of the book is in a simpler exchange between John and the key character of the slave girl when they first meet.

         “Are you the girl who calls herself Etta?”

         “Yes.”

         “Etta is not all of a name. What is the rest?”

         “That all there be now.”

         “Why?”

         Despite her age and size, there was no fear. Where had she lost her natural fear?

         “I called Henrietta aft’ my father.”

         “Henrietta is a very pretty name.”

         “It be his name. I don’t wan his name. I be Etta.”

         A nine-year-old was simply rejecting the premise that she must automatically be part of the system.

         Later, after dark, her mother appears. She wants her daughter to learn to read and write. John has often served as a scrivener and reader of documents for others in the neighborhood where he lives on the backside of Beacon Hill. John agrees to the project. But only if the mother, Abby, will come and learn as well. John is already smitten with Abby and can find no way to tell her without first teaching her his own language.

         Etta’s father was Henry Macauber, a scoundrel John knows too well for not paying his bills for books purchased at the shop. It is known that Macauber had previously escaped legal procedures for bankruptcy in Virginia. Through much of the story this villain is gone, having fled to England with the British evacuation of Boston in 1775. Etta and Abby, have been left behind.

         Abby, fearful then that Macauber may have sold her from afar, in England, to pay his bills, is living in the underworld of a Boston already broken by the abuse of British occupation and with a civil government in tatters. Abby had been a folk-nurse and midwife in Virginia, but more recently reduced to house slave and mistress. Now she earns her living any way she can. John, his own life in ruins from the occupation, cannot help her to survive, but begins teaching them both to read and write as a better occupation than self-pity.  He gets her books on the subject of medicine and midwifery so she can study, giving her another purpose in learning to read. In return she begins the task of bringing order back to John’s own life, which has been previously shattered by the loss of his true love and his best friend, and now by the ongoing accusations of treason which have greatly reduced his business. It is Etta who comes to the bookshop each day to help him with the ‘keeping’ in return for her lessons, and becomes his surrogate daughter.

         Etta’s father had given her a letter of manumission when he left. This was done at the pleading of her mother, for the very reason that Etta was his blood child. Abby had been ‘good’ to Macauber, and given the manumission in return, but the letter was not witnessed. This omission was intentional on Macauber’s part; purposely done so that it would not be legal and binding. John understands this immediately when he sees the document. He knows that the war will one day be over and this omission will be taken advantage of by the unscrupulous Macauber. John signs the letter himself as if he had witnessed it in the first place, and then forges a duplicate for the mother so that they will be free in the meantime.

         After the Treaty of Paris, as John continues to seek the individual who had spread the lies of treason which have caused him so much grief, Henry Macauber returns to claim his property. John protects the mother and daughter, and goes to court in their defense. John’s own legal status being in question, the fight is doubled. Fortunately, the anti-British sentiment that lingers allows John to win the case. For his trouble, Macauber vows to kill John. John tells him to go back to England. After Macauber shows up again one night to fulfill his threat, and John disarms him, the fact is clear that the hounding will continue and that there is no alternative. John kills Macauber to end the matter in instead.

         Fiction can be so much more satisfactory than fact.

***

28. My Desperado Love and the FBI

         And one more thing. Or two. Before I move on.

         The resident FBI agent at The Gist was Donald Wakes. He is undoubtedly retired today and living on his pension in Florida, probably within shouting distance of some number of those same people he once spied upon and betrayed so willingly and happily to his government. Well-pensioned now for a job well done (by such standards), he probably even drives a Jeep Grand Cherokee. That is the car of choice among those who pretend they drive a Jeep, isn’t it? He probably owns a dog. A small dog. A terrier, perhaps. And has a backyard pool big enough to cool off in but insufficient to swim laps. (Thus he has a paunch and a small problem with ‘type 2’ diabetes.) He must wear Hawaiian shirts and baggy shorts and open-toed leather sandals when he goes to the Safeway to buy his groceries. He has a large flat-screen TV and the full cable package. He needs the full package because he is living alone again for the second time. Maybe the third. But he is definitely divorced again and needs the vicarious entertainment of the adult channels.

         As I remember from my encounters with her forty years ago at the office parties, his wife of the time was as willing at betrayal as he was. By the end, everyone in the office knew he was a spy. But at first, his true occupation in our midst was guessed only to me. And that was an accident.

         I wrote three novels while working at The Gist. The last was The Stolon, which was the first work published. I have told you about that. The second was Desperado Lover. I should explain that debacle as well, but I see that I have never spoken of the first attempt while I was there: Triad. I was given to liking such short names for my efforts at the beginning. I suppose it was the fashion in the 1960’s. Either that, or the title was something so wordy it had to be clumsily reduced to a single word or two when asked for at the bookshop counter.

         Triad was my one attempt to write an outright thriller. I had yet to come to terms with my inadequacies as an author and thought the formula seemed to be easy enough. After reading all of the Ian Fleming books, consuming a dozen Donald Hamilton novellas over lunch, and greatly enjoying Le Carre, there didn’t seem to be much to it. And the demand at that moment appeared to be fierce. All that was needed was a Soviet spy and a lady in distress, or undress, or both.

         As you could expect, given my contradictory and lapsed-Catholic belief in ‘write about what you know,’ I set my own tale in the offices of a ‘weekly news magazine.’ A very smart choice, if I do say so myself.  The plot was this: a big story was about to be broken at the magazine which involved government corruption and the murder of a reporter as well as the bumbling efforts of a newbie FBI agent on his first lone undercover assignment. The agent, Mack Hughes, has infiltrated the ranks of the magazine staff to find the killer. There is ample sex, more than sufficient blood, and a foot chase through and across several Manhattan skyscrapers.

         Because at the time I couldn’t even load a gun much less fire it accurately, having previously done most of my shooting at the Topsfield Fair, I suspected that, like E. B. White, “I would feel mighty awkward discharging a gun that was not fastened to a counter by a small chain,” so I took lessons at the West Side Rifle and Pistol Range on 20th Street.

         And like any proud and enthusiastic young author, I could not resist talking about my project. Mostly these were asides, made at awkward moments at the coffee machine, which went by without apparent interest.  

         “How ya doin’?”

         “Great. Wrote a whole chapter last night.”

         “Great. You see The Graduate yet? Hoffman’s a laugh, heh?”

         “No. I’ve been busy writing a novel”

         “Great. Looks like it’s going to rain. Should have brought an umbrella.”

         Everyone at The Gist was, after all, a writer in their own mind. Don Wakes was the exception.

         When I mention the initials ‘F.B.I.’ over my coffee and donut one morning, Donald immediately came to attention and wanted to know more. Before long, I had managed to relate almost every word I had written, even to revealing who the villain was.

         The joke in this is that Donald Wakes was, before his outing as an FBI agent, the office fool. Not intentionally, of course. Just by dint of his constant attempts at rabble rousing over every new government stupidity, or overreach by ‘The Pigs.’ He often called for rebellion and revolution against one edict, transgression or another (“I don’t think we should be paying income tax if it’s going to fund the war”) and made regular use of slogans that sounded even worse than they looked on some placard at a rally (“Make babies not bodies”).

         He was a Harvard graduate, slightly older that most of the staff, and a maven for correct usage. Where he had learned his Strunk & White, I am not sure, but this made him very useful as a copyeditor for minimalist text. He was a speed-reader as well, another proud graduate of an Evelyn Wood course, and only bettered in this regard by Paul Winger himself. Don could pull out enough material from a morning’s worth of news releases to easily patch together a news story on demand—if told what subject to look for. That was the key, of course. He could not actually think for himself, but he took direction wonderfully.

         He was always jacketless, but dressed in a clean white shirt and tie that was perpetually pulled loose at his open collar from morning till night. I assume this was to strike the appearance of being hard at work. In 1967, at the age of 28, he was balding. His scalp shone through the thinning hair in painful gleams that caught the eye from any part of that large and cluttered room, making him easy to find.

         For a time it was assumed he was gay because of the interest he took in Mr. Ritts and other male members of the staff. But then he began the deliberate seduction of Joyce Moore, one of the ‘gossip crew,’ responsible for the human-interest stories we used as a way of breaking the monotonous drumbeat of war and dissent which would otherwise fill the pages week after week. After a month or two, given her own penchant for being ‘open’ about the ‘natural human desires’ and a predilection for talking about her personal life, Joyce was happy to relate to anyone interested that, though he was awkward and rather old fashioned, his passions were rather heterosexual.

         However, it was Joyce, a rather progressive minded young woman from Greenwich, Connecticut, who first reported several of Donald’s real oddities. He apparently had no particular background before his days at Harvard . . . And he carried a gun. She had seen this when he took his clothes off in a hurry one evening.

         In that I had just learned a little about guns, and thus thought myself an instant authority on the subject, I noted this new interest in a conversation with Donald. Donald was more curious about my extrapolations concerning an FBI agent who worked for a weekly news magazine. My imaginings might have sounded like sheer paranoid fantasy, but the collisions in our objectives were inevitable.

         So I stayed late one night to talk with Paul.

         “What’s up?”

         This was Paul’s usual way of saying, ‘Get to the point quickly, I’m busy.’

         I said, “I think we have a spy in our midst.”

         Paul said, “What kind of spy?”

         “FBI.”

         His head dropped in a swoon of exasperation. “Angus, for Christ sake, I know you’re writing something like that, but don’t go off the deep end. Don’t get neurotic. Why in the hell would any spy be interested in what we do here? It’s all public information.”

         “I don’t know. I don’t know why.”

         “Who is it?”

         “Donald Wakes.”

         “Donald! Donald can’t tie his shoes without hitting his head on the edge of a desk. If Donald is an FBI agent, this country really is in deep shit.”

         “Well, as I think you’ve already noticed, we are in really deep shit.”

         “Christ!”

         Paul asked me to keep my mouth shut while he started keeping an eye on Donald for himself and not two weeks later he confirmed my suspicions. Evidently, someone had been in Mr. Ritts’ office in the middle of the night looking at the books and put them back incorrectly. Mr. Ritts noticed that right away. He was very precise. (Oddly, it was Donald’s constant complaint at the coffeemaker that we were all a bunch of slobs and didn’t put back anything where we had found it—but he was referring then to staplers and pens.) In addition several pieces of correspondence with regular French, German and Soviet contacts had been taken out of their files in Paul office.

         It was Paul’s idea that we keep quiet about our discovery. If we knew who the traitor in our midst was, we could better control the situation. In retrospect, I think this was another wise move on Paul’s part. However, I made the bad suggestion (having read far too many cloak and dagger mysteries) that we could feed this traitor false information which might ruin his standing with his superiors. Bless his heart, (a favorite expression of the woman I was dating at the time), Paul liked the idea instantly and put the effort into my hands.

         I wrote half a dozen letters on various machines in other offices, on a selection of blank sheets collected from our own old files, and ostensibly by foreign contacts, which detailed various nasty deeds. I kept no copies of any of these so I cannot now recall many of the details, but one, supposedly by a West German who simply called himself ‘Achim’, and who spoke of information received concerning the number of American combat-ready troops at German bases. The info was taken directly from recent Congressional testimony, but I backdated the letter. Donald was either not very good at his pilfering in the files, or he was simply not enticed by my other McGuffins, but he did find the missive from ‘Achim.’

         Within a week Donald was requesting an assignment from Paul to use his knowledge of German and wanting to know if we had any contacts there that he might be able to use or develop for fresh stories. I immediately started working on a more elaborate deception. But it came to naught. Timing being everything.

         Unfortunately we were all quite surprised one day when we learned that Donald was married. This was rather sudden. She simply showed up at the elevator door and asked for ‘Mr. Wakes.’

         Donna Timms, a copy editor, asked her who was inquiring.

Jean Wakes said, “His wife.”

         It appeared as if she had tracked him down.

         I could only guess at the arrangement of this marriage. The guess on the part of Joyce Moore was a bit more explicit. She had been bold enough to ask outright. They had a house in Scarsdale. They had two kids. And Jean Wakes was bored.

         This being shortly before Christmas, Jean suddenly started showing up at every gathering, at the office or elsewhere, and I was certain she would quickly learn about her husband’s infidelity with Joyce. She would have had to be deaf not to be aware of it.

         And within a couple of weeks, I believe after discovering these peccadillos, Jean proceeded to show more than one male member of the staff, just how such assignations should be conducted.

         I did not partake of this largesse. I felt bad for the kids. And I was pursuing other interests. But I must say this now, with perhaps some little regret. She was a very good looking woman.

         What was quite clear to me even then was that the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the K.G.B, the N.S.A. and S.M.I.R.S.H. were all of a kind. Undoubtedly some earnest people did their jobs in those organizations for the most idealistic reasons, but as a whole they were incompetent at the tasks they were assigned, capable of being thwarted by a single Scottish actor in a toupee, unaware of the moral underpinnings to their endeavors, and unable to function in a free society without doing very bad things to preserve themselves.

         Donald quit his job just after New Year’s and we never saw him, or Jean, again. And it was only afterward, when a year-end tax statement was mailed to his Scarsdale address and then returned, stamped ‘addressee unknown,” that the thought occurred to Mr. Ritts that Jean had been a spy as well, and that their ‘marriage’ was mere additional subterfuge and a means of more quickly discerning any real value to the assignment. Obviously there was not.

         Naturally I then further regretted my abstinence per Jean. Though I have read many of the Ian Fleming books while in bed, to my knowledge, I have never slept with a spy.

         In 1968, overcome by one of those inspirations that have so often taken me by storm, I started the novel Desperado Lover. The hubris of the effort astonishes me even now.

         At the time, western fiction had not fallen into such disfavor among the intelligentsia and my overarching plan was to write something in every genre simply to see if I could do it. Perhaps my outrage at a piece of highly touted violence porn like The Wild Bunch had set me off.  I don’t know. The specific idea had been spawned by reading The Life of John Wesley Hardin As Written by Himself, a copy of which I had found at the Strand Bookstore in 1967 while I was there looking for a book so that I could write a better review of the movie Bonnie and Clyde for a similar reasoning. As good as the film-making was in the later case, the supposed relationship between Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow seemed to me perverse and antithetical to the nature of love (again, I remind you that I was young then, more in mind than body, and had no idea). Capote had already stormed our collective consciousness with In Cold Blood, and I suppose there was some remnant motivation caused by that as well. Murder was such a surreal act, I thought it could only be aberrant if not done out of some idealism, wrongheaded or not.

         Reading the words of a cold-blooded killer like the gunfighter John Wesley Hardin struck me as a possible means of understanding the thing. Instead, I became more fascinated by Hardin himself. A murderer at the age of fifteen, he reserved little sentiment for his acts, even to admittedly shooting a sleeping man for snoring too loudly and causing the death of a Mexican man by shooting at him for sport, killing several others apparently for being black, as well as cowboys, circus roughnecks, and some unfortunate passersby for merely crossing his path, not to mention the many soldiers or lawmen attempting his capture. Over forty dead in all. And in addition he was a confessed horse-thief, cattle rustler, highwayman, sore gambler, womanizer, liar and apparent alcoholic. In all, a psychopath, before the term was invented.

         But a few other facts struck me as well. For many, Hardin had been a good enough friend that associates were willing to risk their lives to harbor him. I wondered, was this man’s history just another case of reportage done by his enemies?

While in the prison at Huntsville for a twenty-five year sentence levied on just one of his crimes, he had studied law (later passing the Texas bar exam), had written a very readable account of his life. And one more item. While in that prison, as it turned out, for only seventeen years before being pardoned for ill health partly a result of his many wounds, Hardin had continuously written love letters to his wife, Jane Bowen, and she in turn had promised to wait for him.       

         But shortly before his release, she had died.

         It seemed to me that there was more in the way of real human contradiction in the tale of John and Jane than in what was known about Clyde and Bonnie, or in those cold blooded killers Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, but I had a few problems to overcome with my story. A significant one was that I had never been to Texas.

That year, during my two-week vacation in August, and in the face of a heat wave which finally made real to me the often encountered phrase ‘oven-like,’ I took a bus to Fort Worth.

         This journey was for the most part futile. I had not written the letters in advance of the trip which might have opened a few necessary doors to me. I supposed, I think, that I could simply march in on any public office and ask to see the records … I can’t remember now, but I didn’t bother to make note of any such madness. But the courthouse records in several of the counties where Hardin had operated were closed for the month while the clerks were on their own vacations. The ‘Press’ card I carried from The Gist had apparently shut tight several other doors in that more conservative climate, instead of opening them. My attempt to interview that fine author, historian and newspaperman Elmer Kelton, whom I thought might offer a few tips following a generous response to a letter I had sent to him at the last moment, was frustrated by his own schedule. The Hertz rent-a-car company would not ‘put me in the driver’s seat,’ because I did not yet have a credit card. There were few buses operating between smaller towns like Childress, Clovis, Crockett, or Cisco and the larger cities where Hardin operated.

         Deflated, I remember the bus ride home as a prolonged lesson to me. I had not done my homework. I had not prepared well enough. I had chosen a topic that was beyond my abilities and knowledge. I should have first turned my effort to something closer to home.

         But then, somewhere between Louisville Kentucky and the Port Authority building in New York City, the first words of The Stolon had materialized in my brain.

         It was several years later that the band, The Eagles, had released an album with a song on it that disinterred all of my original enthusiasm. Desperado struck every right note in my head. In addition, I had by then the experience of those several days with Roger Terrill in Austin, Texas, in 1973, and the brawl there and being in jail for two days, and my own witnessing of Roger’s relationship with Patricia Evers, which, though it was not perverse, offered more contrast than I had ever been forced into understanding concerning matters of the heart prior to that. It took me less than six weeks to rewrite the manuscript of Desperado Love: a pistol airy, from start to finish, in the way I wanted it. The fact that the narrative was told in the form of letters made this easier, I think. Once I had Hardin’s voice in my head, the occasions of incidental love that might happen between a man and a woman occurred to me almost effortlessly. And this was helped further perhaps by my own state of mind at the time. Helen Morris was driving me nuts. Jane Bowen’s shorter letters to the outlaw Hardin in return were all heard in my brain then, as if spoken in the tones of a girl from Mississippi, as Helen was.

***

29. The case of the missing fore-skin

         So what would any red-blooded youth do who was all but broke and had no connections to speak of, but wanted to continue making his mark? (Please note: this fantasy easily overcame whatever better judgment I might have then possessed and became manifest in my notes even before I had actually received the advance from Gerard Strauss for The Stolon.)

         There was no internet. Pages were still paper. Ink still stained the fingers of reports. Newstands still disfigured the corners of neat city blocks.

         I decided to start a magazine of my own.

         Technically, The Fore-edge was not all mine, but that was the way I felt about it. No one from The Gist wanted to join me in my folly, so I placed a classified ad in the Village Voice. ‘Wanted: writers who have the time to help others get published. A new literary magazine devoted to the story as narrative needs a staff.’ 

         “Very wordy,” I was told by a young woman named Stevy at the counter in the Village Voice classifieds office. But over a hundred people, mostly of my own age, showed up at Dante’s Pizza at the appointed hour the following Friday. Stevy among them. I took their resumes while sitting at a corner table as Charles Ferraro took orders for pizza on the phone as well as orders from the hungry applicants. Dante’s was a smaller place then, maybe twelve feet wide and obstructed at either side by small tables and chairs and about twenty feet deep before you ran into the high counter. By 8 pm, the line was out the door.

         Charlie was someone else who owned a piece of The Fore-edge from day one. He was a poet. He was that, but also a good hand with the thick-crusted ‘Sicilian’ pie that was his specialty. We always ate well during the dozen years we survived on Mulberry Street. And it was he who wisely first insisted that I include poetry in the mix of the magazine. I did not write poetry then and hadn’t thought of it.

         But I’d began eating there on a regular basis after the doors at The Gist had been chained, only because I had taken a temporary job unloading trucks into a warehouse nearby in an effort to keep my rent paid (with my advance on the novel held aside for my project) and an easy fall-back to my roots. Most of Charlie’s business was take-out, with the orders phoned in, and foot traffic was slow by mid-afternoon when the trucks were emptied. I used to combine my lunch with dinner by ordering a whole pie and later heading home with half of it.

         On one of those days Charlie leaned out over the counter and wanted to know what it was I was writing in my notebooks all time. He could spot another scrivener. We chatted. I bragged that I had a novel coming out. And soon enough, I’d told him all about my idea for a literary magazine. He literally climbed over the counter to look at my notes. Two minutes later he was showing me pages of his poems.

         He was thinner then. Not thin. He liked his own product too much. But before the place was a real success and he could afford the extra help, he worked a twelve hour day from 10 am to 10 pm., and burned most of it off.

         I relented to the idea of including poetry only when he promised not to submit his own work—not because I didn’t like his poems. They were fine. But because I saw the incestuousness of self-publishing as the key flaw in almost every other literary magazine I read. Still, this was a promise (as our man Hamlet made) “More honour’d in the breach than the observance.” Charlie would put another name on a new batch of verse and send them in almost monthly. He was one of the poetry editors, along with Helen Morris for most of those years, but at least he passed the work we used beneath the noses of several others on the crew and got one or two ‘yes’ votes before accepting them.

         And I got to play editor-in-chief. Though I was also in charge of typesetting, paste-up and writing any copy that was needed to fill in. We had five official editors, in fact (all chiefs and no ‘injuns’ was the appropriate expression), all of whom had other jobs that left them less than twenty hours a week for the effort. 

         The money, and our only money at the start, was my five-thousand-dollar advance from Gerard Strauss for The Stolon. Even allowing for inflation, things were a whole lot cheaper in those days.

         Eventually, over the next twelve years, some two hundred different hands were responsible for the magazine’s production. The first twenty of those individuals were winnowed from the early applicants, that one night in June 1970. Every single person that applied, if they already had a full-time job, I accepted. The rest I passed on. Even the good looking ones. My rule was, if they already had a job and were willing to take on more, they had the kind of attitude I wanted. That was one of my better ideas, but I can’t lay claim to it entirely. I think I found the advice in a book someplace.

         A key factor at The Fore-edge, just as it had been with The Gist, was the IBM Compositor. I had grown friendly and familiar with the repairmen and representatives from IBM who frequented The Gist office. The machines were balky. There were too many moving parts not to have something breaking down almost daily. I called up one of these fellows, Derek Mann, the most affable of the lot (and a true aficionado of corned beef and pastrami) almost as soon as I got this new brainstorm. I told him that all I could really afford was the service contract. What I wanted was for IBM to donate the machine itself to ‘the service of the arts,’ another phrase I had encountered elsewhere. (Already I knew that older machines were commonly scavenged for parts because new models were being introduced regularly.) He laughed for a minute or two. But eventually, a machine was returned which was ugly but repairable and he had it delivered to us as a ‘demo.’ That demo lasted the first two years, until a better model had become outdated and was ‘donated’ to replace it.

         Just as great ideas, like the electric light bulb, are not unexpectedly discovered, but created out of an ether of need and vision as much as the odor of Mr. Edison’s oft mentioned sweat, and thus exhaled by more than one inventor at the same time, there were several others with sufficient hubris and insufficient animal caution or intelligence, attempting to conquer the literary darkness at that once. In brief, The Fore-edge was not the only new literary magazine of that moment. As I say, and it’s typically the way, the idea was in the air. A primary difference in our case (as I believed to be important then as well as now) was my insistence that we would not be funded by tax money confiscated by some State Council of the Arts from citizens who could not give a damn if we even existed. We would produce something worthy of notice, and gain a circulation and subscriber list by offering work above the ordinary, or fail on the merits.

         Whether this goal was achieved in any part is really for others to judge (as some critics did at the time, both in our initial success and eventual failure), but in my own opinion we always fell far short of the marks I had hoped for.

         I should say that it was not my initial genius to publish in a tabloid format. That came from George Bent. A Chemical Science major at NYU, he always had the brain for figures. While I was dreaming of four-color covers and slick stock for the interiors, he added up the numbers and told me what we could actually afford. An initial fantasy on my part of finding some remainder of rag stock that we could procure for the right price was knocked down by the simple fact that such paper would not be suitable for the sort of newsprint web press we needed use. A tabloid sheet on reasonably good and fairly white 35-pound stock would have to do. We must settle for two-color covers and center fold, or else we would run through my meager five-thousand dollars in one issue. What we really needed was to get at least five issues out in order to know if the sales would sustain a sixth.

         At the time, George was not yet writing science fiction. His dream then was to be a ‘serious author.’ Though I have not spoken with him for years, I believe he takes his science fiction very seriously today. It appears now, in fact, he might be the only one from the old crew who continues making a regular living out of the pen. And given the consistent quality of his work, that makes sense to me.

         Ragtag was not a game we played, but an apt descriptive of our crew. Whereas the staff of The Gist had been primarily the offspring of families who had been insured of their well-being with trust funds, the staff of The Fore-edge lived, for the most part, hand-to-mouth. Had that not been the case, we could not have afforded them. As it was, we seldom issued any kind of paycheck. There was no money for such niceties as workman’s comp or a bookkeeper handy to calculate withholding. Instead, we paid ourselves, if at all, as writers, each for the work we produced, on a per word basis—just as if what we were writing came in over the transom along with the rest of the three and four and eventually as many as eight hundred submissions received each month. And even those meager payments were then divided only out of the actual sales receipts. Another conceit. Our per word rate depended wholly on our sales. Oddly, this idea, often mislabeled ‘profit-sharing,’ was one of the things most often cited in the news stories about the success of our efforts. Though we never did manage to make a profit.

         The manuscripts had begun to mysteriously arrive at the office on Mulberry Street within weeks of signing the lease for the second floor space across from Dante’s Pizza and only a few months after our first gathering. My suspicion was that other members of the staff had submitted some of their own material under pen names—just as I had. But once it was learned that we were a market for such material, the trickle quickly turned into a flood. Anything postmarked within fifty miles of the city continued to be held in high suspicion, but we had plenty to choose from. I had my own first offering mailed by my mother from Boston under the name of Fergus MacAleer—a favorite nom de plume of mine at the time when submitting more than one work to a single publication. (I only stopped that subterfuge after my second novel.) But it didn’t do any good. The first story I submitted to The Fore-edge was rejected, with the only reader giving it high marks being yours truly.

         From the start, anyone who wanted to read submissions could do it. The single requirement was to be able to write a short paragraph of criticism, which was then folded over and traveled with the manuscript through a minimum of two more readings. At a ceremony on Fridays, the week’s submissions were sorted. Anything which had received a positive review was passed on to a fourth reader, to be taken home over that weekend and returned on Monday. A fifth reader was then found on Monday if the fourth reader’s response was positive.

         All of this procedure was not an easy matter. It required ‘free’ time, and people other than myself as well as the few anti-social types who did not have larger lives. Within two months, most of the staff had dropped out of the reader’s pool, in any case, if not the whole process. After the first issue appeared, there were essentially just five of us. Necessarily, we quickly learned the need to discriminate based on first pages, just the way most publishers do. I attempted to spread the wisdom of Gerard Strauss by requiring readers to dip into later pages, but I could not make them do this in the case of the average manuscript, which was, in the immortal words of Perry Mason’s legal dogsbody, Hamilton Burger, “Incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial!”

         We pretty much kept that same number of readers for the next dozen years, with newcomers added more or less as others drifted away. Some of the older hands, such as myself, dropped out for short periods to take on other tasks (like the promotion of a new novel), and others left altogether as their lives changed, usually for the better. Reading the slush pile was a labor and not the fun any of us had first anticipated. 

         Three years had passed before I found out, during one late night paste-up party, that my original story had been rejected because everyone knew it was mine to begin with. Most of them had bothered to acquaint themselves with my previously published efforts when they applied to work. Who was this Irish guy from Boston who thought he had the chutzpah to publish a literary magazine? They had gotten a good laugh out of it, though—maugre my subterfuge of having it mailed from Boston. That had been a dead giveaway. I was the only one on the crew originally from Boston. They spotted my idiosyncrasies from the get go, not the least of which was my overuse of obscure words like maugre.

         The decision not to publish our own stuff, outside of specific writing assignments, was a good one, though—perhaps a key to what small success we enjoyed during our run.

         Distribution was another matter entirely. For one thing, this involved postal permits, which required me to spend hours sitting on benches at the main post office to get questions answered which I already knew would not be completely accurate. For this reason I assigned others to the task of double-checking every stipulation. The Gist had fallen afoul of postal regulations on several occasions, resulting in the near total loss of subscriber copies on at least one occasion. But subscribers were not our first concern. Shipping was.

         I had borrowed (essentially stolen) the dealer list for The Gist only days before the last issue. But this was with some help.

         One evening in December, I was already home on Carroll Street in Brooklyn when the pencil in my hand reached the line of calculations for how many copies of my new brainchild we would need to be circulated to be viable. I believe there was an electric shock from the wooden shaft of the pencil and it flew out of my hands. I had simply been using a figure based on the number of newsstands and bookshops that were then carrying The Gist. A priori. My obsession with the editorial needs had completely dominated my thinking—as if we could produce a magazine of such sterling quality from the get-go that the dealers would be beating at our doors from day one. I had not bothered to actually obtain the ‘Gist List’ as it was then known in the office, and I had never been involved with that aspect of that magazine’s production, so I had no idea how it was physically done, nor where exactly that list might be.

         The obsessive mind is a dangerous thing. Unchecked, it can lead to mass murder.

         There was sleet falling from a gray sky, pelting me for my stupidity. The urgency of the moment that I felt was stirred by a rumor which had gone round during the day about the possibility The Gist would be filing for bankruptcy at any time. I had a visceral knowledge of this based on the recent business failure of a bookshop in Brooklyn, which had been owned by a friend. I had helped him to haul away personal belongings in cardboard liquor boxes balanced in our arms even as the sheriff was fixing the chain on the front door.

         I was back on the BMT before midnight, headed to the office at Union Square. Crossing from the subway exit I could actually see a light in the office above on the third floor and I suddenly worried that my theft would be thwarted.

         I walked up the stairwell to the echoing bark of my own footsteps in an otherwise silent building and opened the door I had entered for the first time just three years before. Naturally, the door creaked, as I’d never heard it cry out previously, and echoed into the stairwell behind me as well as out and across that half-dark and silent room. Over the empty desks I could see the pool of light in Paul’s office and there two faces turned up at my entrance. One was Paul’s and the other was Mr. Ritts.

         I waved. I said, “I forgot something. Sorry to be disturbing anything.”

         Paul closed the book on the desk in front of him and just said, “We’re done, anyway.”

         I was not sure what he was referring to and was reluctant to ask. I went right to my own desk and started playing with the papers in a drawer as if there might be something I wanted in the mess. Mr. Ritts came by, carrying the book they had been looking at to his own office.

         He spoke to me from behind as he gathered things into his briefcase. “What are you writing now?”

         I was always writing something, so I just started in on the latest thing.

         “I took a couple chapters out of The Stolon that really didn’t matter to that and I’m using them for another novel. I thought I left them here.”

         “How are the sales?”

         “Okay, I think.”

         “I saw you on the street the other day with your pushcart. That was good.”

         “That was fun.”

         “What do you think you’ll do after we close-up?”

         I had not heard the verdict. “Is it that certain?”

         “Yes.”

         I really didn’t know for sure. “I don’t know what I’ll do yet.”

         “I heard you talking with a couple of the others about starting a literary magazine.”

         “It’s one idea. The best thing I’ve come up with.”

         His eyes went up to me in a deadpan face. “I’m sure the world needs another literary magazine . . . How are you going to distribute that?”

         “I don’t know”

         “You better figure that out first, I’d say. It took us a while to get the dealers we have . . . You know, you ought to take our list. I have it here,” he looked up at Paul who was still sitting at his desk and appearing to be very tired.

         Paul had heard us and waved. “Go ahead. No need for that to go to waste.”

         Mr. Ritts went back in his office and pulled out a thick folder.

         “I can’t sort this for you right now. Some of these folks have never paid. You’ll want to avoid them. But why don’t you just take it home with you and copy it all. You’re going to need it.”

         And I did.

         Thus began a process which was more than simply the doodles of a maniac, wannabe thief, and potential serial killer. Taking myself seriously was quite difficult. Until that time, every project was a lark. Why don’t I do this? Why don’t I do that? Suddenly I was beginning something that would necessarily involve the lives of others and I would be responsible for it. The image of Paul sitting at his desk that night stayed with me . . . At least I could try to be responsible.

         From that moment, my first real break from the daily routine of getting a monthly magazine out, a grind which was less the lark I had imagined and more something Paul had known on a weekly basis, came during the book tour with Roger Terrill, which was the best single adventure of my life, sui generis, and deserves several chapters to itself. Our two novels, my second and his first, were both published by Gerard Strauss officially at the end of October 1971. We were on the road by the middle of that month and did not return to our individual habitats, even for a change of clothes, until a couple of weeks before Christmas.

***

30. The endeavor of Jim

         I’ve often felt as if I’ve dodged the bullet. As if I am living on some sort of borrowed time, or by dint of an unaccountable accident of good fortune. Perhaps this is a kind of extrasensory awareness of what might have befallen me had I ended up in Vietnam while living an alternate life, or in one of those parallel time zones that are so popular in cheesy science fiction—not 42.3333 latitude and -71.0362 longitude but 92.3333 degrees north and -191 degrees west. That sense of an ‘Old Mortality’ is my only actual acquaintance with a battlefield, and that unquiet feeling that I have managed to avoid some greater harm is a sudden chilling that can come upon me at night, or in broad daylight as easily as in between, and often serves as a caution to find a safer foxhole than before.

         Roger Terrill had actually lived through the reality of that experience, and dodged the bullet more than once by the time I met him. Once for each of us, he liked to say. In Vietnam, he had been stationed at Da Nang during the Tet Offensive, and was later transferred to Plaiku. It was there at this second posting in the highlands around that city of corrugated metal and scrap wood that he had dealt directly with the Montagnards. His novel, The Journey of Nay, was prescient for clearly predicting the inevitable tragedy that would befall the Muong people after American withdrawal from the country, but was primarily concerned then with the personal betrayal of a single woman. The story is told in the voice of the grandmother, Nay Sui, and speaks first of the discrimination experienced by the Montagnards from the lighter-skinned lowland Vietnamese, something she had endured for her entire life. This was followed by a recapitulation of this prejudice in the life of a granddaughter, Yiedt Sui, who has fallen in love with Darrin, a young Afro-American soldier, when she came to America, along with the grandmother as her chaperone and mentor, only to face a similar treatment here.

         Besides the good writing—something Roger had worked on at the University of Iowa for two years following his return from Vietnam, just to be able to tell the story as he envisioned it—the unique and driving force of the narrative is not the voice of the old woman, or her granddaughter, nor the young and earnest but scarred man she came to the United States to be with, but the ghosts. From the start, the missing males of the Montagnard family are mixed thoroughly in the narrative, in conversations, in minor incident, even to the giving of the marriage bracelet, and their voices are always in the dreams and aspirations of Nay Siu, and Yiedt Siu, and finally even in the troubled nightmares of Darrin. These are the men who are not there, the casualties of war who had first fought the French, then the Japanese, and then the French again, as well as the Viet Minh, and finally the Viet Cong. But it is only Darrin who cannot see or hear them on a daily basis—except in his dreams at night.

         The primary setting of that novel was Roger’s hometowns of Minneapolis and St. Paul, so that was to be our second major whistle stop on a tour that took us to several dozen smaller towns along the way. But the whistling was mostly Roger’s.

Just as there could not be two novels more different in temper or the telling – one possessed of a magical realism akin to Borges, Roger’s favorite author, and the other a solipsistic stew of detail, polemic, and hearsay, there could not be two different authors in nature or appearance than Roger and myself. He was only an inch taller, but he always appeared to tower over me, possibly because he had the military bearing and I was becoming round-shouldered for the hours spent at the IBM as well as my little Olivetti.

         He was fair, and I was swarthy. He spoke in short and direct sentences, the words already shaped by his thoughts. I tended to think out loud, abandoning the structure of sentences before they were complete. I had a tendency toward theatre in my presentations (i.e., I used my hands too much). Roger used his eyes, and the deeper voice, and stood fairly still through an entire reading. The voice, a baritone to my tenor, would often hesitate over a word as if he thought he might choose another better one, and each time the audience would lean forward a little in expectation.

         The gatherings we met at the bookshops and libraries from New York to Santa Monica almost always came to see Roger, the blond, blue-eyed and handsome wunderkind who was getting the key reviews in all the book sections of every major newspaper. But because of a natural reticence (he was terribly shy and always had difficulty speaking before audiences from first to last), often displaying an anxiousness that would make him visibly shake just moments before his turn came, it was me they more often got to hear at length.

         In fact, it was Gerard who wisely paired us for the very reason of our differences and sent us out together with me playing the part of Nay Sui to Roger’s Yiedt. We both sold our books, naturally, but Roger sold far more. By at least double. However, I made up part of the difference with a paperback edition of The Stolon, which had been re-issued just in time for the publication date of Head Island.

         My story was the simpler of the two novels. I had chosen to straddle the tale I had previously begun in The Stolon by picking up a tragic thread from my protagonists’ childhood and then working out the effects of this on him as an adult.

         Roger’s natural bashfulness alone was evidently devastating to women and men alike, but it was more than magnified and even contradicted by the visual flamboyance of his outfit as he roared into town on his ruby and white motorcycle wearing his father’s beaten leather World War Two flight jacket and flagging a tattered yellow scarf. Such contradictions seem to drive women nuts, and the great majority of book page columnists who interviewed us were women.

         At Roger’s suggestion—nay, insistence—we set out from New York by truck.

I would love to have been present for the argument with Gerard over that! Roger owned both a 1969 Ford 100 with a low camper top straddling an eight-foot bed, and a trailer rig for his Harley Davidson Electra Glide. He had purchased them a couple of years before, the same week he had gotten out of the military (on a promise he had made himself while pretending to be dead one night that he’d spent alone in a rice paddy surrounded by Viet Cong) and each of these were two-tone white and ruby red and looked like the kind of matched pair you might see in a magazine advertisement (which they were, I was later told by his father, actually ripped from a page of Playboy magazine) and still gleamed with the brand new glow of regular pampering and multiple coats of wax. This was all fine with me because he preferred to drive the motorcycle and I got to drive the truck alone in all but foul weather, which gave us more than sufficient time to be apart, day after day, so that we seldom got on each other’s nerves. Better yet, he could fix either of them with a small wrench and a screwdriver. 

         For his part, Gerard was happy in the end to save the extra expense of air travel and used the difference to book more dates in more cities along the way. Miss Evers took care of the phone work, actually making the hotel reservations and the reading dates as well as looking after the shipping of copies to each location.           

         Three nights out of four we slept on air mattresses in the truck bed with our sleeping bags beneath the camper top. Shaving and other needs were performed in foul gas station toilets and public library restrooms. We much preferred the libraries, where young boys would stand close at the door and stare back at us curiously as we used the sinks. It was cool weather but not cold until we reached Colorado. The bookings for readings started and ended in New York City, with both of us lodged separately there the first night at the old Biltmore near Grand Central Station with its near antique grandeur, and we did the last minute planning with Pat Evers and Gerard over a late dinner. We then went to Boston for a couple of days, which was a story in itself, and from there to Springfield, Troy, Syracuse, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Ann Arbor, Chicago, Madison, and on to Minneapolis. At that point, the trip was about one-quarter done and I was already exhausted. Roger, however, was, by his own testimony, as happy as he had ever been in his life. Of course, he had the added impetus of being in love. When we reached our hotel in Minneapolis, as she had previously done in Chicago, Pat Evers was there waiting.

         I read the same two portions of my own book at each event—one an argument between my subtly disguised protagonist, Fergus MacAleer and his father, and the other a love scene between himself and his childhood sweetheart, slyly and simply named ‘Ellen.’ Roger usually read one longer scene from his book which involved a family dinner at the home of Darrin’s parents in St. Paul.

         Both of us quickly reached the point where we had memorized our lines and would have been able to deliver the words without fumbling, I think, but I had begun a foolish attempt to imitate Roger’s natural hesitations for some added dramatic emphasis. They worked so well for him. However, instead of silence and rapt attention, I receive a shifting of seats and polite coughs. We took turns going first, but even when I was reading, I could see that the faces of the women in the audience, already sitting uncomfortably in the folded chairs set out in whatever open space had been provided, all had their eyes on Roger.

         Driving through this country, rather than flying over, makes you aware of its size in both practical and spiritual ways. The thing I learned to appreciate first is the quaint beauty of the small town. This is not estimable. There were many places where I thought I would just park and pull my bags out and stay for the rest of my life. It’s the depth of field, I think, as well as the Technicolor. Places that transfix the eye not in monotony but in synecdoche with those thousand different individual and vernacular parts, any one of which might faithfully represent the whole for somehow appearing so true and in their proper place. Analogy and analogue.

         But I will admit here again, as I did in one of the essays I wrote at the time, that I have never trusted farmers. They have an occupation which is hard work and requires long hours for low pay. In addition, it is dangerous, often lonely, and only permits vacation time during the winter. Ice fishing never appealed to me either, for reasons which should not need explaining. The point is, the farmer says he loves to do what he does. And this is obviously a lie.

         My urban prejudice was easily acquired, given my essentially contrary nature. The farmer, like the teacher and the fireman, had long been an icon of American culture. Criticism of these occupations was considered blasphemy. And it was for that reason alone that I had once taken up that very subject at The Gist. All the fireman I had ever known then, all of them Irish, except a very few, were overweight and frequently ‘out sick’ on the better summer days. Alike, I could count the number of teachers I loved on one hand.

         It was the farmer’s love of his life, I supposed in print, that might explain why so many had sold their land to large agribusiness firms rather than get along on their own from year to year. I followed this up on various occasions with articles on farm subsidies for tobacco even while the government had started an anti-smoking campaign, and about their love of being paid not to grow crops (it was there I had first proposed that authors be paid not to write books in order to save trees), apparent cruelty to farm animals and poor husbandry (my boyhood excursion to the turkey farm had come to mind), and the near slave labor of migrant farm workers all to get a cheaper product to the consumer table, not a better one.

         In that light, I supposed, there must be some secret motivation which the farmers have kept from the rest of us through the centuries, like a Mason and his oaths. But the worst of it was, in our time, the farmer wanted to be paid for their love whether they did well or not. As if I should receive royalties for the copies of my novels that never sold, just because it took a year or more of my life to write them.

The fact that the American farmer grew the best quality food on the planet, in the greatest quantity, on the fewest number of acres per capita, at the lowest prices, only made my job as critic a little harder. It did not dissuade me from my object as a wannabe iconoclast.

         Again now, following our excursion, I wished (while allowing for the wisdom of Caesar paying the Gauls to stay at home) I could have found a piece of such a business back when I was working three jobs to get along. I would have had the time to write a few more novels that no one would read. And I wrote an essay to that effect as well.

         I now congratulated farmers for figuring out that they could kill two and half or three birds with one stone by not growing tobacco on a given acreage, and thus getting a government check which they could then use to buy more acreage and not grow tobacco on that as well. If they combined that income with the subsidy they got for actually growing corn, for instance (not to be used as food for hogs or humans, but to make ethanol), they could then contribute to the profits of the oil companies by purchasing stock, which in turn subsidized those corporations for NOT drilling for oil. This compact works out very nicely for all concerned when the oil company turns around and uses some of this extra cash after dividends to make cheap fertilizers to help the farmers grow their corn. The fact that the fertilizers pollute the rivers and make it necessary to build well chlorinated swimming pools for their kids so as to keep the youngsters from just going down to the river and using the old rope swing, is an added side benefit to the swimming pool and to the chlorine industries which is only magnified by the need to build better water purification plants for the towns affected by the pollution of their rivers from chemically befouled runoff, employing contractors, builders, surveyors, consultants, plumbers, masons, electricians, etc., but also while benefiting more than several large political lobbies interested in saving the environment which in turn demanded that the pollution be controlled, thence resulting in even larger projects by the Army Corps of Engineers, and others, to wit, tens of thousands of people are employed just to get the farmer not to grow tobacco. The older solution of simply letting the farmer lose his shirt for growing too much of one thing or another and not keeping his eyes open on the market prices, or putting away a sufficient amount in the local savings and loan during good years to weather the lean ones, was outdated, or far too radical.

         I began to take notes on the first obvious manifestations of chicanery by the time we reached Chicago, as well as the novel that I hoped would come out of it. The first essay, concerning the need to pay authors not to write their novels in the same manner as farmers were paid not to grow crops, appeared in The Atlantic and was well received at the time. It was called ‘Swiftian,’ by some critics, but then I had begged for that comparison by entitling the essay ‘An Immodest Proposal.’

         Understand, I had not been around for Roger’s initial arrival at the Gerard Strauss offices and I did not pursue gossip there in any case, nor would he have said anything to me, being the true gentlemen he was, so I was unaware of his own first encounter with Miss Evers until, in a hotel in Pittsburgh where we were sharing a room, he got a call and I answered the phone. To me she said, “Hello, Angus. Can I speak to Roger?” That was it. She and Roger were on the line together for an hour, with him stretching the cord into the bathroom for privacy. I went downstairs to explore the lobby, being unable to guess what she was saying that made him laugh so often.

         Whatever his talents were as a writer, and I think they were considerable and greater than my own, or his good looks, he must have had other attributes I did not possess. Patricia Evers and Roger Terrill were married the following June. It was something of a true love match by all accounts. He was 28, she was 42. He was a shy mid-westerner with a streak of Lutheran that translated everything into principles of behavior. She was a ‘Melina Mercouri’ of unbound appetites with a husky voice and striking features veiled beneath a perpetual wisp of gray rising off of her cigarettes. Perhaps it was a mutual understanding of the extreme mid-western temperatures that was their communion. And wit. They both certainly had the wit to entertain each other.

         His death the following year in a motorcycle accident on a stretch of Interstate 94 after a visit with his family seemed impossible to me at the time. Some people have the aura about them that makes you believe they will live forever. I wrote Pat a short letter of condolence, but I never had the opportunity to speak with her about it. The blow up in the office at Gerard Strauss that had ended my welcome there had already taken place during the spring following the book tour and I did not return there for some time.

         Despite the statement on the book jacket flap, I began writing The Endeavor of Jim while the wheels were still rolling on our great adventure to California and back again, not while at MacDowell the following summer, though, in fact, I did finish the book there. It is still my favorite of all the books I have written—every detail of the experience that made it so is etched by reconsideration and polished by handling in my mind. However, in truth, and given the fact that Roger’s death took the wind out of me for most of the year following, I don’t think I would have even begun the novel, much less finished it, had I not already written a substantial portion prior to the end of 1972. It was the quiet of New Hampshire, away from the bustle at The Fore-edge, that allowed me the concentration and necessary calm.

***

31. Mything Roger

         I generally refrain from re-commenting on the comments of critics, most of whom are a cretinous and sniveling lot who can smell little beyond their own snot, and so I said nothing at the time, but because their insinuations and distortions have a wider currency than my own, and my own fabrications have seldom been intended to harm others, it is worth the trouble to set some of that record to rights now, when it matters to no one but myself. Just for the good of my meager soul.

         Obviously I had taken as my template, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It is one of my favorite books, has always been so through half a dozen readings, and the chance to work from that mythology I took just as seriously as I believe Virgil must have done in building the Aeneid upon the stones trodden by Homer in his re-account of the Iliad. Very grand indeed! But I was young enough then and not embarrassed at such undertakings. That journey ‘on the road’ east to west on rivers of macadam instead of down the Mississippi was intended as echo, as often as I could manage it, in what was essentially an perpendicular narrative to Mr. Twain, and not in any way to counter Mr. Kerouac’s very different book (even allowing for my avowed distaste for that work).

         Nor was I then unaware of the Leslie Fiedler thesis on a homoerotic vein to American literature so nicely captured in the phrase “Come back to the raft ag’in, Huck honey!” Certainly that may have played some part in the shenanigans of Mr. Kerouac, even if it was a silly conjecture about Mr. Twain. Such pre-post-modern has always simply escaped me (or I it).

         The choice of re-making Twain’s Jim into a blond and blue-eyed Adonis was not done ‘casually’ as one twit said, but for the very purpose of the contrast it offered. Where Jim’s friendship was only accepted as a convenience and then a responsibility and weight on Huck’s conscience, my Jim was not only the indefatigable beast of burden who carried the venture, but the outright hero in the face of a hundred easy opportunities to be a lesser man. It seemed to me that to rise above your oppressors and keep your integrity is noble enough, but to reject opportunity that is unearned, to turn from praise and flattery and keep your head about you and to physically quiet applause, as I had seen Roger do many times, in order to make the point that there were people still dying on an inglorious battlefield at that very moment in Vietnam, is at least equally worthy.

         The transfiguration was not a miracle is some eyes. It was more transmogrification to many.

         It was already common at that time to raise up black individuals who had done some good, far above the real worth of their accomplishments, as if this might salve the gaping wounds and neglect of past oppression and not denigrate and devalue those who had genuinely earned their merit. To me, that process was clearly demeaning and would inevitably undermine the real progress then still necessary for African Americans a hundred years after the Civil War that was meant to set them free of pandering. Such a worry could not yet have bothered Mr. Twain. He worked beautifully with the circumstance of his time. But that was past. There was a fortune of new hazards to face, to turn another phrase.

         And too, it is important to realize that the mind of the author is always challenging the resistance within himself. If not, the game is over. My own prejudices, having been raised in a part of town where a black face was seldom seen much beyond a delivery truck, were the weight on the grit and resulting friction that I needed to smooth that process for myself.

         From the first stop on our journey, my own Boston, I was terribly jealous of Roger’s warm acceptance at every turn. Nothing I said or did could cast a shadow on him. Yet never once in two months of travel together did he ever act toward me in any way to reflect that he knew he was the better of us. Nor did he try to make up the difference with any false or pandering support for my own work. We were simply friends from the beginning and neither more nor less.

         I would talk for half an hour, working hard enough to raise a sweat on a cool October day, and get polite applause. Roger would speak for twenty minutes in his halting and uncertain style and get a standing ovation. And remember too, this was at a time when the returning soldiers were being spat upon in airports.

         I remember one moment when the reporter for the Pittsburgh Press stood by me, woefully, saying he had not yet eaten his dinner and the young women who encircled Roger would not let the journalist in close enough to ask his questions. I told the fellow to just wait a moment. Roger would get out of his ambush as soon as he had signed the books clutched in their hands and we could go have a quiet dinner together at whatever restaurant he thought best. It was actually a canny move on my part. We had no idea where the best place was to eat. We had a terrific meal in a German neighborhood we would never have found otherwise.

         We stopped an extra night in Chicago because of the number of bookshops there, and the need to speak to several more journalists. Miss Evers had anticipated this. She was there ahead of us and had set up the interviews and the readings in an order that was a positively scientific application of intent upon time and space. And she had also taken a second room again, so I was able to get into a quiet bed fairly early. I needed the rest.

         I had no idea then that the later success of The Endeavor of Jim, both in sales and critical appreciation, would be the highpoint of my own career. Not that it would have made a difference. I always had my projects lined up ahead of me like yellow ducks on the bath tub edge, or as I imagine that would be, if I had ever done it. And the success of the book at that time was so greatly diminished for me from the first by the cloud of my having left Gerard Strauss and then the great blow of Roger’s death, that I could never feel as good about it as it should have.

         The stop in Boston to promote Head Island became something of a prelude as well as a dénouement. As happened before, following the publication of The Stolon, neither my parents nor Mary Ellen came to the readings. I had sent them notes, and made the point of how little time there would be for visiting. My call to Mary Ellen’s house had been brief. Her sister told me again that she no longer lived there. Goodbye. In fact, I hadn’t spoken to Mary Ellen in almost two years at that point.

         Perhaps I should say, more importantly, she had not spoken or written to me. And I had thought to dedicate the book to her as my first muse, but then realized a small portion of my far greater neglect, and thought to offered it up to my parents. Then again, I had not been exactly forgiving in my renditions of family life. At last, I offered it up to Trudy, wherever she was, in the hope that she might see it and find the memories of our conversations to have been somewhat happy. At least a brightening on a dark day.

         None of that mattered, I suppose. Not in the end. The fictional working over my father had received in Head Island was, I thought later, to be fair enough. I had tried not to make him the villain, at least as much as he might have been seen to be in the first book. But the material was still raw to that time and place. I simply assumed he did not want to be associated with it—especially after it was reviewed as a roman a clef, in the same way that The Stolon had been seen as a bildungsroman. I supposed he had not read any review, or even the book itself, but perhaps taken the sense of it from some friends who had. He never once spoke to me specifically about either of the books at the time. But then, in afterthought, I really should not have expected more.

         We had interviews to do at the Sheraton Hotel that morning, and for lunch I took Roger over to South Boston to see ‘the old stopping grounds,’ as he wanted to call them. The building where the Head House Spa had been, home of the ‘toasted bun’ and the all beef hot dog, and the scene of many a rendezvous and much of the loitering and malingering which had been the core of my youth, was unexpectedly closed. Without the constant activity inside and out, the place had the look of a husk in the same way a human being might who has died with their eyes open, windows empty, kitchen equipment removed, linoleum floor darkened by the blood of grease. Before heading around to eat at Sully’s instead, we stood there at the seawall near the Head Island causeway. It was just above that small portion of foul and rotting seaweed and sand which had been adequate for our smaller and younger bodies to huddle away from the wind in cold weather and where we had smoked our stolen cigarettes and plotted our schemes. I had written about that in the book.

         “It’s a small place, I know, but then it seemed even smaller. No more, at the time, than another room in our lives. The rocks there on the breakwater were as familiar to me as the furniture in our house.”

         He said, “It was no different in St. Paul. Benick’s was one of our places. The Mississippi River was just behind, and there was a floodwall where we could hunker down away from the wind out of Canada. The sun on the dark rock would melt away the snow in that spot first and there was no witness to our foolishness except the river itself.”

         I wondered, “What did you say you’d do when you schemed your future? What was your plan?”

         He looked bemused by the question—like it was something he had thought of again just recently. “First, I was going to go down the river all the way to New Orleans. That was the plan. We had heard it was the wickedest place on Earth and we couldn’t wait to get there. Achim Baur was our pastor, a large man who liked to visit every one of his parishioners in their homes at least once a year and always ate whatever little cake was offered. Not a bad fellow, really. Coached basketball . . . His face would go pink and he used to sweat his gray jersey through to black in minutes. But he could hit a three pointer from the foul line nine times out of ten. I think he cared a bit too much about the wrong things, though. He would use the metaphor of New Orleans for hell on Earth in his sermons, and detail every evil of the place. I don’t think there was any boy among us who did not want get there at the first chance.”

         “Did you make it?”

         “Oh, yes.”

         “Well, I think you’re going again. It’s on our schedule.”

         “Good. Maybe we’ll meet Pastor Baur there this time. Happy at last. He was finally caught diddling one of the widows, and the church made him leave, and afterward when we kids asked what had happened to him, they’d say, ‘He’s gone to New Orleans,’ and get a smirk. I looked all over for him the first time I got down there, but I didn’t see him.”

         Roger liked to get off on the blue highways of the map, away from the sound of the trucks, but more than once, nightfall came too soon. I remember particularly one time when the singing tires of the big rigs were passing just a hundred yards away from our RV camp, the trucks trailing in a steady procession of lights down a strip of Interstate 80 onto the bluffs and plains below Cheyenne, Wyoming. I wrote “the sound of the rubber ululating with the smaller rise and falls in the asphalt sounding like wild beasts in harsh harmonic counterpoint to the diesel growl, becoming screams in the dark and echoing their warning in the open atmosphere—echoing against what, I don’t know.”

         I said, “Too bad we aren’t out there away from the highway now, where we could enjoy the peace of quiet and catch that view at better distance.”

         This comment seemed to irritate him. “You ask for too much” he said. “What we have here is already more than we can handle. I think I’ll take what I got. Who knows if we will ever get to Africa. But here we have our very own Serengeti.”

         This exact exchange with slightly different wording occurred half a dozen times on the trip. Where I found fault, he found virtues.

         It was raining again in San Francisco. I objected to the damp and the cold. He observed how the sounds were smothered as well and the smell of the bay was tangy and had made him hungry. We stayed there in an old hotel on Broadway, evidently the only one with rooms available that was also near the City Lights Bookshop, which was our objective the next day. The hotel turned out to be busy with hookers through the night and I did not sleep very much at all.

         My complaint at that fact was met at breakfast with Rogers’ observation, “But did you listen to them? Did you hear that language? Did you hear the stuff they were saying?”

         I told him that I’d lived across a narrow airshaft from a hooker for a couple of years. I had heard enough of that.

         He waved my sour answer away, “You haven’t heard anything until you try to sleep in a hotel in Saigon. Walls card board thick and the doors are curtains. The girls make sounds purposely, not only to please the guys into thinking they are doing well, but to compete with one another. It’s what I imagine an eternal insane asylum might be like. At least the girls here moan in English. Mostly. You should’ve listened. They were funny.”

         We had a nearly similar occasion of near sin later on in New Orleans, but rather than continuing to suffer the wafting of groans and moans, I got up in the middle of the night and went out for a walk. It was as hot there as San Francisco had been cold. The streets were busy. It was raining as well, but the overhangs gave room to walk for several blocks without getting too wet. Nude dancers could be seen bumping and grinding and prancing atop bar-high walkways in various establishments through wide open double doors. Hawkers, big fellows in bright Hawaiian shirts or matched tuxedo jackets and shorts, stood guard at each entrance and tried to make eye contact to draw you in. The beat of the music from one place battered at the pulsing of the next unless it was overcome by the ever present splatter of rain from the roofs onto the cobblestone and brick. Hookers gathered at the doorways to the buildings between, looking damp, and making whistles and clicks and trying to make you look their way more aggressively than the hucksters. Even so, it all appeared rather darkly festive. To my untempered nature, a sort of Grand Guignol without end. The cacophony was not unpleasant to the ear, even though the discordances were perhaps a bit too much like some modern music at times. I had heard far better jazz on record. The girls on the street were entertaining and if you looked more than a second longer, they would start a pitch, “I won’t hurry you,” and “I’ll bet you that I know some stuff you have never even thought about in your whole life before.”

         I didn’t need convincing. I could tell that she did. I imagined Trudy playing her part.

         At last I went into one establishment and ordered a double shot of bourbon on Bourbon Street, just to say I had, and paid the price, which I wrote down as seven dollars, watched the entertainment a while and felt better about the investment. I thought some of Roger’s positive mental attitude was rubbing off on me. I was proud of myself, and when I got back and saw him sitting in the lobby, I started telling him about the party that was going on out outside in the rain.

         He listened silently and solemnly for a moment, and then announced, “We’ve got bed bugs as big as they have in Saigon. They’re changing the room for us.”

         I felt like I couldn’t win, but he was laughing over breakfast the next day.

         Roger didn’t ride his bike too fast. It was a quiet machine and he liked to ‘lay his eyes’ on what was passing. Speed seemed unimportant. Often he was behind me a hundred yards or more but his horn had a good high pitch, and if he wanted to turn off and stop somewhere, he would give me a beep. This mostly worked. But once I missed it and didn’t realize he was not there for some miles. We had that worked out in advance too. I was to stay put and he would find me. But that time, on an empty stretch of road right between Alabama and Georgia on the way to Atlanta, along toward the end of November, I turned around and went back to find him. There was only the one road up out of Eufaula that I could see on the map. I was pretty sure he had stopped at a filling station I’d noticed, to get something to drink, and I was thirsty too.

         From a distance then I could see a large fellow close by the pumps who appeared to be accosting Roger in a bear hug. I sped up and hit the gravel a little fast, causing a loud growl. There were actually half a dozen other guys inside and they all came out at the sound of my arrival. They had their bikes lined up in military order and gleaming in the sun, and now took up positions in front of these prized possessions, faces turned at me in expectation. But the biggest of the lot, the bear hugger, barked at me as the dust cleared.

         “Fuckin’ a!”

         I had nowhere to go but forward. Thankfully I didn’t.

         The bear was Derek Hayes. He had served in Vietnam with Roger for three years. I spent the next couple of hours drinking Pepsi and eating Hunnybuns and listening to war stories at a picnic table in the scraggly shade of a pecan tree at one side of the place. The stories involved nearly everything but fighting. And because Roger did not often speak about that experience, I kept quiet, listened, and tried to remember what I could. The book I wanted to write had been taking shape in the truck as I had driven along alone, and this encounter seemed to be serendipitous. Instead, it was no coincidence at all. Derek Hayes had read about Roger’s appearance at the bookshop in Atlanta and had dragged his buddies out to hear us. I collected half a notebook out of it.

***

32. The fist of heaven

         I was happy enough to usually avoid altercations. All the fistfights I had ever known in my childhood were brief. A few quick blows. A defeat. A quick retreat. Perhaps a few weeks necessarily wearing black gaffer’s tape on my glasses to keep them together. But my very last and greatest encounter was at a bar in San Antonio, Texas. We had given a joint reading at the university library that afternoon and for relief that evening, after driving a few back roads in the vicinity to get the feel of the place while purposely avoiding that small nut of a building they call the Alamo, we had stopped at the ‘Double-Horn Cafe,’ the name loudly presented on a sign that shouted garishly in a clashing palate of red, blue and white neon over the scrubby trees to the highway.

         In the truck, I looked over at Roger and he was already smiling at the prospect. All the food there, chicken, catfish, crawfish, and sweet potatoes (excepting only the barbeque and the beer), was deep-fried. They had two kinds of beer, large and small. All of that was for the better. But apparently this was a ‘locals only’ place that disdained any contact with the population of professors and students at the university.

         We were soon sitting at the bar eating and watching the early news on a television that was suspended over one end. A story came on there concerning a young woman who had a map of the state of Texas tattooed on her rump. They briefly showed only the most northerly reaches of that swath of colorful cartography as the young woman explained that her fiancée had recently discovered this fact and broken off their relationship, he being from Colorado. Roger was much entertained by the piece.

         “I knew a girl in college with a map of Texas on her ass. She was going with a buddy of mine. I called him up once to see if he wanted to go for a beer. He said he couldn’t because he was in the middle of working his way from the Panhandle to the Rio Grande.”

         I probably laughed a little too loudly at that. The plate of ribs I was working on had most of my attention. In any case, I was unaware of any argument then until it had become full blown. Some fellow with the requisite massive tattoos on both forearms said something to Roger in response to the anecdote. Roger ignored him and concentrated on his catfish. The fellow pulled at Roger’s shoulder and told him to pay attention. Roger simply planted his fist in the fellow’s face hard enough to break his nose and send him stumbling backwards to his own table. The several gentlemen with this guy arose then en masse and came at us. And, apparently, they also had other friends there. I was suddenly busy fending off a fellow a foot shorter than myself and a foot wider as well, and trying to avoid getting my glasses broken again, while Roger put two men from another table onto their backs in the midst of a large pork rib-platter. The ribs arced through the air right back at us catapult fashion. In fact, though the short fellow had me down on my butt pretty quickly and was attempting to step on my head when I finally got a grip on his boot and turned him over, Roger had quickly made an unfair fight of it. Three or four fellows with more than barbeque sauce on their faces slunk around at the periphery yelling epithets which lost any meaning in their well oiled drawls. Then the police came.

         As if they had been waiting in a car for just this occasion, which I imagine they were, on that Saturday night. They came in the door and at us before more than a few minutes had passed. And then we were in jail, barbeque sauce and all, for that night and the next. They did not let us out until after a hearing on the Monday morning.

         But in the holding cell, immediately after we were brought in, Roger said, “That was embarrassing.”

         I asked, “Why?” I was actually fairly pleased at the experience. My glasses were intact and I was a little bored with the trip just then after traveling the heart of Kansas and Oklahoma.

         He said, “None of those fellows knew a thing about fighting. I guess I can imagine why some of them use guns. ‘Gunfighters’ we used to call them all in Nam. Try to make up for their deficiencies with a pistol. Lead for brains.”

         This conversation was overheard by a cop close by. He asked Roger where he had served and in which unit. They got to talking. Evidently that much earned us a hot meal which we needed because ours at the Double-Horn had mostly been lost,                       However, the incident had some even better good to it. I’ll get to that later, if I can.

         It was barely spring then when Gerard called and asked me to come uptown one day for lunch. He had read the first portion of the new novel. He had asked to see it after somehow hearing about the subject (I am positive Roger had said nothing about it). But Gerard’s voice made it clear to me he was not pleased with the idea.

         Gerard first took on the ‘fatherly’ demeanor he was so excellent at. But I was already a little raw from overwork and as well as feeling edgy because of the tone I had detected on the phone.

         He said, “You’re doing too much.”

         I said only, “I’m doing what I can.”

         “I think you should put this novel aside for a time and reconsider it down the road.”

         “I can’t afford that. I need the income.”

         “Aren’t you drawing a salary from the magazine yet?”

         “More the opposite.”

         “I think perhaps then you have to decide whether you want to be a novelist or a publisher.”

         “Dickens published Household Words. Trollope published St. James.”

         “This isn’t the nineteenth century, and you are not Dickens or Trollope.”

         “I supposed I was only pretending to be Angus McGuire.”

         His tone of voice lowered then, as if revealing a confidence.

         “Listen. This book is about people we both know.”

         “It’s fiction.”

         “Did Roger see it?”

         “The first part. I read it aloud to him in the truck. He thought it was a laugh.”

         “Perhaps it’s not so funny now.”

         “No?”

         “I can’t publish this.”

         “Alright.”

         My tone probably made it clear that my agreement had nothing to do with holding back on the novel.

         “I wish you would not publish this. There are people who will be hurt unnecessarily.”

         “If they are hurt, it is only because they read their own misunderstandings into it.”

         “I take exception to it myself.”

         “Publishers do have a tendency toward self-importance.”

         “That’s insulting.”

         “That is not an insult. It is an observation of fact. Your life doesn’t hang on your words. You don’t make the choices, sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, chapter to chapter. You don’t have to live with yourself that way, day to day. You only judge the results of those who do. Good or bad . . . So you don’t like it. I accept that. I wouldn’t dream of telling you what to publish. But don’t tell me what to write. That’s insulting.”

         As we had travelled from reading to reading, Roger had laughed loudly more than once over the editorial process he had endured to get his book into print. The political correctness of that moment was more about race than any other matter. Reworking sentences so that the context of ‘white,’ and ‘black,’ and the plainly spoken Montagnard would not be misunderstood had caused him considerable angst. He had told me about several arguments with his editor at the company (Not Emily. She would have done better.), which had required the intercession of Gerard Strauss himself.

         Gerard was angry enough that last day we met at his office to forget to offer his hand as we parted.

         In advance of the reviews for The Endeavor of Jim, and as if anticipating that those would be good enough to support the effort, the good people at Simon and Schuster had set up readings for me at half a dozen bookshops around the city. But the first of these was at the old Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue where I had read once before, just a couple of blocks from the Gerard Strauss office. Whether this choice was in fact a coincidence or not, I will never know. The editorial director in charge of my book insisted it was the first space available. However, I suspected that there was some inter-publisher animosity behind the scenes, and that having the reading there was a sort of hit in kind. I wanted to cancel out of it. When the ads ran in the papers, I got to feeling quite ill. I hardly ever get sick, so this was, I am positive, a purely psychosomatic reaction on my part. I missed at least a day of work at The Fore-edge.

         And the worst part of that was, I was essentially alone. The assistant editor who accompanied me to all of the New York venues, Debbie, was an eager and pleasant young woman only two years out of college. As a matter of fact I was then only a couple of years older than she, yet I had the sense that there was already a generation between us. Though she was very attentive as well as attractive, I don’t remember now that we ever had a conversation that lasted more than a few minutes.

         Countless times, during that season of readings—and there were more than thirty of them as I traveled by train this time from New York to San Francisco—I turned around at the podium, unconsciously, to look for Roger’s face. Each time, the same small shock of recognition occurred—this time I was alone—and I was thankful when Christmas approached and I could quit.

          There was no genesis for another novel in that particular journey. I wrote a few essays to fill time, nothing more.

         But the first reading of The Endeavor of Jim, there at the Barnes & Noble in New York, was the worst. I was weak-kneed. I was nauseous. I had a headache. I had not eaten the entire day. Debbie, the publisher’s rep, met me at the subway exit on 6th and walked with me to the bookshop. I think she even offered to hold my arm once during that transit. I must have looked as good as I felt. To avoid appearing like an invalid, I told her I had the flu and that she should stay back. She got a sympathetic grimace on her face then and treated me like a sick child for the remainder of the evening.

         The crowd was unexpectedly large. The reading was in a basement area and tables of books had been moved, but there really wasn’t room. All the chairs were filled and people stood at the edges. Despite the advance publicity, I was dismayed. I had not expected such a response and I looked behind me then for the first time to see a friendly face and saw only a store manager there instead.

         The air conditioning was not working. One of the long fluorescent lights above fluttered in its fixture, strobing in a manner that would have made me feel ill in any case. I stood on a slightly raised platform and the ceiling felt terribly near above my head. By publisher’s request, I was wearing my one and only suit—a brown corduroy that had not been on a hanger for months (maybe a year). I could feel the sweat gathering in my armpits. I had entered the store almost blindly, walking behind Debbie and avoiding eye contact, but shaking whatever hands were offered, and then looked down at my notes to evade the eyes of the audience and discovered only then that I had forgotten to shine my shoes. I must have been an impressive sight.

         When I managed a few full breaths, I looked up finally and saw that Gerard Strauss had a seat at the rear, next to Patricia Evers. Emily Black stood right behind them.

         Debbie took it on herself to find someone to replace the light in the fixture, and this delayed the affair for perhaps ten minutes and brought some applause when it was accomplished. I expected that to be the highpoint of the evening.

         At this moment I was feeling incredibly ashamed for having left Gerard Strauss. Our argument was understandable enough, but I felt I should have made the effort to put the pieces together and I had not. The fact that he had come to my first reading for The Endeavor of Jim, as I was afraid he would, confirmed every self-doubt that plagued both my mind and stomach.

         The store manager made an introductory speech and then disappeared.

         In memory I can see myself standing there for hours before I managed my first words. It might have been less. And then I could not focus my eyes on the pages I had marked on the copy of the book in front of me. So I just started to talk.

         I told them about the time I had given a reading in Boston, with Roger behind me. He had said, ‘The worst part is you look even worse than you think you do and people don’t understand half of what you say, so coherence isn’t the matter. Just don’t mumble, look like you mean it, and they’ll believe you.’ This was a rendition of something a fellow officer had told him in Nam when he had to speak to an assembly of soldiers. The audience at that first reading thought my anecdote was funny. I was serious, of course.

         I tried to give some specific evidence to the original impetus for the book. I told them about Roger’s Lutheran minister and then, at some point my eyes cleared enough to read a few pages about my character, Jim, fending off ladies of the evening in New Orleans after being caught on the street wearing only the bottom half of his pajamas. At the time, he had been waiting for the hotel to find another bed, minus the bed bugs, and when a terrific flash bang of a thunderstorm had come up, had stepped out the back fire door for a smoke to watch it. The door had locked behind him with a gust and, in the racket, his knocking went unnoticed, forcing a barefooted trek around the ‘block’ in the pouring rain. Unfortunately, that portion of New Orleans was not laid out in a simple grid. One alley led to another. Lacking his wallet or any identification, he eventually met a cop who thought badly of the situation before Jim was rescued by a bevy of ladies who had nothing else to do until the storm let up. I had fashioned it into a scene after Dante’s Purgatorio. The crowd there seemed to enjoy that too.

         I could not find my next marker in the book, so I simply told them about once being lost near Colby, Kansas, on a Sunday night, after getting off the interstate to find some gas. Roger had been driving, so I was feeling a little less guilty about the empty tank. But everything in the vicinity was closed. Even the cinderblock motel.

         With the raised course of the interstate close by, we assumed a false accessibility to civilization and, with the needle already perched, we headed further down the two-lane road that paralleled the stream of traffic on our right. Beneath a nearly full moon, the horizon appeared to be set with a necklace of singular lights, but all of them, we had already determined from our passage on the interstate, were only marking some lonely barn or distant silo. No house appeared to be awake. We had already driven too far then, before the motor died, forcing us to push the truck over at a road marker beside an endless darkened field of desiccated sunflowers, heads nodding at our arrival.

         Most of those sunflowers had fallen over in a previous wind but some stood menacingly, ‘like tall, skinny, broad-faced, short-armed space aliens wandering a devastated earth beneath the bright moon.’ I didn’t remember which of us came up with that first image but we both embellished it.

         ‘Their leaf-like fingers wrap around the flesh of human limbs to squeeze blood to the surface.’

         “They drop their seeds in any moist crevice of a victims body. After a thousand of years of travel through an airless solar system without water, these instantly burst and take root.”

         The distant growl of the trucks on the interstate added that usual ambience. Roger started right in to making up a scary story to match the scene before us as we pulled enough dried stalks and other refuse from the edge of the field to build a fire against the dropping cold of the evening.

         “Tendrils sprout from every orifice,” he said from the dark.

         “The whimpering hosts do not die quickly,” I added.

         Then suddenly we saw the glowing of two xanthic eyes, suspended low in the dark, watching. It froze us both in place as our own eyes tried to sort the vague shadow into something conceivable. The creature stepped forward into half shadow. A small black dog had found us there and stood in the moonlight on the road, simply observing. Without hesitation, Roger called him with a short whistle and just like that the animal went spang into his arms as if he was an old friend. The dog was lean and long-tailed and his wag gave his hindquarters a wobble with every sweep. The animal stayed by the fire with us then, following our tale as if he understood each word, his head turning back and forth; and he ate all of a can of Spam which we had opened to eat ourselves before realizing we had no appetite for it.

         We slept then in the back of the truck as we often did, but the dog had remained outside at first, and after a while of seeing him sit alone by the road, watching over us like a sentry beneath the stars, Roger had called him in and he had slept there between us until morning.

         Shortly after dawn, we heard a motor and the dog was up and out at the sound it. A farmer in a battered pickup stopped in the rising fog on the road and stared at us with a face so blank I would have guessed he was asleep if he had closed his eyes. Before we had managed to scramble ourselves from our sleeping bags, the fellow had whistled and the black dog went right up through the open window into the seat of the other truck. But the man continued to study us silently, as his own motor puttered in the quiet. Half-dressed, barefooted and dancing on the cinders beside the road, we started in trying to explain our predicament and coax the fellow into telling us where we could find a filling station. He remained oddly silent. The thought even came on us both after a minute that the man might be deaf, and I started to make rudimentary hand signals. A sort of New York sign language with a Boston accent. But at last the farmer simply got out, still without saying a word, pulled a red can from behind his seat in the truck and poured at least a gallon of gas in our own tank, before pointing up the road ahead with three fingers spread which we took to mean miles, waved away my offer of several dollar bills, and as he climbed back into his own truck, he turned and pointed at Roger’s ruby and white Electra Glide sitting in its perch on the trailer and said at last, “Sweet!”

         There was no dramatic ending to the story. It was just an incidental happening. But it was of the kind you recall more clearly than all the monuments you have stopped to gape at, and I don’t know why I chose to tell it other than that it occurred to me at the time. But this too went over well with the crowd.

         It had a dog in it, after all.

         I took some questions then about Roger, and a few about myself, and I made the best distinctions between the character Jim and the man Roger that I could.

         In the end I got a decent amount of applause. I looked around then for Gerard but he and Pat Evers were both gone. Emily Black stayed awhile—long enough for me to wave and smile but never close enough to speak. The store had set up a table with copies of the book and I signed all that were there.

         To be honest now, I believe the Jim of my tale was more Dante than runaway slave, remaining true to his Beatrice. I was certainly no Huckleberry Finn. Hell was his Vietnam. America his purgatory. And with due respects to Thornton Wilder, heaven was his destination.

         I was upset over the announcement that Pat was editing Roger’s unfinished second novel. Perhaps as much as she had been at my using Roger as a character in my own work Her project was surely none of my business, but I had become psychologically involved with the character of the man, or at least the character I had re-created of him in writing The Endeavor of Jim. I don’t know which. Still don’t. I see him yet as the fellow I knew and though that man is not a still-life in amber, he does have, in my mind, the black and white quality of a good clean print of a 1930’s film about him which makes me suspect the accuracy of my own remembrance and judgment.

         But at the time, I had determined that his work was being badly altered to suit the sensibilities of the living. Though billed as a work of fiction, Palimpsest Moon was truly just Roger’s unfinished story of a love affair between an older woman and a younger man, both of whom I thought I knew well. It did not seem to me that Pat Evers was the right one for the task of editing.

         The last line of that book, “an ancient script seen upon the face of a vellum moon,” was first spoken aloud in another iteration by Roger that one night in Wyoming as we sat like a couple of self-satisfied cowboys at a little RV park just off the Lincoln Highway outside of Cheyenne, eating hotdogs and beans, with our feet poking at an open fire and me still learning to be happy with what I had when that was the deal. The moon rose up right out of the plains behind us, so big it seemed unreal at first; as if a great yellow light had been turned on. The mowed fields went ashen and silver as it climbed, finally turning bone white. This was the light caught on the bright metal of the North Platte River that crooked below, and looked to me like an old broken scar against the fields.

         Somewhat less originally, I spoke of it out loud then, “That moon looks like an enormous coin. A Roman coin, perhaps.”

         Roger had answered, “More an ancient vellum than a metal, I think. Reused by countless lovers to write the languages of the heart. It’s a palimpsest, perhaps of human skin, tattooed, that never wears thin but renews itself each night.”

         There was no denying the fellow was in love. And I surely pitied him for it, but I did not kid him about it then, out of fear he might hear my jealousies, or might inquire of my own feelings about Pat. I had already begun to idolize the man in some fashion and could not bear the thought that I might hurt him. But he never asked.

         Because life is so often inexplicable to most of us, a skid on the ice where turning is nearly useless, it seemed to me that one worthy purpose of the novel, besides the mere entertainment of watching the smash up, was to offer a coherent picture of living; to capture in the still frame of words on a page those aspects of a narrative of living and being that might even reveal the reasons and the why of things. Better than a photograph. I believe The Endeavor of Jim was the closest I have managed to come in that pursuit.          

         Yet when I first told Gerard at a Christmas party in 1971 that I was writing The Endeavor of Jim he was immediately worried. And I didn’t know what that was about.

         The argument later that April seemed tied to the same concern, but the immediate cause of complaint, on my part, was a feeling of neglect, and for Gerard, perhaps the correct belief that I had spread myself too thin. He predicted a crash. I was writing too much and too quickly. He did not know the half of that. I had given him several chapters and I thought he was at first expressing a lack of interest in the new book more than any particular prejudice.

         A year after the book was published by Simon and Schuster, in 1974, I met Gerard by accident at another event and when he turned to leave, I stopped him. I stood directly in front of him in the lobby of the hotel. He was still a sturdy enough fellow to run right over me if he wanted to, but he stopped.

         At that point he had not answered half a dozen calls and several written letters. He glared at me eye to eye to make a point of his unhappiness at my being there.

         I asked him, “What the hell is this all about? What did I do?”

         And then I stood my ground.

         After a moment hesitation he told me, “You did exactly what I knew you would. Wrote all of that down. No mercy. No quarter. What do you think Pat feels about all that? How do you think I should feel? We have our own lives to live.”

         “It was a novel. It’s fiction. It was a story.”

         “You used him. Everyone knows that book was about him. You don’t seem to care if strangers see you in your underwear—hell, even when your sorry ass is naked—but it’s no one else’s business.”

         I said, “Gerard, I only have what I’ve got. I tried to make a story out of it.”

         After a hesitation, he nodded a moment at that. He said, “You know, I feel sorry for your dad now. When I read your first book, I felt a little sorry for you. Now I realize he was the one getting the shaft.”

         That pretty much shut me up for the moment. He left me there to think about it.

         We spoke again several times in the years afterward. Friendlier occasions. The anger wore thin and then fell apart.

***

33. Cowboys and Indigents 

         The manuscript for The Endeavor of Jim was well begun by late spring of 1972.  But I was doing far too much just then to concentrate sufficiently and still handle all that material well. The Fore-edge had suffered a bit for the two months I had disappeared on my book tour. When Roger and I returned from the tour, the magazine was already running behind the printer’s schedule and incurred several extra late-charges as a result. There had been a general idea that I was the boss, even though I had attempted to farm out every responsibility I could. The result was not just the dissension in the office caused by disorganization, but also the cost of one of our key players at that time, Helen Morris, and in the end, that required more of me to correct than I frankly had to give.

         As a result I dumped a good bit of work on Miles Anders. Thankfully, he took the load then without an apparent extra breath.

         But the mess at The Fore-edge was not all of my making. Not directly so. Though I had, in fact, established the cause for it by ‘hiring’ the two principals. When people are not being paid, it is difficult to refer to them as employees, yet the status of almost everyone at the magazine was well beyond that of a volunteer, for the simple fact of their personal investment of time.

         Early on I had divided the spheres of responsibility between ‘editorial’ and ‘publishing.’ Almost everyone on the staff wanted to be part of editorial at first: selecting the material for a given issue, editing this into a presentable state, selecting the art work and graphics, and doing the proofreading. And only two out of the original twenty or so who had shown up at Dante’s Pizza and survived the early attrition took a greater interest in the mechanics of publishing—getting the editorial material into physical form, typesetting and paste-up, and from there on to the printer and then distribution to the dealers and subscribers. For that reason Miles and I designed a work-board to divide up the various jobs for each issue. Miles designed the actual board after a bit of phone conferencing between the two of us. This was a black 4 x 4 cork surface, grilled into squares by white lines to mark various necessary jobs according to priority, onto which small cards were pinned with the name of the staff member who was doing that particular task. The requirement was: if someone took on a job from the ‘editorial’ side, they had to pick another from ‘publishing.’ Each issue had its own board and as publication deadliness approached, it was easy to see the holes that had not been filled. These gaps usually became my responsibility by default.

         Miles was perhaps the only member of the staff who had a natural sense of organization and could prioritize on his feet. Helen Morris had almost the same good sense about editorial balance and graphic design.

         The problem was, though I had effectively off-loaded most of the really hard work on those four hands, I was the interface between them. This had pluses and minuses. And the minus became apparent when I was gone from the scene for two months on that fall book tour. Thus, part of that minus was in fact my fault, for being too willing to take advantage of what I had seen before only as a plus. Math again.

         I was the primary typesetter. I was the primary person doing paste-up. When those tasks were allotted by default to Helen and Miles, they had to deal directly with each other.

         And Helen couldn’t type.

         This was, I think, originally a reaction on her part to avoid learning the sort of skill which had been traditionally placed on women. For his part, Miles could not draw a straight line. Whether it was because of his eyes, or his brain, when he did paste-up, the copy was always crooked. He had thus taken on the typesetting, but that then placed him directly in the line of acquiescing to the editing decisions made by Helen. Miles was a ‘Strunk & White man,’ even to the point of carrying a little paperback copy of that slim work on usage and grammar in his back pocket. Helen, born in Mississippi and a Suwannee University graduate, was given to the Faulkneresque. Her range of appreciation ran from Flannery O’Connor to Jane Austen. The tight measures of Mr. Strunk and Mr. White were not on her scale. Helen did paste-up, but imposed a graphic sense on the pages, and an appreciation for ‘white space’ that used up inches we could not afford. Miles knew the printing budget by heart.

         I had fallen in love with Helen’s Southern drawl about as fast as it had taken me to grab my apartment in Brooklyn. Maybe faster. But in the end, I could not argue with the budget. We had 48-tabloid size pages to fill each month in 12 pt. Times Roman. No more. No less.

         When I returned from the tour with Roger and tried to impose some discipline on the situation, it appeared that I was taking sides with Miles. I could not alter the numbers for Helen’s aesthetic sensibilities. And I am sure she was already sore at me for leaving her behind for two months to carry my load. I learned then that though you may be fortunate enough to have both at once, there is no actual likeness between love and friendship.

         In retrospect, it may be unfair to match the two situations that followed, but they occurred so close to one another that it’s hard to separate them now in my mind.

         I brought Helen with me to the Gerard Strauss Christmas party.

         This was a somewhat gaudy affair. Not untypical of the time in publishing circles. They had taken over a function room that was essentially the entire top floor of the building, and hired a band. It was catered. There was a uniformed service staff with trays arrayed and garnished with morsels. Too much booze. A an opulent buffet of décolletage. Authors roving at will. Assignations in the stairwell. A fistfight in the men’s room. The constant and loud interplay of publishing gossip, editorial innuendo, and authorial boast punctuated by too loud laughter. Roger actually managed to leave with Pat before I did. He was the boy of the hour and whatever decorum had been managed prior to his departure disappeared quickly. I took Helen home with me to Brooklyn shortly after.

         But she didn’t wait to get across the bridge before grilling me. She stood face to face with me on the subway car. I was quite taken with her frown. Helen is one of those women who had a frown you had to love. A sort of comic pout of turned lips and eyebrows. At the party, she had somehow heard about my brief affair with Pat. It was just the sort of gossip that is meant to hurt rather than simply titillate. A twofer, as they say. It was a knock on both Roger and me. Never mind Pat. Helen wanted to know if the sort of thing—the drinking, stupid jokes, ugly behavior, and the assignations—that she had just witnessed at the Gerard Strauss office was common behavior. And I was not sober enough to be convincing her otherwise.

         Helen officially broke up with me before that ever-long winter was over.

         A while back, I reentered the offices of Gerard Strauss again for the first time in years, to see Emily, an old friend who still worked there in the editorial department. Miss Evers had long since retired and is living in Italy. Gerard himself had passed away some years before. But the German multinational that owns the firm now has maintained the old offices at 22nd and Broadway for status—or at least for as long as the fifty-year lease Gerard smartly signed during the 1970s, when space was cheap, still holds.

         Emily is a sweetheart. We had never been romantically inclined together, but always friends. She had sent me a note to say she was finally retiring herself and that there would be someone new in charge of my account. The two books that Gerard published were still officially ‘in print’ at the time. I thought it was a good chance to catch up on the news and say goodbye.

         She is a small woman, not at all fragile, except with that first appearance. Her hair had gone mostly gray, but it was once the natural black that Miss Evers only aspired to and it always curled tightly to her head. I had called and invited her to lunch and she thankfully accepted. I hated going into the heart of the city from Brooklyn in those later days without a specific objective. Wandering about amidst all the new buildings, as I once had, now made me feel like a tourist and not a participant.

         I announced myself at the desk directly in front of the elevators. The fellow there did not recognize my name and ran his finger over the glass of the computer monitor, looking for it. He asked my name again. I said I was one of their authors. He frowned and gave me a second look, shaking his head just a little. Then he accessed a second database and found me.

         “It says here that you’re deceased.”

         I laughed. It seemed too perfect.

         Having heard the exchange, a young woman who was nearby and now looking very serious rather than seeing the humor of it leaned over toward us and looked at the code on the screen. “He’s inactive. 03. Deceased is 04,” and then up at me without embarrassment, “And who is it you wanted to see again?”

         “Emily Black.”

         “She’s in editorial.”

         “I know. I’m here to see her.”

         “Does she know you?”

         “Yes.”

         A phone call was made and then a perfunctory smile replaced the severity of expression.

         “She’ll be right out.”

         I pointed up the hall, “Can I just go back to see her in the office? I know where she is.”

         The fellow shook his head again, “Only authorized personnel are allowed beyond the waiting room.”

         I thought of the years when I had roamed the two floors as if they were a private preserve, trying to find the right idea to correct a scene which Emily had just made clear to me I had left undone. No one had ever questioned me then. Tolerant smiles had met my mumbling.

         Emily appeared momentarily.

         She had barely changed. She immediately appeared to me to be very happy.

         In the elevator, I asked her how she had managed to hang on in such an caustic environment.

         She admitted the cause, readily. “The retirement plan. Two more months, and then I’m free. Free at last! It’s been like a prison sentence since Gerard died . . . But I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m the last of the old crew left. They’ve let everyone else go and I was kept on only because I’d been here the longest, I knew where the bodies were buried, and it gave them the convenience of pointing at me when they wanted to advertise the traditions of the company . . . That, and I told them I would sue their asses off for age discrimination if they fired me, because they’d just hired a couple numbskulls right out of Barnard to replace two of the other old hands.”

         We had a long lunch at a seafood restaurant and she caught me up on recent history at the firm and I told her about my own failed exploits. She seemed to know a bit about those already. There had been a few notices in the press, and a couple of my own articles about ‘the death of the book.’ Then she recalled reading about an interest in making a movie of Idiot’s Idyll and I told her all about that. She had seen the play and regretted not writing me to tell me how much she had liked it. I assumed she hadn’t.

         The sight of a white sauce on someone else’s filet of sole reminded me of Miss Evers.

         I had to ask, “Have you heard from Patricia?”

         Emily shrugged. “Never. Never once. I sent her a few notes concerning a couple of the authors she’d found. I sent her a few Christmas cards early on. But I stopped years ago. She’s alive and well, I hear. She has a small house near Genoa, on the Italian Riviera. I’ve even looked at it on the Google maps. You can see the pool and the white stripe of foam on the beach just a few yards away. I’ve dreamed of living that way myself someday, of course. And finally it’s here. That’s what’s kept me going.”

         “Is she married?”

         “No. Just the once. Roger was it for her, I suppose . . . Why? Some old embers still burning?”

         The raised eyebrow was not curious but critical.

         “No. That was hot soup, but never a fire. I was just the toy of the moment, of course. Young and stupid. Now that I’m old and stupid, the best I can do is try to remember what kind of soup it was and how it tasted.”

         She didn’t quite laugh. She shook her head. “You are incorrigible.” And then she bit her lip with a hesitation, just as she always used to. She cleared her throat before looking up, and out of the blue she said, “You could have had me, if you wanted.”

         There was something of a slap to it. Unexpected. Hard. And I responded too quickly, hoping it was a joke.

         “You’re kidding . . . Sweet Emily?”

         She said, “Sweet Emily can only look back at broth now. I never even got to order the soup. Now I have nothing to remember at all.”

         There was no joke to it. That much was clear in her eyes if not the line of her lips, pressed tight with the sudden recollection of hurt.

         One moment came back to me just then, like a short piece of a film used in a movie trailer that you only manage to see after you’ve already watched the movie, and you say to yourself, ‘That was the right moment to keep.’ In that I see Emily standing there by the elevator in the office at The Gist with the proof copy of The Stolon in a manila envelope, clutched to her body, and her eyes looking over the room for mine. I had remembered that moment a hundred times. Why had I always thought of that clip of a moment as if it were just about me? It was her that I had always seen. The scene was about her and not me.

         I said, “That’s my fault then. I’m sorry for that. My most grievous fault. And just another one of those, in a long history of blindness. I’m very sorry I missed that.” Actually, I think I was afraid. I suddenly felt the cold from the restaurant air conditioner, I saw down that gaping crack in the cosmos filled with all the stuff I’ve never known before. But I immediately fled the other way. I added, “But now we are both alone in the world and trying to stay afloat by our own devices. At least you have the retirement plan.” I started a laugh, but it wasn’t funny. “Then again, I never did have one. I’ll probably end up going back to South Boston, tail between my legs. I can see it coming. Looming. Really, my just deserts. Made to live with myself to the last; with ‘all my sins remembered,’ to borrow a phrase from Joe Haldeman.”

         She leaned in and looked at me full face. An open face.

         She said, “I’m going to New Mexico. You know. I’ve talked to you about that before, I think. I have a little house there near Taos. Bought it a few years ago . . . Do you want to come?”

         There was a spark in her eyes and that crack in the cosmos widened. Another life yawned at me beneath blue skies in hues of yellow and red.

         I should have said yes. Right then. I am that stupid.

         I know that I came close. I believe, for a moment at least, the words were in my mouth. I certainly knew where I was headed as things stood. I know that much about myself, at least, and that even if I did not yet love Emily with the passion I wished for, it would have been better, at the very least, than just soup. Or nothing at all.

         More impressive in that moment was how daring she was to be saying such a thing to me, the habitual reprobate, after so many years. The risk of putting herself in my hands was so far beyond understanding. Why are women so brave? Certainly it’s not fearlessness. Is it abandon? Just another way that the species avoids extinction . . . If women only knew the compulsions that pester a man’s mind. Or is it that they know that much, instinctively, and choose to abandon themselves to it as the only other possibility for themselves, or mankind? Something analogous to the male black widow spider who gives himself up in sexual sacrifice?

         Where do such thoughts even come from?

         Instead of saying, ‘Yes,’ as I should have, I said, “You are a most impressive human being. Where do you get such courage? God only knows why you feel anything for me now, but to make such an offer . . . it takes my breath.”

         She sighed. The spark turned to gloss. I think there was an immediate resignation then. What small hope she had suddenly garnered for such an impossible idea, bled away.

         Looking at me then, right in the eye the way her boss used to do, she said,  “I fell in love with you forty years ago. Did you ever even know that? During the editorial conferences we had over The Stolon . . . No! Not actually!” She held a finger in the air to pin down another thought, ever the editor looking for exactly the right meaning. “Actually, it was that one day down there on Union Square and you had the pushcart and you were selling your own book as if it was the best thing since Catcher in the Rye. Such a goof! Calling out at the top of your lungs. ‘Get your brand new Stolon. Get it right here. While they last!’ And the people coming over to ask, “What’s a Stolon?” She stopped and laughed a bit suddenly, at that, and then paused to look at her hands rather than what might have been on my face, thank God.

         At least she said, “I’d called my friend John at The Post and told him one of our authors had gone mad and was hawking his book to the Christmas crowds like a maniac. That was when—” A serious tone came back to her voice. “But Pat Evers had you by the balls then, you silly schmuck.” She shook her head at my stupidity. “Yet . . . You know, you’d explained all of those things you’d written about in your book, to me! To me! And I’ll bet Pat never even asked . . . I have a picture of you out there in Union Square hanging on my wall at the office right now. I’ll show it to you. Don’t you remember? Or did you just think that every editor would spend so much time with you over such small details? Even back then. It was just an excuse to stay late and talk to you.”

         I had been shown once again that I’d missed another road in life. One I had not even noticed, but certainly should not have overlooked. The compulsions which could have directed me to the safer harbor were usurped and commandeered by a pirate, Pat Evers. That thought, in fact, did leave me breathless. I was stunned and shamed to silence, and when I finally spoke I said the wrong thing once again.

         “Me? I didn’t have a clue. But, certainly you’ve dealt with better men than me in your life. Why me?”

         She shrugged, “Why anything? As you said before, God only knows.”

         This was no bandage to my newly acquired wound.

***

34. Troll Hunter

         Allowing for the possibility that some comely Irish ancestor of mine might have been raped by rampaging Norwegians, I do not know of any Nordic blood in my veins. But you have to admit the very idea of a troll is appealingly horrible. One wants to see them in the semi-darkness beneath every bridge. They are a perfect foil for the calamities in our lives. Not our own greed, or stupidity, or lust. The troll did it.

         The trolls of Norse mythology are like the Welsh ‘bucca,’ and the Irish ‘sidhe’ (the Banshee of death was one) but nothing like the Leanan Sidhe, who were always beautiful and irresistible in their wants and more like Yeats’ very repressed Irish schoolboy imagining of them. The point being there are many types of troll. And they are all around. Reports that they could sometimes be good was the sort of propaganda that could lead to being eaten alive, or roasted on a spit, or stewed.

         I had wanted to assess much of my life as being that of ‘troll hunter’ extraordinaire. But you see by now, that this is not the case. But it appeared to my weak eyes that all the truly horrible trolls had been dealt with well before my coming on the scene. Except for the petty whine of those silly pisks on the internet, I was left to cultivating my fields in relative peace.

         Had I chosen to live a more eventful life, I certainly would have written less. (I take Patrick Leigh Fermor as an example of this.)  Had my enemies been more fierce, and the ‘kol of my moyl’ been more fierce (that is, if I remember the Yiddish of Phyllis Rabinowitz correctly), I might have been made to wage bloodier war. (Yet another blind leader, perhaps?) Or died in the doing, young. But the trolls in my own time, well before the virtual form on the internet, were mostly small and ugly plastic dolls so weak they could be safely made into toys for children. Indeed, this may be a worse fate for those creatures of the night than anything I might have been capable of with my mighty pen.

         Nevertheless. This is what I did.

         And whereas a novel may or may not receive some attention, a review here and a mention there, the work which has kept my name at least above the water line and afloat through more than one storm as has been in the form essay. Even when I could not find an agent to handle my fiction, and before the demise of periodicals as a market for the printed word has altered, there was always some interest in the magazines for the non-fiction I wrote, that is of the sort I used to crank out for The Gist, and especially if aimed it at some new and popular shibboleth or mania.

         One more example here will suffice.

         Though his authority in the matter is obviously questionable, given the fact that he was not only highly educated and stubbornly rational (which clearly makes him an elitist), but also because he is dead, white, and male, which makes him automatically evil, I have grown quite fond of a supposed quote (attributed to but not confirmed) from the work of Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee, a Scottish judge and professor of history and antiquities at the University of Edinburgh (and a good friend of the poet Robert Burns).

         It is said that Mr. Tytler once said, “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess of the public treasury. From that time on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits . . . with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always to be followed by a dictatorship . . .”

         It is somewhat entertaining to me that a number of pseudo intellectuals have disputed whether the good Judge ever wrote such a thing. Evidently the exact words are not to be found in the canon of his work. I wouldn’t know. But they are an exact representation of much else that I have read by him, so it is a dickering of dick-heads to argue the wording and ignore the meaning. But that too is common to our age. 

A proclaimed monarchist, Judge Tytler is most avowedly not a libertarian and so I have read his arguments as an excellent model of rational contest to my own beliefs. He is invigorating. And he has much else to offer on the subject of democracy by way of example and verification that brings smelling salts to the faint of mind who pander to the pottage of egalitarianism in our time, but all of that is irrelevant to most readers in that they have not subscribed to this memoir with the intention of receiving a lecture from a dead guy via one only nearly living, especially about politics. Nor is the dispute as to whether he said those words, or not, of any importance here. I am not so interested in the source as I am in the meaning of the words. If they were contained only in a novel, it would be sufficient. But they were the catalyst to my own thinking and immediately important to why I did what I did in 1975.

         I had spent countless but joyful hours of my pre-internet life during that year going from bookshop to bookshop in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Boston, looking for a copy of Tytler’s biographical memoir of his friend and mentor Henry Home, Lord Kames, a key figure of the Scottish Enlightenment and a father of modern libertarian thought. What might have been the dinner table arguments between these two great men, one the elder statesman and the other a young lawyer, fast friends, though diametrically opposed to one another by philosophy? What a two-person play it might make, if staged well!

         Understanding my madness then, without this appreciation is impossible. I began my search with the greater interest in Kames, and ended it struck dumb by the truth that I had learned something more from his friend and philosophical opponent.

         We act, all of us, and react to the times in which we live. I had built great hopes on the social revolution that had overtaken the public marketplace of ideas and challenged the established institutions in my youth. And I agreed wholly by dint of my reading of history with another supposed statement by the Judge: “The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from great courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from dependency back again to bondage.”

         But why was locating his book so difficult? Why was finding any good book so difficult? Most copies were not expensive, having been frequently used by good teachers in those olden times when the rigor of philosophy was part of the curriculum and thus of little interest to the price conscious antiquarians of the rare. Shouldn’t the good ones be the easiest to come upon? Sure, you could stumble on Joyce’s Ulysses and Fitzgerald’s Gatsby around any corner. But they were idolized by the academy. Why not Roumeli, the account of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s travels in Northern Greece? It had only just been published in 1966 and was already out of print! And what about Tschiffely’s Ride? Aime Felix Tschiffely had journeyed on horseback from Buenos Aires to Washington D.C. in 1925, across the Andes more than once, through jungle and desert. That book was a bestseller in 1933. It took me weeks to track down a copy only forty years later. Or Eric Newby’s account of capture, escape and romance, Love and War in the Apennines. That memoir had been published as recently as 1971 and wasn’t even available to me in the United States without special ordering the British edition. My want list for biography, memoir, and true life adventures was long. For history and fiction it was far longer. No wonder we were an ill-educated lot, I said. I said that aloud, I should say.     

         In 1975 I was staring at the coming two hundredth anniversary of my own nation squarely in the face. Most of my time during the previous six years had been spent writing fiction, mostly novels, and an occasional essay to prick some specific boil on my ass that made it difficult to sit still. What concerned me most was that, in conversation with my fellow baby boomers, an especially large and ill-educated tribe, I was continually confronted with a depth of ignorance that closed off any possibility of argument. By their lights, there was no future of consequences to be paid by them for the actions they took in the present. The inner allusions of Gatsby had eluded them.

         As always, the history of the moment continued to cumulate and accrue. The unfortunate Vietnamese who had foolishly trusted the Americans to beat back those other Vietnamese who had alternative ideas about who should rule that small portion of the heart of darkness, found themselves abandoned. The procession of dictators in Soviet Russia and other godforsaken precincts continued. South America festered. Africa re-discovered the joys of genocide. The American space program, built on political expediencies and objectives, sputtered to an inevitably political end. And with Richard Nixon now eliminated from the focus of power, American politics floundered in the ebb tide, unsure of itself and in need of a new bogeyman to scare the populace into voting for someone else.

         I am a one candle sort of fellow. Better to light that one small wick than to curse the darkness. Already breathing as much 3M spray affixative while doing paste-up for the photo-ready copy of The Fore-edge as my physiology could handle, I could not imagine starting another publication to more particularly address political topics. Besides, my own libertarian philosophy was not one that might gather interest from any identifiable group. It was too often at odds with one thing or another. I could argue the case for a literary magazine devoted to the florid and ample lies of storytelling, as we had made with The Fore-edge, but I could not discover a political label for myself that would draw flies, much less intellects. Libertarians would as soon shoot each other as anyone else. I might, however, offer some refuge to the inquiring mind, be a resource for the few who dared question authority, and make some small portion of my needed living expenses from the effort, if I did something else entirely.

         After the paperback sales for The Endeavor of Jim petered out, The Unfortunate Happiness of Peter Brim had not produced much more than the publisher’s too generous advance after three printings (and that had already been used to pay an overdue printer’s bill for The Fore-edge). Metaphysical inquiries into the joys and sorrows of living, at least those proffered as fiction, or not attached to some faddish presentation of the newly discovered splendors of sex, the horrible possibility of being eaten by a sea monster, or the dietary pleasures of eliminating biologically crucial carbohydrates from the diet, did not appear to have a natural following either. My new publisher dropped me and sold themselves to another, larger fish. I was left then with a contemplation of why anyone would believe in a philosophy that prohibited spaghetti. (That quandary, at least, was picked up by the magazine Food and Wine.)

         So I picked up the thread and wrote a little love story to that effect as well, mostly about a couple of fictional doppelgangers for Helen Morris and myself and the ways a guy can screw up a good thing, and called it No Food for the Gods. A vegetarian nightmare with steak sauce. My agent informed me there was a rumor that Viking wanted another love story for their fall list to counter some other publisher’s successful fore-play. They took mine. There was even talk of a movie when an option for the film rights was sold—a modest but important additional income of $5000 after deductions for various and sundry.

         And naturally enough for me, this left only one possibility for future happiness: I opened a bookshop.

         Willa Cather died the year I was born. What a coincidence. Isn’t it amazing? Not so much, you say. Just another fact without a context. I thus began looking for context. Some of the bestsellers in 1975 were: Angels, God’s Secret Agents by the Rev. Billy Graham, Winning through Intimidation by Robert Ringer, and The Bermuda Triangle by Charles Berlitz. These should have been warning enough. But the true depths of my profound stupidity were as yet unplumbed.

         The plumb was just the lead in my head, and the line of credit foolish friends were willing to extend. I should have been encouraged had I heard a call, “by the mark twain.” Instead the lined reeled out as if the weight had been taken by a sea monster (or giant catfish) as bait. I took the silence that returned as promising instead of realizing I was simply out of my depth.

         Selling The Stolon on the street that cold and sunny December day in 1969 had left its mark. I had enjoyed it enormously. Not the weather that already seemed so distant, but the interaction with people and the engagement over something so ephemeral as a mere book, and a novel at that, as opposed to the more mundane needs in life.

         I had thought about starting up a bookshop many times, just for the ‘fun’ of it; having spent too many hours of my life each week in one or another of those places not to be aware of the inky realities of wood pulp and rag. I pity the poor seeker of truth today who has nothing more than the glass of the computer screen before them, or on their hands. They cannot know that the scent of truth is to be found in the dust. The shadow of the finger of knowledge seeking the spine of the right book is a gnomon across latitudinous lines of shelving, and as true as the mark of a style, as that spike of shadow upon the surface of the sundial seeks the hour against the rotation of the planet. True north can be found in no other way.

         I wanted a place of my own where the works of monarchists and libertarians, Marxists and Unitarians, might mingle.

         I began actively to look at books on the shelves at other shops as if I were selecting them for my own. I started examining shelves and considering the pluses or minuses of this kind or that. For being more wieldy, a unit three feet wide seemed more appropriate to me than four. Pine would be easier to cut than oak, much cheaper, and could be more easily falsified by stain to look like anything I might want it to appear to be. This process had grown to something of an obsession by January 1975, when I found myself on one cold afternoon, staring up at the lights and fixtures in The Strand, a large shop on the Lower East Side, and a frequent destination for me in those days. I didn’t like them. The fluorescence bleached the color from the book covers on display and filled the air with a vapor of homogenous glow that defied my need for shadows and gnomons. Nor were they bright enough in many places. By a trick of corners, some nooks were actually dark. A young fellow who was putting away books nearby noticed my interest and came over and stood beside me staring up at the fixture I was contemplating at that moment.

         He said, “What do you see?”

         I said, “I see the light.”

         There was a moment of silence. Then he started laughing out loud and shaking his head as if I had caught him in a prank. As usual, I had not actually meant the joke. I was simply playing with the words. But I did see the light—just then—and possibly this was caused out of some immediate embarrassment at my own words. The cringe of self-consciousness cleared everything else from my mind, perhaps. But I knew then, standing in that spot in the aisle, that I should just go ahead and do it and stop thinking about it.

         The Marlboro Smoke Shop on 7th Street in Brooklyn had closed at the end of December. The owner, Harold Stern, had died after fifty years of purveying the best cigars and the cheapest cigarettes in New York. I had been a regular customer for the latter. It was a good spot. Barely two blocks from my apartment. Not too large. Eighteen feet from side to side. Fifty-nine feet deep. Twelve-foot ceilings. (Those were embossed tin, like the cover of a Victorian book.) Big enough by my reckoning. But the owner wanted $1200 a month. That was over my budget. But he wasn’t interested then in coming down in price, so I looked elsewhere. And I kept my fingers crossed.

There were three or four other spaces vacant in the area. The general economy was bad, and New York’s was worse. All of the other locations were asking about as much—all of them over $12 per square foot per year. But I liked the Marlboro Smoke Shop space. It offered a little more room for the money because it had never been renovated. The building was a neat red brick with yellow brick trim that soot darkened to match the red. You could see that whoever had built the place a hundred years before had given some care to the details.

         By May, the landlord had blinked. We dickered. I offered him eight hundred. He offered to come down to $1000. I offered eight-fifty. He told me the best he could do was $950. We settled on $900, with a maximum hike of $50 after the first year, and no more than $50 any year thereafter. I had most of the five-thousand-dollar movie option from my fifth novel in the bank and a little more left from the actual advance and that was burning a hole in my pocket vault. After the security deposit, a month’s rent and two months’ rent in advance, I had $1400 left to live on as well as to make a deposit with Con Edison, get insurance, buy books, shelves, lighting fixtures, a cash register and anything else that might present itself. I had to borrow some money.

         I called Mr. Ritts.

         His advice, reduced to its essence was, “Don’t do it.”

         I said, “But I’m going to do it!”

         He asked, “How much do you make out of The Fore-edge?”

         “Make? You mean, like, a salary?”

         “Whatever.”

         “We don’t have salaries. We barely get enough in the door every month to pay the printer’s bill.” That was a lie. We rarely made the monthly nut. But I assumed he would assume as much.

         The usually restrained tone of his voice rose in surprise.

         “But I see it all over the place. I thought it was a big success.”

         “It is. By the standards of other literary magazines, I suppose.”

         “You are hopeless.”

          Stating the obvious was not going to alter my course.

         “So?”

         He said, “I can probably put together a couple of thousand that I can afford to never see again.”

         I said, “Thanks.”

         This conversation, cadging mostly smaller sums, was duplicated several times during that one week. By the end of it I had a massed a small fortune of eight thousand additional dollars and I’d used up every line of credit I had among my few friends, and that included two other members of the staff at The Fore-edge.

         The next matter was what I would call my enterprise, given the probable doom the venture faced. Naming it for some favorite author like Kipling or Boswell, or Shakespeare, seemed inappropriately like blaming those worthies for my foolishness, and besides, most of those names were already well used in one form or another. Puns had become popular as business names just then, like ‘All Booked Up,’ or ‘Bearly Read Books,’ but for my own purposes, my imagination failed me, and we were not in a basement, so the nearly ubiquitous ‘Bookcellar’ was out.

         As the day approached and the first advertisements and other such things had to be placed. I panicked. Calling it the ‘Fore-edge,’ after our magazine seemed obvious enough, but that word clearly needed some additional annotation to make it clear just what sort of shop it was. I came up with ‘Fore-edges and Endpapers’ and almost went with that until one member of the magazine staff who shall remain nameless, in spite of the great and lasting benefit of their acute observation, said to me, “What’s an endpaper? Is that like toilet tissue? You aren’t going to name it that, are you?” I was immediately reminded of the woman at the Eastern Newsstand asking Mr. Green if he carried the ‘Fore-skin.’ The nuance overwhelmed the literary.

         That night I worked away at the chaos in my unfinished shop until just after midnight, smoking my remaining half pack of cigarettes, drinking my last four warm beers, and had to unplug the toilet twice before the inspiration finally came to me as I exited the small room at the back and stared out over the piles I had made by category in order to get a visual sense of the shelving I still needed. The meager sun of a single remaining light bulb cast its brilliance. It was a landscape. Another country.

I settled on the name ‘A Republic of Books’ only two weeks before we opened the doors.

         There is a house in Brooklyn, over in Bay Ridge, that is built out of fieldstones, framed in an ironwork fence, with an undulating roof that looks like thatch, and with windows broken into the multiple lights that you will only see on a hand-built and uniquely imagined home—or something out of the arts and crafts movement. That house stands out on the street as if transplanted there by an alien culture amidst all the others which are nice enough but merely common versions of the same rectangular thing, repeated for the convenience of the builders, over and again, as if it was the people who live in them who must conform to the carpenters need to simply get the job done and go home to his own proscribed version of the same, rather than to meet the needs of the client. I kept that exemplar of whimsy from Bay Ridge in my head as I worked through the allotment of inches on my aisles at the store. I knew I would be living in the place as much or more than anywhere else each day and I wanted something that would keep my own interest.

         About this time, searching for lower cost solutions to the problems that faced me, I had discovered, both to my horror and my benefit, that many of the old houses and apartments which had been built with the loving care of craftsmen several generations ago, back when the work of a life mattered as much as the pay, were now being gutted for modern conveniences, and once livable spaces were being ‘rehabbed’ and sub-divided into something better suited to lab rats. My benefit from that circumstance was simply that those people of olden times once read by the ambient light of their glass windows rather than to stare, glassy-eyed, at the screens of their televisions.

         At a salvage yard in Queens I discovered stacks of oak and beech and ash and maple shelving, all of it torn from the built-in spaces of homes that had been ‘remodeled,’ and so already shellacked, and excepting for a scratch or some wear, ready to polish again. I spent a week there, selecting sizes that I could wrestle with my own meager carpentry skills into new shelving units. In the end I spent far more on my shelves than I had budgeted, but they were at least worthy of the books I wanted to fill them with.

         When it was finally obvious I would not have enough funds to buy all the books I needed, I appealed to the publisher’s themselves, or at least to their credit departments.

         Random House then managed several imprints, including Knopf and Pantheon and, most crucially, Ballantine, which was the purveyor of much of the science fiction I wanted in paperback. Viking was associated with Penguin. I was able to get a fair assortment of the classics from them before I had reached my limit. The woman at the credit department for Gerard Strauss remembered my name and took the order without even the fuss of credit forms and banking information. They were still that small of a company then.

         Various people came by to say hello during the several months while my expenses mounted and the opening date wanted to recede rather than get closer. I had the telephone company in on the very week when I had signed the lease. But the electrician and the plumber and the city inspector came in on their own good time. The first city inspector kindly told me everything I was doing was wrong and gave me the list of other inspectors whose approval would be necessary before opening. I assumed by his demeanor (impatience with my questions) many of these criticisms had no bearing on any code or requirement other than his own opinion. I told him I had too little money to do it his way. By the look of sawdust in my hair and grime on my clothes, I guess he supposed I was telling him the truth. But most of the time I was there alone.

         I had ‘temporarily’ given up my morning writing schedule and one of my usual afternoons at the Fore-edge office, and every one of the evenings I might have otherwise spent at a movie theater. I set up my little KLH stereo system and played records loudly to drown the monster doubts that pushed up through every crack in my plan. At night I obsessed over petty worries, like the need to eat, and used those as firebreaks in a forest of doubt to fend the others off.

         And then, one day, while I was deep inside the chaos of store space fitting a set of darkly stained oak boards together that had once been used to hold fine china in a dining room, I heard the tap of metal at the window. A finger ring.

         Gerard stood there in the sun outside, holding his hand at his cheek against the sooty glass so that he could see through.

         As I let him in, he asked, “What fine madness is this?”

         I said, “I have no excuse for it. It was a compulsion.”

         He looked healthy then and tanned and smelled of the last cigar he had smoked. As he walked through and looked at the mess and noted this or that, I was so pleased he’d come that I don’t in fact remember all of what he said that day. Simply, to my needy ears, he sounded pleased with me, but full of fatherly cautions, and gave me more than enough faith to keep me going. And at the last, he spoke to my larger concerns.

         “These shelves, they come out of houses that once had such needs because people used to read and keep the books they loved to read again, and to lend them to friends. That world is not this one, my boy. Reading is an ephemeral occupation nowadays. Paperbacks are disposable and replacements available, like condoms, at any drugstore. Barnes and Noble has expanded into a dozen locations and growing, just like the one down the street here. Because they’re only pushing the books that they take those big ads out for in the Times, they’re buying quantities at a discount you can’t get. They stack them up like cereal boxes at the supermarket. People are all buying what they heard about on the Carson show or the Cavett show on the TV last night, or saw on the bestseller list in the New York Times on Sunday, because they don’t want to be out of the loop. I don’t know how you intend to compete with that, but anything I can do, let me know. The trolls will be waiting for you beneath every bridge. Be armed . . . And don’t forget to keep writing yourself. If you do this, but then forget to write, you’ve only taken one step forward for the two you’ve lost. You cannot see the white of their teeth when the troll smiles. That’s what makes them so dangerous.

***

35. Found paradise, and lost again

         “I find . . . more order and restraint in my morals than in my opinions, and my lust less depraved than my reason. ” 

         Of Cruelty: Essays, Book Two, by Michel de Montaigne

         Dad’s first idea of a family vacation was to place us into a circumstance which was as alien to our everyday lives as he could afford. Not a bad idea in theory. But this inspiration was then vitiated somewhat, and thankfully so, by the fact that we went back to those same places we had liked best each year thereafter, year after year.

         Most years he had two weeks of paid vacation time and he broke this into two parts, one week in mid-July and the other week in mid-August. July was spent at Harley’s Motor Camp in Easton, in a stand of stunted pine on Cape Cod. This place was composed of thirty-six ‘Roadcraft’ trailers which had been purchased new at a bankruptcy auction in 1954 by Thomas Harley, a fisherman in Wellfleet who had grown tired of the ‘wet-work’ and used an insurance settlement after Hurricane Carol to buy the trailers as well as the four acres of land in a stand of pine on a low sandy ridge in Easton. Speaking of the sand may sound like a prolixity given that this was Cape Cod, but the sand at Harley’s Camp had special qualities. It traveled on its own. It seeped. It infused. It infiltrated any fabric, all foodstuffs, and every orifice. As a consequence, from the first crunch of egg in the morning to the last gritty bit of hot dog at night, we had a sort of day-long and living  example of how the gizzard functions in the chicken.

         It makes no sense to go on about the glory of running headlong on a wide-open beach against a stiff ocean wind, or digging ephemeral bastions against the incoming waves or spending hours at play in the living churn of the surf. All that is the plain paradise of it. It is assumed. What I have had the most fun writing about through the years since is the particular resonance of a grain of sand as it catches between your molars.

         The other vacation spot that Dad found for a week in August, was a 10 by 12 cabin on Sebago Lake in Maine. This rustic place was also an established paradise for the Culicidae family, who always came especially to holiday on that same week, and with whom we were forced to play. Or so it seems to me in memory.

         Dad went fishing, often with Eddy if he would willingly get out of bed in the dark of night. By day, Mom stayed within the screened porch and read her ‘summer’ books.  I mostly remained submersed by the lake waters like a log, or moved quickly, arms cartwheeling continuously in an effort to separate myself from the friendly visitations of our flying neighbors. For that week I stank of insect repellant and wandered aimlessly as a feral child amongst the ferns and the lichen. Except, of course, when Dad insisted on taking me fishing as well, which required getting up before dawn and stumbling across the pine roots in the dark. At noon we would use our daily allotted quarter to purchase the world’s thinnest hamburger, a coke in a small thick green-glass bottle, and an ice cream sandwich that melted faster than it could be consumed. (A side note: to my mind, this meal still ranks as one of the finest achievements of civilization.)

         The single commonality of these two experiences, excepting sunlight and water, were the pine trees. Forever since, no place can be a vacation spot unless there are pine trees. The rest is optional.

         But it was from this meager evidence I took a certain sense of what Paradise was, or should be.

         In 1976 I had an idea for a movie. Though the whole exercise was a botch from the beginning, I learned a little something from the effort worth telling.

         I had just read a novel by Elizabeth Boyer about the historical castaway Marguerite de la Rocque, who had been abandoned by her cousin, Captain Jean-Francois de La Rocque, on an island in the Atlantic, somewhere off the coast of Newfoundland. The true story had been previously retold several times by other authors, some contemporary, as well as various historians and even a poet. But given the rising feminism of that moment, the substance seemed to me to be ripe for use as the subject of a film. It was to me as mythic as any Norse saga.

         To this was added the inspiration of a one-hundred-dollar bottle of Bordeaux, given to me by my publisher upon completion the previous year of The Unfortunate Happiness of Peter Brim, and still sitting unopened on a shelf in my narrow loft. The aroma of fine Bordeaux is nearly irresistible, but I was generally not fond of wine for the after-effects within my skull. The philosophy of Michel de Montaigne, as well as the person of the great humanist thinker himself, had figured heavily in that previous work and he was, of course, from Bordeaux. And then one particular night I was out of beer. The headache that followed was well earned.

         The Elizabeth Boyer story was good, but failed to capture the dramatic moment I wanted for my own purpose—the make or break element of civilization—so I went back to earlier sources. At this time I had yet to finish any other film script, though I had started several, and for reasons as mysterious as any, this particular tale suddenly captured my sense of something that would be ideal for such a project. A recapitulation of Eden. A reconstruction of human society from the ground up. And as well, a fundamental statement of both the differences and equalities inherent with men and women. (True, I had recently broken up with Helen Morris, and felt the loss.) But it was at heart a wonderful adventure story about a Paradise lost as well as love and redemption.

         Michel de la Montaigne and Marguerite de la Rocque were contemporaries, so I reasoned that they might even have been familiar to one another. Very familiar, perhaps? A good thought, as her family estates were in the Aquitaine and not so far from Bordeaux. Could it be enough that they read the same books and were influenced by innovative ideas? Maybe. But women were not commonly educated at the time and we know that Michel’s father had him reading Latin before French, and schooled him in the humanist theories that were transforming the Renaissance mind at a time when the various religions that purported to follow Christ were bent on destroying one another in slaughter and burning. But then I would never have let a matter of mere geography stand in the way of a good idea. And just as Montaigne, the son, was schooled by his father, the rich merchant Pierre Eyquem, to be the best of minds, Marguerite’s father had raised his only child as if she were a son.

         What was known of the original event which has lingered in history was scanty enough: during the year 1541, on an early exploratory voyage to the New World, Marguerite, a cousin to the Captain, had fallen in love with one of the sailors aboard ship. When the Captain learned of this, he put her and her belongings ashore, along with a servant Damienne, likely because, as the only females, they had become disruptive influences within the close confines of the ship, or as punishment, or perhaps only to get rid of her so that he might inherit her lands. (Captain La Rocque was famously profligate and habitually in debt.) Or perhaps he actually intended to pick them up again on his return, as he testified. That is not known.

         But always, the most important of facts are unknown. The history is wonderfully uncertain, and for truth, that is where the best of stories lie. We do not have a clue why Marguerite, an unmarried woman of property, was aboard the ship in the first place, rather than abiding more safely at home. And whatever the cause of her presence (even first cousins sometimes married in this age), the unnamed sailor (in some accounts a man of noble birth, or an officer, but most likely a ship’s carpenter, who would be of more value to the voyage than another aristocrat or a mere female) did not take Captain La Rocque’s will as his own command, and jumped ship himself, foolishly choosing to stay behind on the island with the object of his new found passion.

         What is known, or thought to be known, of the two and a half years that followed is the basis for endless legend. Marguerite became pregnant. The servant died. The carpenter died. The child died. And this historical detail, “She had shot three bears ‘as white as an egg.’ ”

         The actual Marguerite survived, we know, rescued by Basque fishermen, and lived on long afterward, becoming famous from the recounting of her exploits, and was later a school mistress living in a family Chateau at Nontron in the Aquitaine. Not all that far from Bordeaux.

         So as to be free of any restraint, I chose all of my few facts selectively from the scant record of an early and original account, the Heptaméron by Queen Marguerite of Navarre, as well as the histories by François de Belleforest and André Thévet, but admittedly, from the beginning, I was greatly influenced by the novel by Ms. Boyer.

         The evil Captain Jean-Francois de la Rocque’s previously unprincipled life had been much aided by his friendship with King Francis I, who had granted him a Royal charter for his explorations as Lieutenant General of New France. For a time he had been a successful corsair and adventurer (pirate) against Spain and England but recently converted to Calvinism at the time of the incident I was focused upon, and was struggling to live within the strict moral code of his new philosophy. He apparently may have even been an early Huguenot martyr at the time of the St. Bartholomew Massacre of Protestants by Catholics. The undercurrents of the story were that fine.

         I imagined then that La Rocque himself had first seduced his young and rebellious cousin Marguerite and brought her on the voyage as his mistress. For her part, as an individual of personal independence in a time where no legal rights were possible to a woman without a husband, she had come along at the Captain’s convenience as well as to escape some measure of shame and family ire. Perhaps she was hoping for a marriage performed by the Franciscan priest aboard. Her falling in love with the ship’s carpenter, Pierre, on that long voyage had to have been an unfortunate happenstance.

         Pierre, I thought, should be a good man, and fair, but unschooled beyond the ways of wood. Not a thinker, but intrigued by the mysteries of thought from the lips of a beautiful woman he calls ‘Peggy.’ A handsome man with a sense of adventure and the physical prowess to do whatever he thought necessary, not destined to be a drudge in a small village. His shining youth would have been a great attraction over the older scarred and battered body of La Rocque. The simpler philosophies of wood must have been charming to her ears.

         It might have been jealous rage, and at least the counsel of the ship’s priest, which had made La Rocque caste Marguerite away on the island, along with all evidence of his own immorality. But at this, it was more like the devil casting Adam and Eve ‘into’ the garden of Eden.

         Unfortunately, there is no paradise on earth.

         Against contradictory historical conjectures in favor of various smaller islands nearer the mainland where survival alone, for even a year, would be problematic because of weather as well as the native tribes who hunted there, I chose Sable Island as the more probable place for this Paradise. A sandy crescent-shaped spit of land over twenty-five miles long and little more than a mile wide, this shoal which is almost two hundred miles from the mainland of Nova Scotia had fascinated me before and still does, like a Pacific atoll lost and adrift out of place. If, in fact Captain La Rocque had hoped to return at all, he would have chosen such a location already known to him on his charts and a more likely spot to find again. But the great fogs caused by the Gulf Stream meeting the Labrador current at that ocean crest had hidden the island on his return months later. He might have even given misdirection afterward so that no others might find his cousin until her fate was sealed and obscured by tides and weather.

         Warm enough due to those same ocean currents, Sable Island has fresh water, even today. A quantity enough to support wildlife. And trees enough in those days, though low in height. The place is barren now, having been ravaged through hundreds of years of abuse by fishermen in need of firewood and the predations of ‘wreckers’ who preyed on the ships that foundered in those shallows. I supposed it to be like a smaller Cape Cod, shell-girt within the shoal-frilled skirt of the sea, a place familiar enough to me, but without the tourists and the traffic. Importantly, it also gave me the use of fog. I have always loved fog as a background for both good and evil, mistakes and discoveries; melodramatic in its special effects, yet real and truly terrifying, as anyone ever lost in one alone can testify.

         The conflict between the sexes as they struggle with the isolation of their circumstance becomes the deeper story. If they are to survive they must come to terms with this new place and with themselves. Food and water must be found amidst the grassy dunes and scrub. Great auks, flightless, are caught and cooked and eaten. Shelter made.

         Peggy, at once, is inspired by her circumstance and relishes her newfound independence. Without the oversight of convention, and to the consternation and pleasure of the ever willing Pierre, her unfettering is quickly complete. She runs naked on the beach as far as her breath can take her, just as she had dreamed of doing since childhood. The servant, Damienne, more used to her reduced role in life, preserves her modesty longer and thus represents the tendency of those who have less to begin with to hold tight to what little they have.

         There is a darker presence in paradise. But that darkness is not the bear, though that enormous presence is exposed when he is shot (only one of these, an enormous beast that had drifted too far south on sea ice flows and then swum to the island sometime before the castaways). After all, I had decided the other bears were counted by exaggeration in the retelling of the terrible confrontation. (One was sufficient.) I even played there with a recapitulation of Robinson Crusoe’s finding of Friday’s footprint, as Peggy first discovers the great bear’s pawmark in the sand. Its grunts in the night as it seeks their larder are likened to the devil by Damienne, who fears that what her mistress had done has brought forth the beast, even as Peggy and Pierre make love nearby.

         Damienne learns to forage for greens and blueberries and the eggs of birds. She traps seal pups on a cord and chases pell-mell after the flightless auks, tackling them in her arms and wringing their necks. Her natural quiet is broken only by the telling of folk tales, often scary and horrific, as she manages ways to cook, using shells at the fire. Pierre, who had first built a hut only against the winds, transforms this at Peggy’s urging into a small home with driftwood from wrecks and by using the stunted pine and spruce and larch that grow there, playing the harder wood against the soft.

         Marguerite is the only one familiar with the use of the arquebus, one of her father’s guns which she had packed for the voyage to a New World wilderness rather than additional clothes. She learned to shoot pheasant on her father’s estate in France, when she had been responsible for reloading the guns between firings. Now she shoots puffins  and seals. In the critical moment, it is that finesse that allows her to kill the white beast of a bear with a second shot as it chases her in the fog.

         But now, afraid of using up the remaining powder, and spooked by the bear, Peggy becomes overly careful, not knowing what else might be lurking there. Fear has come to paradise. When winter arrives, they are more often confined to the close quarters of their shelter by foul weather. Peggy and Damienne’s remaining clothes have tattered and they dress themselves for warmth now with the bear skin and the shredded remains of cloth woven with the skins and feathers of other animals they are able to kill for food. They look more like Indians.

         I imagined then, in the howl of winter, that Damienne would seek Pierre for comfort against the cold. And the carpenter, always resourceful, and a randy fellow in his own right, had finally seduced the servant maid. It is then that the politics of survival between two women and a single man becomes more acute. An even more elemental contest. Inevitably, with spring, just as Peggy’s cousin Jean-Francois had cast her away for succumbing to Pierre, she rejects Damienne in turn, banishing her from their compound at the point of the gun. Marguerite is now pregnant and worries for her own well-being and that of the child. Semi-heroic Pierre attempts to defend and provide for them both (and to have his cake and eat it too) by building a second shelter. But the effort fails its purpose. He is now in love with Damienne.

         An uneasy truce is made. The baby is born, with Damienne there to aid in the delivery. But that done, the jealousy arises again, and now more fiercely as Peggy understands a need to defend her child.

         One evening, Peggy comes home from hunting and discovers Damienne with Pierre once more, and her baby neglected in a cold crib. Damienne is driven out once more. But by then the weather is already turning toward their second winter on the island.

         The auks are now gone and the seals have left for better shelter. Food becomes scarce beneath the snows. In desperate hunger, one deep-chilled and moon-bright night, Damienne returns, wearing her bear skin, and seeking food from the larder. Marguerite, suddenly awakened, shoots her, perhaps only by mistake, thinking it might be yet another bear. But then, as Pierre attempts to stop the murder, he too is killed. The last of the gunpowder has been used or spoiled. Marguerite is finally the only witness to her trial by conscience and by fact.

         Unable to care for the baby and also hunt for food, the child is soon lost as well. When discovered by the Basque fisherman she is half-mad, naked and emaciated. Her found paradise had become her hell. The baby is buried in its crib with only the rocking handle which had lovingly been carved by Pierre, to be seen above the drift of sand. The rusted arquebus is broken into a cross above the one grave for both Pierre and Damienne.

         Richard Herman was an independent filmmaker and director then living in New York. He had spent several years filming off Broadway plays for some theatre archive which was supported by the National Endowment and was tired of getting nowhere close to Hollywood. We had met at a party, and when I thought the original script was complete, I called him for some advice as to where to take it. He suggested immediately that I bring it to his office on lower Broadway. We ended up talking through an entire night and eating bagels and coffee for breakfast together while sitting on a park bench one cool April morning on the East River, over by Brooklyn Bridge. The sun comes up there with the Manhattan Bridge behind in such a way you’ll want to write a story that takes place right on that spot, just for that backdrop. Just like John Ford used Monument Valley.

         Briefly, I think, we both thought we had found what we were looking for.

         We managed to visit Sable Island twice that summer while staying at an old brick hotel in Halifax, and scouted out a smaller island closer to Nova Scotia with sufficient trees to use for necessary scenes. In the meantime Richard had already begun his queries.

         At first there appeared to be some interest. But then there were immediate objections, once the script was submitted to the appropriate authorities at the Canadian Film Board. They didn’t like the idea of three actors running around half-naked on the grassy dunes of their National Trust. (I had even doctored those scenes which contained full nudity, already aware of the possibility of there being some problem with the naked human body as opposed to a sequence of some hoodlum blowing the brains out of a cop on the streets of Toronto as you might remember from one or another film they had okayed the same year). And then some bureaucrat for the Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau, suggested that the randy sailor’s name had been chosen for political reasons. The Canadian Film Board rejected the project. Finally, Richard got a last minute teaching position at NYU. He’s there yet today.

         I had written the screenplay during a few weeks of 1976. There was no other interest to any of my own queries over the following year. I re-wrote it in 1977. And again in 1978. These were the years of Star Wars and Saturday Night Fever. At the time, Annie Hall better represented the ‘new’ woman, it seemed, than my resourceful Peggy. David Lynch’s Eraserhead better captured the zeitgeist than my petty Paradise Lost.

***

36. Our Hatrack; or righting writes

         Pornography, you might think, went away as an important matter for argument in civilized countries about the time H.L. Mencken got himself arrested on Boston Common in the Hatrack case in 1924. You’d be wrong. Limits upon speech and the press have increased greatly in our time. Libel laws have proliferated to protect the entrenched. Copyright laws have been expanded to enlarge the inheritance of royalties by third cousins twice-removed. It is easier to find an original 19th century novel today by Wilkie Collins than a 20th century title by Henry Green. Even patent law has been drawn upon to inhibit the use of particular words, which are now ‘owned.’ And whole religions have been singled out as beyond the pale of criticism. And races too. I have learned that the hard way.

         Inspired by the best parts of Henry Miller and Erskine Caldwell when I was still young, I did try my hand (so to speak) at writing a little of a softer variety or porn to gloss a smaller story or two, but it was a waste of time. Just too little satisfaction, or gratification for that matter. I am at once too Catholic to enjoy the form and too agnostic to think is worth the effort.

         I don’t doubt, if we had ever received anything at The Fore-edge as well written as Herbert Asbury’s fictional memoir about a small town Missouri prostitute, we would have grabbed it. But in Mencken’s time, only fifty years before, even the innuendo of illicit sex could get your publication removed from the newsstands and libraries. This much, at least, is no longer the case, and thus our times offer fewer opportunities in that regard to the resourceful publisher looking for new ways to increase sales. Simply using words forbidden by the arbiters of the politically correct does not draw the animal interest in the same way as a bit of filmed bouncing bodice busting.

         Today, sexually explicit material is welcomed into the pages of what once were know as ‘family’ magazines, and the politically incorrect thought is banned instead. And this truth was in fact the influence to my own thinking at that time, as I looked for ways to reach a larger audience and maybe get a few extra dollars out of our few advertisers at the The Fore-edge. Sales had leveled off at about forty-five thousand per issue on a print run of seventy-six. Big enough to sell the back page to a publisher and a scattering of single column advertising spaces but seldom much more. Only break-even most months.

         Nevertheless, The Fore-edge did manage to get itself  ‘Banned in Boston.’ At least temporarily. Unlike the Mencken’s arrest, which was staged for the purpose of upholding the First Amendment, our kerfuffle never reached a full court address. And whereas you can still print the word ‘nigger’ in context, you cannot speak it. The First Amendment now has footnotes. And in Boston, whereas you may criticize the Kennedy family out loud so long as no more ears are present than can fill a typical tavern, you must be careful what you print.

         In the October issue, 1974, we ran a novella ‘An Appearance of Jack‘ in The Fore-edge which was purportedly by an estranged member of the Kennedy family, namely one Richard “Dick” Kennedy, the illegitimate son of Joseph P. Kennedy, and a New York chorus girl. In our story, the aptly named ‘Dick’, a ne’er do well doppelganger who looked uncannily like his half-brother Jack, has finally been taken into the family fold, not as a lost son (as he himself believed at first) but as a stand in, a body double, impersonator, food taster and the one to take the bullet when the time came.

         At the time, the controversy over the Kennedy assassination had grown to hundreds of books and thousands of theories. All of it appeared as farce to me. None of what we the public knew made much sense, but the truth, already more than ten years old, would likely never be known and every new ‘fact’ was suspect and most probably just more obfuscation planted by whomever’s interests were at risk, given the time allowed for delicate fabrication. Worse, all sorts of more sordid details were surfacing from various former employees and ostensible ‘friends’ of the Kennedy clan. I thought the situation was ripe for satire and pastiche.

         In the White House ‘safe rooms,’ our hero Dick must fulfill the wishes of an endless parade of interns and movie stars young and old, while his drugged and impotent half-brother ineffectually manages the affairs of state. When his Midwestern accent is questioned by one particular Hollywood actress, he is caught cannily mimicking Jack by one of the presidential advisors and then and thereafter used repeatedly on ‘bad’ days, to actually deliver speeches for the President to the media as well. When the President is not up for the travel, Dick must go to the lesser locals in the President’s stead, and he is often kept at the ready to stand-in when the President’s back is bothering him. Playing the good guy,  Jackie, good Jackie, is not interested in any of this.

         By such happenstance, Dick is present in Dallas on the day of the assassination and is witness to possible co-conspirators. The climax of that moment in the story occurs in a local hotel room as he is in the midst of an assignation with the female Secret Service agent who is charged with the task of making sure their doppelganger goes unnoticed (he dresses casually, wears a false mustache and parts his hair on the opposite side). But the television is on and the news breaks with the first reports concerning the murder of his half-sibling. Instinctually, realizing the danger, Dick finishes his immediate task with the agent and then flees the premises through a bathroom window just in time to avoid being shot by his unsatisfied keeper, and while both of them are still in the nude.

         Naked flight is the template and tenor of the entire piece.

         Hiding out in the unused second projection room of a Texas Theatre, eating stale popcorn and drinking flat Pepsi while watching War is Hell through an opening to the theatre below, Dick is a spectator to the capture of Lee Harvey Oswald. Dick then successfully flees Dallas entirely, while dressed as a Bozo the Clown, the only clothing in the theatre storage room, and in the correct belief that his own life is at mortal risk, not from a fellow Oswald conspirator but from the Secret Service.

He does not stop there. Instead, he adopts some of the characteristic attitudes and ploys of Richard Kimble in The Fugitive, his favorite television show. Frequent references are made to the show as a source of tips for hiding from the law. Most of these ploys are unsuccessful and in fact embarrassing, but our Dick never gives up on the idea that television is a font of true knowledge. 

         After finding refuge at a brothel in San Francisco for several years, working there as a bouncer in a place where his other unique physical attributes are even more appreciated than his good looks, the now bearded Dick is accidently re-discovered one day by his half-brother Robert, who happens to be there on an ‘inspection tour’ and from whom he must flee once more, again naked, but now through the streets of Haight Ashbury, where this overexposure passes unnoticed and unremarked. Stealing damp clothes from a washing line along the way which causes him a sneezing fit and allows him to narrowly avoid a germ conscious Secret Service agent, he then cadges a beer at a bar just in time to see his other half-brother, Bobby, on live TV, killed by Sirhan-Sirhan.

         Other equally unlikely coincidences ensue, before, and at last, when tired of running, he comes East to try and speak with his last surviving half-brother Edward. This is the reason why he is working on a fishing boat out of Edgartown on the night of July 18, 1969, just offshore from Chappaquiddick.

         Finally, hiding out in New York and employed as a building superintendent who fixes more than leaking faucets for lonely residents, and with the authorities still in pursuit after these many years, he writes his own story down, lest the truth never be known.

         The idea was a mixture of Fanny Hill and The Big Sleep—the one for its au natural humor and the other for its organic confusion. I thought it was funny when I wrote it, though the trouble it caused has since made the fun of it a bit sour. I presumed a negative reaction from the editor at Playboy based on yet another bit of hagiography they published on the sainted Jack at about this time, so I decided to simply send it in to my own Fore-edge rather than shove it in the drawer with the other rejects.

         However, our prohibition against publishing the work of staff members who were not assigned a specific article was in full force. So, in honor of the old master of prurience himself, Herbert Asbury, I submitted the work with a return address at a P.O. box in Asbury Park, New York. The cover letter I typed out on a Royal typewriter in a secondhand shop on Second Avenue. In my letter I asked, in a voice as pitiful as I could make it, ‘Would you please consider this story as a work of fiction? It has been rejected as a memoir by several other publications. I have lost hope in that regard. But if you might consider it simply as a fabrication, perhaps it will at last be published, if only as an entertainment.’

         Though I attempted to conceal my usual style by the more deliberate use of shorter sentences and a heavy Anglo-Saxon bias in the word choice, while mostly avoiding any of the rhyme I play with by habit, and totally abstaining from the use of the pronoun ‘which,’ which has always bothered so many mavens of correct usage, I still thought I would be found out before the third reader had gotten halfway through the tale. To my surprise it went the rounds on the staff, not through three but six readers before it came up at the monthly editorial meeting in April. Evidently everyone loved it. A good laugh had been had by all. The humor and satire were much appreciated. The debate became another matter entirely. It appeared that the P.O. box the author had given was closed (I thought I had made it up entirely). What were we to do? Had the author fled yet again for his life?

         Of course, after suggesting that the number of sex scenes might be excessive, I voted to publish it anyway and to put the author’s payment away pending his possible reappearance.

         Even in that editorial meeting I was afraid someone of the others would look me in the face, see through to my false inner self by some cast of eye or turn of mouth, and identify me as the perpetrator. But it didn’t happen. Everyone was getting too big a kick out of the burlesque of the story itself.

         Everyone except a Kennedy family lawyer in Boston who, rashly, attempted to have the issue withdrawn. The local distributor did in fact hold back almost half the run in the metro Boston area.

         There was a hearing. And after the distributor’s lawyer practically begged for the judge to file a court order in support of the complaint, believing correctly that such action would make the issue the hottest thing in town, the complaint was dropped. Worse, none of the local papers had bothered to send over a reporter (the First Amendment only being important when their own ox was being gored), so that the one woman from Channel Five who had decided to cover the event did not even get her two minutes on the evening news. Officially then, we were never actually ‘Banned in Boston,’ but by the time the hearing was held, the on-sale date had grown stale and we got back the covers from the dealers for credit on three-quarters of the five thousand copies shipped to Boston anyway.

***

37. My Alma Mahler

         I often miss my late night arguments with Peter Rabinowitz. They were an education for me, and I have often fallen asleep since then, recalling our back and forth. He was more than a friend. In spite of my disagreement with so many of the principles that he held to so dear, I can say that he was a good and honest and generous man and an exemplary human being. Honesty I count as the chief among those attributes. When faced with an agreed fact of history, such as the collusion between Stalin and Hitler in 1939, he could admit the wrong-headedness of this even while arguing vociferously for the mistaken need, given the time and place.

         He had himself seen the hard edge of the Holocaust as a G.I. doctor entering into the devastation of Germany in 1945. His opinions about the necessity to end the very causes for war were heartfelt. He would readily admit the failures of socialism, but always proscribe a specific remedy, which was in keeping with his philosophy. Often he would say, before the words were out of my mouth, “And don’t give me any of your Orwell. 1984 will never be. Not here. Orwell was always a man of the left! Always remember, in the end, he would agree with me!”

         And I would have to repeat, “Yes. He was. But at least he saw the great flaw in his ideals. Even if he was a socialist.” 

         In warm months, sitting out in the garden of an evening with our drinks balanced on the cement pedestal of the birdbath, the arguing would often draw a crowd from the windows across the alley and occasionally an added comment here or there would rain down on us and Peter would look back up at the source, silhouetted against the light in a room, and answer without hesitation.

         “The FBI had a file on me! I know this for a fact!”  Or another time “You can’t compare Roosevelt to Stalin. Roosevelt was not a dictator!”

         Peter loved Roosevelt, but he loved this sort of exchange more. He was a man who really needed an audience, even if it was just a single patient.

         A common thread of our discussion ranged around the supposed differences between socialism and communism and fascism. Peter insisted that fascism was a right wing phenomenon.

         I always countered with some simple statement to the effect of,  “National Socialism had every principle in common with the socialist parties of England, France, Italy, and the United States, with the one difference being the use of nationalism as a catalyst. “

         In most left wing circles, given their fawn prior to that calamity, fascism had apparently only gotten a bad name out of World War Two. Mussolini’s prewar fascism, so praised by the New York times along with Stalin’s, was suddenly ignored. This really wasn’t fair. Not so far as the typecasting goes. For a want of state management and authoritarian rule over the lives of the individual citizen, which fascism so well represented, the philosophy was a common ideal in Western intellectual circles for the first third of the twentieth century. Social efficiency alone apparently dictated the need, and it was argued by intellects as widespread as John Dewey and Bertrand Russell. Individuals doing their own thing was obviously a very wasteful and messy process. ‘Scientific management,’ as it was often described, would be better for all.

         Peter loved to quote Gandhi on much of this. Another of his heroes.

         ‘All land belongs to Gopal, where then is the boundary line? Man is the maker of that line and he can therefore unmake it.’

         Perversely, I would often call upon the socialist spirits of Margaret Sanger and her Planned Parenthood devotees who had first dreamed up the dark reality behind Aldous Huxley’s nightmare Brave New World with the ideal of eliminating the weak-minded and ‘inferior races’ through birth control. Or of Woodrow Wilson, who waxed eloquently of a new world order and called upon enlightened scholarship—mostly his own of course—to redefine the inequities and inefficiencies of the Constitution.

         Given the news at the time, I asserted that, “All liberals had a kind of Stockholm Syndrome based on their own adaption to captivity and could not imagine mankind’s messy survival without Big Brother.”

         Peter would groan loudly then in sorrow at my unredeemability.

         I remember, in my debates with Peter, recalling the ignominy of the New York Times and their reporter Walter Duranty who had gone to the Soviet Union in 1932 just as Stalin’s economic policies starved a nation into submission, and then come back, like Lincoln Steffens before him, to extol the wonder of a future that ‘worked.’

         However, one particular argument with Peter Rabinowitz still rings loudly. I have set aside this most controversial issue of our times until now, knowing that it will be a last straw to many readers—a matter which, until the last decades of the twentieth century would have been beyond debate but which has since traveled from one end of the scale to the other in the balance of things—from anathema to even consider, to anathema to re-consider. Even if they quit on me now, at least those who have gotten this far will better know some of my past and might appreciate that much sufficiently to re-read a few of my works now in this age of the e-book. Perhaps. Maybe.

         Abortion is, in truth, has become the zeitgeist of our age, and there is little I can say about the subject which will be listened to by those who do not permit themselves to examine the sadness of the fact. Because I have argued this case so often before, I am certain that few of those who believe in this modern sacrament as a key symbol of female competence will be interested in debate and those who are appalled by it do not need my few words to fester the wounds. But in the early 1970s such debate was still common.

         And one of the key matters of contention then was that the philosophical predicate for abortion was the same as that for euthanasia and suicide.

         My dear friends Mr. and Mrs. Rabinowitz are now long gone. In keeping with their philosophy, the timing of this exit was their own choice. I would not have physically stopped them, if I could. I might have begged them to reconsider, but undoubtedly Peter would have brushed away my objections with some titbit like ‘There are too many people in the world as it is.’ This was a favorite rejoinder of his. And I would answer, ‘But there are not enough people such as yourself and Phyllis.’

         Peter and I had this argument more than once, but once particularly I remember, on a sultry evening in Brooklyn, beneath a pearly xanthic moon, while sitting in that back garden on Carroll Street. And I am reminded here of something Phyllis Rabinowitz told me about her first encounters with Peter.

         “He came in once with a sprained ankle. Then a mashed finger. Then a bruised toe. And then an infected cut. He worked his shifts there and would then hang around the hospital tent as closely as one of the guards, just to walk me back through the camp every evening, staring down the wolf whistles. He wouldn’t leave me alone. If I said I was going somewhere, he would say ‘That’s a coincidence, I’m on the way to the commissary too.’ Or whatever it was.

         “We were in England then. I was transferred twice during the war. Both times closer to the front, where nurses were most in need. He had a medical degree but he was a psychologist. He could have stayed back to care for the psychologically wounded. But he would turned up at the same place where I was within a week. Both times. Pulled strings the army didn’t even know it had. And then he came around with a bullet wound himself. It was from a sniper, but still. I told him I would marry him if he would just stop injuring himself just so that he could see me. I figured once it was done he would get tired of me and then I would have some time to myself again. I was wrong.”

         I remember the call from Peter’s lawyer telling me of their deaths. The fact of it was incomprehensible. Had they been struck by a truck somewhere on Interstate 95 in the Carolinas on their way home, I would not have been so shocked. Evidently, Phyllis had a deteriorating heart condition. The account of a friend they had notified, who found them in bed together after they had taken the pills, seemed not the “peaceful” end that the lawyer described, but to me a gruesome twist on the love they had for each other. I wondered, had they looked into each other’s eyes, as I had seen them do so many times, and known that they were accepting the death of the person they loved most in the world? Surely. Then how can that be? Why not fight to the last breath? Why not just make love instead?

         I wrote a magazine article in January 1973, concerning the Roe v. Wade decision. I opposed it as clearly and reasonably as I could. I didn’t even attempt humorous asides given the topic. But because of the general hubbub of the moment, my small voice was pretty much unheard. I suppose I should have been more strident or at least ironic and sardonic, if not histrionic, drama being the key to calling attention, not reason.

         Not long ago some genius discovered how to use his LexisNexis search engine and directed his wormy academic eyes on me. He promptly rediscovered my criticism of ‘the Supremes’ (the judges, not the singers) in that ancient time and added that titbit to a larger tirade against my work, accusing me of being against “a woman’s right to choose.” In plainer words, an ‘anti-abortionist.’ This latter designation I would have accepted quietly. But the former is a misapplication of a falsehood—a sort of double negative.

         Still, today, the question I argued then to Peter is begged: “How could a general prohibition common to all humanity, upheld by the customs of every known society for thousands of years and an acknowledged religious tenet for the entirety of our recorded history, be finally overturned in less than a decade, eliminated by a mere court (worse, only a part of that court) and then be accepted by the general public with relatively minor protest? How strong is the moral fiber of human society after all?”

         He had countered, “We can commit murder at Mai Lai in the midst of a bloody war and still distinguish between a homicide and a battle death. As strong as that!”

         I offered, “Our society is clearly not of sound mind, though I want to believe it has good intentions. In spite of the death of countless millions of unborn children, their murder was generally done in a true faith that it was for the good, and in the same way we accept the casualties of war.”

         His voice rose up with his back straightened from the chair, “Is every soldier who kills a murderer? Is every woman who aborts her child a killer? The equation of war with abortion is too much!”

         “But it is in fact the heart of the matter.”

         Peter would squirm in his chair over this.

         Phyllis would lay her book closed on her lap and comment if we gave her a pause.

         “Can we forgive Jefferson for owning slaves? I think not. Can we see how that allowance was the very thing that led to the slaughter and horror of the Civil War?”

         I wondered then whose side she was on. She never said.

         I allowed for the drift of the conversation as some relief.

         “But can we still agree that Jefferson’s intentions were better than his acts? That his intelligence was extraordinary? That his rationalization of the despicable act of slavery is still inexcusable, and I believe, beyond question. Though three-quarters of the world in his time allowed slavery to exist, we know from his own words that he knew the wrong of it. He wrote that. And not just as some intellectual exercise, but as a matter of the blood and sweat of his own life.”

         The look on Peter’s face was often, ‘There is so much forgiving to do, and so little time.’

         I came to appreciate the music of Mahler only lately. It may have been inevitable, given my progression from the dense but accessible work of Beethoven and the easier delights of Chopin. I had ranged through most of the major romantic repertoire. I could visit the classical measures of Mozart on a summer afternoon or Bach in the morning, but I was always ready to be with my favorites at night and finally, with the internet opening up, the chance to see them all as they are performed, I listened again. But still Mahler had eluded me. I had mentally placed him too close to the lengthy and more repetitive music of Bruckner, and along side the windy stentorian Wagner, whom I still can’t stand. Mahler simply required a commitment of time.

         Suddenly, then, I was out of work. The shop was closed. And the time was mine. It was then that the great conductor Mariss Jansons gave a present to me with his wonderful renditions of Mahler’s second and third symphonies, available on the internet. Watching Jansons’ face as he opens the package of each work is more than sufficient to call your attention to what you might have overlooked before. And building on that, I discovered the conducting of Claudio Abbado and his sublime renditions of the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh. Now the resulting addiction is my cocaine.

         The discovery, or rediscovery by me, of that composer felt like a hurdle had finally been passed. I had somehow graduated from the insistent need to reach a precise end—a climax. All very sexual, I’m sure. I had never been given to forcing a story to its finale. I like to dawdle over the parts as much as the next man. But the restraint of Mahler was a true study in self-control. (But of course, he had Alma to dawdle over!)

         I think now that my problem with Mahler, with the fact that he was in no rush to tell his story, my have been felt by me to have been a subtle critique of my own work. I may have taken some subliminal negative comment from it at first and turned way. Hadn’t Gerard Strauss warned me of this—told me I needed patience with my writing? Now that I am older, and slower myself in every way, I have caught up to the great composer and I hear Gerard’s voice again in my ear.

         I still remember Peter Rabinowitz listening to the Leonard Bernstein recordings of Mahler, with Peter getting up every half an hour or so to turn the record over or put on the next, and with the sound of his slippers sighing on the floor above my head during the silence between. On summer days the waft of the musical passages would drift from the open windows of his living room, one wonderous small melody after another, with the transitions swallowed in the city noise, so that you might think there was a street band passing somewhere near.

         Most interestingly, it was Mahler who was the cause of the only full-scale argument I ever heard between Peter and Phyllis. And I listened to every bit of that, enchanted.

         This was not the kind of expletive-laced fury I was familiar with from my childhood, or that you sometimes unexpectedly encounter in public. The subject was Mahler’s marriage. It was easy for me to interpret some ‘transference’—a word Peter loved to use—in the cause of their disagreement. Vehemence was only clear from the way words were tossed.

         The squabble ended with, “He used her. He kept her from writing her own music!”

         “If she had anything to say in music, she would have done it! Artistic expression is a force of nature! Look what Mahler went through to achieve what he did!”

         “She was busy caring for the children—“

         “She had nurses! They always had nurses. And housekeepers! One reason he had to work so hard. To pay the cook!”

         “He forbade her! He made her come with him wherever he went. He was a tyrant. A sex maniac!”

         My ears stood on the ends that they do not have. I awaited Peter’s response.

         Finally, “Well, if I had been married to Alma Mahler, I might have been a sex maniac myself.”

         Quiet.

         In my mind I could see the hint of a smile on Peter’s face. I saw Phyllis turn away from that, momentarily defeated.

         This is something like watching Magdalena Kozena sing the solo part in Mahler’s 4th with Claudio Abbado’s great Luzern Orchestra. Her eyes wide. Her heart exposed in her voice. Even while the words themselves are silly, as opera can often be, the music is pure. And the words are only the vehicle for this. And I am reminded of this and of the fact that I could never let my temper rage with Sarah. She would defeat me with a look of hurt that was always heartrending. She would manage this when I least expected it, just as I was winding up my argument and readying to bellow. My feet always came out from beneath me instead. My words sounding foolish in my head.

***

38. Like Stupid on a Stick

         There is that blessed stupidity that gets you by, if you are fortunate, and allows you to survive with little more than skinned shins after letting your bike gain too much speed on the downhill at Broadway, nothing but black ice beneath your tires, and the intersection at L Street dead ahead. (Prematurely dead being more what you expected of yourself when you were ten.) It is the kind of stupidity you can wake up from, one perfect morning, forty years later, when you think it is Sunday and you have no responsibility to any man or woman more than yourself, and your responsibility to God may be postponed yet again until your inevitable born-again experience at a more appropriate age when death might be closer, or at least more nearly lurking, but not here in the sweet sun that spills from the window right out on your bed like it used to when you were a kid and your mother opened the curtains to get you up and then she went away long enough for you to wallow in the blankets. But this time the buttery light is coming from the window you never closed last night (you were that drunk) and you stretch with the sheer pleasure of it and enjoy the warmth as if it’s summer and not fall with winter there ahead, and not like Broadway was the once that you were just dreaming about, and a jolt of memory jogs another, and then another, and then, suddenly, you know in a single chilled spasm, your eyes suddenly wide open, that it is not Sunday after all but Saturday and you are due—overdue—for the meeting that you yourself arranged with Dr. Ted because he doesn’t charge you for the checkup if you come in on Saturday mornings, and then you feel that slight discomfort between your legs again that you’ve felt several times before and tried to ignore until this week when you finally called and he said he’d meet you at his office at nine and now it’s already ten. Jesus!

         The three novellas, written in the second person, which constituted Like Stupid on a Stick and were together entitled that after a phrase my friend Zeph often used as a term of art when we were caught doing something we should not have even been thinking about, were written years apart and gathered after the fact to complete the contract I had then with Random House. I liked that story form in short doses, a sort of belligerent one-way conversation with myself during which I could not answer, and I hoped that by combining several stories of a very different nature (though each of them intended to be humorous) that the more visceral experience of a second person narrative might hold up for the reader.

         The boy, Gary, in the first story, may be considered innocent until proven guilty, and the young man, Dave, in the second, may earn the benefit of the doubt for trying to do the right thing in the wrong way, but I did not give the third character, Steve, the redeeming quality of good intentions. He was old enough to know better. His predicament between two women might have made him pitiful, but the serial catastrophe of his life must be considered his own doing or it would not have been funny.

         The book appeared shortly after Christmas, with a publication date of January 15, 1987, and disappeared from shelves by the time the Spring List books were shipped in February. The lead story, an erstwhile comedy of errors, with my proto hero, Gary, on his bike delivering newspapers as I had done for a time in 1957 and 1958, and trying to get the attention of the daughter of one of his customers, was actually inspired just as much by an incident that occurred more than ten years later when I was driving in Brookline, Massachusetts early one winter morning, in my father’s car (I had borrowed it with his permission that particular time).

         On that later date it had snowed just a little during the night and I hit the ice beneath that skim frosting while coming down the drop in altitude on Summit Avenue and was out of control for at least a hundred yards. There were no other cars parked there, so the wagging of the rear end of that big Ford Crown Vic bearing against my attempts to steer was inhibited only by the curb. All the houses and apartments along the way are close-in to the street and make a trough of it with only a short segment of the street ahead then visible to me. One lone pedestrian on the sidewalk stopped in his tracks and stared as I slipped by. The traffic light below me on Beacon Street was red. I could even hear the trolley ringing the bell as it passed over the street crossing a block away. Traffic along there flows in waves as each light changes and I was certain to meet a phalanx of commuters in a hurry when I reached the bottom. I was not so worried about killing some stockbroker in a BMW as I was about hitting a mother in a minivan loaded with kids on the way to school. After having committed a mortal sin, more than once, during the night before, and feeling no remorse, I instantly determined to accept my punishment for those more worthy offenses first and figured it was better to hit a telephone pole than a trolley in any case and attempted to work myself in that direction, pulling against the heavy invisible hand of the power steering, toward the light post at the near corner, all the while with my grip on the steering wheel tight as I pressed repeatedly on the horn with my thumbs to warn anyone away who might not just stop in their tracks and stare, and with my stomach muscles already stiff in a pre-death rigor mortis . . . but I missed it. The car spun completely around, front to back, and came to a halt right on the tracks at the crossing. The trolley too had stopped short, right there next to me, with the driver looking down from his window in disgust. The phalanx of commuters abused their horns. I had hit nothing. Not even the old lady who was now standing next to the post I had missed and was scolding me loudly in the morning air for the fool I was.

         This was the moment when I re-remembered the first instance of being out of control and expecting to die after an attempt to show my superior braking ability on the bike while delivering papers, and which fiasco had resulted in my sliding directly beneath the wheels of a car. That car belonged to the father of the girl I was trying to impress. He had stopped in time, however, and his daughter wanted nothing more to do with me, from thence forward, though my efforts did not cease until her affections had been won by Marty Gruber. Marty was junior varsity and ended up with a scholarship to Notre Dame.

         I have relived both those moments many times since, most probably because they were such clear-cut instances of my stupidity while most the other causes of the calamities I have survived are obscure to me still. And these moments are always relived like a film shot using the viewpoint of a subjective camera.

         The ‘subjective camera’ aspect of the second person viewpoint has become common again with video games, and that is as good and effective a use as any you will likely find. Seeing the action of a film through the eyes of a key player, thus making that actor themselves invisible except when reflected in a mirror or in a pool of water, has a way of bringing the viewer right into the action, much in the manner of the second person narrative, and just as exhausting when carried on at length. I have long admired the process and had always thought very highly of the Robert Montgomery attempt with Chandler’s Lady in the Lake since first seeing it on television as a kid (even though that production had not in fact been a success with the public and thus I should have been forewarned).

         When a young fellow approached me in 1994 with the idea of doing a short film of Like Stupid on a Stick using the ‘subjective camera’ throughout so as to cut down on the expense of at least one cast member, I thought the idea had merit. I knocked out a screenplay accordingly. And the ‘second person’ viewpoint of the story was not only readymade for subjective camera, it was also a fine way to avoid having to find an adequate child actor. I detest most child actors.

         I think I sold myself on the idea better than the filmmaker did.

         You can usually blame your stupidity on someone else, though living alone makes that a little more difficult, if only by degree. Doing the same stupid thing twice is a special preference I have. I like to think it helps me to avoid the third time.

         I had a very exciting meeting with the fellow who wanted to make the film (we will call him Ron), in a loft in Tribeca within expensive surroundings of exposed steel girders and glass where he had a rehearsal set just waiting for my okay and a short video presentation ready to show me the methods he intended to use. His girlfriend, always present, was going to play the foil in the piece, the character of a woman who is on the beach each day, scantily clad and unattended, and has drawn the attention of the boys as well as that of the unfaithful husband and father of the girl that my near-hero Gary is enchanted with and she had all the attributes of the sort of fantasy I had imagined (I had done away with the junior varsity quarterback as too much of a cliché and added the element of an older woman to better reflect the sexual awakening of the boys). Ron had estimated a shooting schedule and had gone so far as to make preliminary contacts with some of the various film festivals where the piece might be shown the following year to get traction for a limited theatrical release. It all looked like fun.

         The contract I signed with the filmmaker called for an initial payment of $1000. Little enough. I understood in advance that it was a seat of the pants and shoestring sort of thing. It was kind of neat to be a part of something like that again. But weeks passed and the check never arrived and the phone number I had, which no one ever answered after that initial meeting, was soon disconnected. On closer inspection of the agreement I saw that there was no specific time stated for that initial payment to be made, only that it would be the first of several—the others amounting to one percent of any gross sales receipts. But the contract quite explicitly gave all film, stage or other visual presentation rights for the work to the filmmaker nonetheless. And my signature was at the bottom.

         I went back over to Tribeca and discovered that the place I had visited was only a studio for hire, week-to-week, and often used by theatre companies. The building manager there had a forwarding address for the filmmaker (actually for the girlfriend, who, the manager thoughtfully informed me, was the source of the one and only rent check he had received). That address was for a post office box in Hollywood, California. I sent a letter there. And then, assuming the worst, I contacted my old friend from The Gist, Doug ‘aka’ Morris. Hollywood was his stomping grounds, after all. Aka said he’d have his secretary look into it, and then told me I should have contacted him first with the script. I reminded him he had rejected the last few I had sent him. He didn’t apologize.

         The young filmmaker soon turned up peddling my script around tinsel town with his own name on it. According to the account I heard from Doug’s secretary, who had been present at the time, Doug had physically removed the script from Ron’s hands and told him he should keep his nose clean. (I had memories of Doug in The Gist offices having a conniption over some distribution screw-up or another when he had physically lifted his Steelcase desk and turned it on its side in the air to shake out some loose change that had fallen behind a drawer so he could buy himself a drink). ‘Aka’ had also demanded the contract from Ron that I had stupidly signed, which he got back as well. I believed this much of the tale because Doug often used phrases like ‘Keep your nose clean.’ I suppose that has a bit more resonance in Hollywood.

         Perversely, Doug read my short script then himself and liked it. But he wanted me to expand it for a feature length.

         Because the original story, drawn from those days when I used to tag along with Zeph Thomas and involving a bunch of near-teenage boys living out the last best summer of their lives on the beach in South Boston, was pretty slim material by itself, I did what he asked essentially by combining it with the other two novellas in the book, offering a glimpse of what happens to the same characters as they commit the same mistakes over and again as adults. The tobogganing of my father’s Crown Victoria down Summit Avenue follows Gary’s disastrously successful first sexual encounter which reflects the entire status of his life. To this I added the get-rich-quick debacle of the third story but reworked the ending so that Gary had a chance to start over and make the same mistakes again or pick up the pieces of his catastrophes and try to make them whole. I left that ending open for the audience to make their own judgment about whether he had learned enough from his defeats. However, this reworking was a tiresome project that took several months to complete because I was in the middle of something else at the time.

         After that, Doug tried to get some interest in this new script over several years, presenting it to at least a dozen of “his closest friends,” before finally giving up on the idea that anyone would ever want to make a film about of a bunch of guys being so habitually stupid. And Doug never paid the $1000 either, but then again, we never had a written contract.

         The truth of the matter, that it is human nature to commit every mistake at least twice before we successfully blame the results of our stupidity on something or someone else and then move on to the next thing, is just one more theme I have to work on again someday. I am well aware that we seldom pick up the pieces.

         I do not believe I am as stupid now as I once was. Perhaps that is delusion. But over time, and learning as I went along, my philosophy has become a version of my father’s. Perhaps this was always the case, but with my own nose before me, I was unaware of it. I have thus evolved these rules:

         I am no better than I am made to be by the things I love. I must make my business out of those things and kick the ass of anyone who wants to mind my business for me.

         People are no better than they have to be. They are not inherently good any more than they are inherently smart enough to ride a bike with caution on a hill when their minds are on other matters.

         By the use of numbers a person can build a bomb or rationalize any evil, from justifying the enslavement of other human beings to the self-righteous annihilation of Jews, or Armenians, or Ibos, or Hutus.

         By the chanting of their dogma loud enough, a person may be deafened to the cries of the child they slaughter, and by the bright colors of the flag they wave, they may be blinded to the eyes of the dead.

         If people choose to be governed by others, they will be no better than those who rule them, and if there is no one to govern the rulers, those people will inevitably be bad.

         We learn to be what we are, good or bad or indifferent, and indifference is no better than evil.

         My father would never have taken another man as a slave, and thus he is a better man by my philosophy than Thomas Jefferson, for all of that Virginian’s other genius.

         Wanting to make the world better is a desire for tyranny. Wanting to make ourselves better is a worthy enough pursuit.

         Because no other man, or government, or committee, can know what we love and how it is we love those things, we must be responsible for them ourselves.

         If we pursue what we love, each to his own, governed only by the more golden rule that we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us, things will not be perfect, but they will be better, and in the case of most of us, more nearly the best. And the best is all we can do or hope for.

***

39. The curious case of The Peterson Papers

         The curious case of Ralph D. Peterson actually begun several months after moving into my apartment on Avenue A. The box of books which had been abandoned by that previous tenant were a fair stratum of the paperback revolution in the mid-1960’s, but they were mostly garbage, or had been transformed to that by the work of the countless cockroaches which left their tobacco-stain trails at every opening and nibbled at almost any edge. There were, however, four books which had been neatly swaddled in Saran wrap. The others in the box I brought downstairs one morning on my way to work and left in the vestibule with the intention of carrying them back around to Vlad when I got home, but they had quickly been stolen.

         The four wrapped books remained unopened on a shelf for nearly a week. That was by way of a small entertainment. With their titles mostly obscured through the twisted layers of clear plastic, I began a game late in the evenings, as I lay on my mattress listening to maunderings of Jean Shepherd on the radio, of guessing what they were from the few signs that were visible. ’       Ersk-‘ was easy enough. There is only one literary Erskine of any note. One of the books offered the image of a ship which I took to be Norse, but that turned out to be Greek. I had read Joyce’s Dubliners and knew the cover colors for that paperback well, so that one was no mystery to me. But one book had me completely flummoxed. When the game had grown tiresome, I opened them one at a time like presents. The Erskine Caldwell was a rather well thumbed copy of Tobacco Road with the glue of the spine cracked at each of the more savory parts. It didn’t last long in my own hands. Richard Lattimore’s Odyssey was already on my reading list, so I started in on that almost immediately. It fell apart some years later during a subsequent reading. The copy of Dubliners was in nicer shape and I have kept it. Still have it today—somewhere. But the fourth book I gave away long ago. To Trudy, in fact. That was a copy of Thornton Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Rey in a large paperback edition. She made me explain the plot of the book, several times, until I began to regret the gift, but what was most remarkable in that volume, beside the story itself, were the three small cards that fell out in my hand when I first opened it: a ‘Selective Service System Registration Certificate,’ A ‘Notice of Classification’—better known as a ‘draft card,’—and a Social Security card. Those I kept as well. But, as I told someone not long ago, I don’t know where they are today. I don’t even know where my own cards are, for that matter.

         The cards in the book were for a Ralph David Peterson. He was born August 20, 1946, and thus was about a year older than myself. He was registered in Mount Vernon, N.Y.; color eyes: brown (as are mine); color hair: brown (ditto); height: 6 ft. 1 in. (I had him beat on that count by an inch.); weight: 160 lbs. (my regular in-take of spaghetti with Ragu tomato sauce had already raised my own weight to 165.); other obvious physical characteristics: none. His draft status was 1-A.

         Each of the four books had also contained Peterson’s full name, neatly written on the inside of the cover, as well an address in Mount Vernon, New York.

         It was my understanding then that Ralph had probably abandoned his apartment when he got his draft notice and slipped off, or wandered thence, to Canada. I did not know that for sure. It was based on something Trudy told me. While in residence at Avenue A, he used to visit her about once a week and he liked to talk while he conducted his business.

         After asking if she knew who he was, the first time, I actually told her not to tell me anything more about the man. I suddenly realized it was better not knowing—better at the least than the facts that I was hearing. And by that time I had already begun to make up an elaborate tale about Mr. Peterson and the smaller details that Trudy was happy to relate only served to spoil the story. There will be more on that matter later.

         Of more interest to me then, however, was a comment Trudy made about Thornton Wilder’s book. One evening, after asking me to explain some aspect of the story to her once again, she suddenly said, “I am the bridge!”

         I said, “What do you mean?”

         She had sudden come to a very clear realization. “All of the men who come to me have their different reasons and different excuses, but they all need to pass over my body on their way.”

         The simile was shocking to me. Looking for some way to mitigate the actual tragedy in that idea was obvious even to a callous nineteen-year-old. I brightly said something like, “But you will not collapse.”

         And she said, “I have already fallen. Every day I wake up and I’m standing. But then I fall again.”

         This twist on the words occupied my mind for months afterward.

         I believe it was for that reason that Ralph D. Peterson entered into my life again, more importantly, in 1977.

         I was at loose ends. Bored, I think. And rather weary of watching the slow motion collapse of the nation around me which was then being run into the ground by an anally fixated peanut farmer. For me, the big city actually seemed to be losing its charm for the first time. Graffiti was being touted as art. The better ocean air never quite reached Park Slope. Between labor strikes, the garbage wasn’t being picked up and too much of it was left behind after the trucks were gone. Things generally looked grimier—filmy. Every window looked dirty. And my apartment was robbed for the second or third time.

         Importantly, I did not have a regular girlfriend and most of the females I met had two left hands. In New York, if you eliminated the Catholic and the Jewish girls who were actually Catholic or Jewish and not just posing in ethnic roles to give themselves some of the cultural color they had missed acquiring while sunning themselves at Jones Beach, all you had left were liberals. The good thing about that, I suppose, was that the liberal girls seemed to like both sex and books better than the religious girls, so I saw a fair assortment of them in the shop, many of whom were quite taken with the artificial liberties bestowed upon their bodies by the temporary infertility induced via ‘The Pill.’

         But the barrenness of their bodies extended into their minds in unsubtle ways. They spoke about themselves incessantly. They did almost nothing else. The books they read were about young women who did nothing but think about themselves. It was as if the French movies of the 1960’s had finally taken possession of the urban culture of America. They smoked. They drank. The ‘had’ sex. They did drugs to gain some glimpse of the euphoria they wished they could be having morning noon and night, but especially at night. (Wasn’t it unfair that the climax they experienced in sex could not be extended? A difficult topic for a fellow to follow while thus occupied.) But they even took yoga classes in that singular pursuit.

         If you didn’t sleep with someone on the first date, they wanted to know what was wrong. Had they done something? Said something? Were you tired? Were you sick? The greater truth contained in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall was that, whether you did or you didn’t, they all seemed to want to talk about it before, during, and after.

         For a time, I actually started believing that sex was an appropriate subject of conversation in almost any circumstance. It was the one reliable topic to fill any idle moment. You could hear the most intimate details of someone’s bed-life while standing on the subway platform waiting for a train, or while seated in a movie theatre awaiting the lights to dim. Or during the film, if it was slow. Once at a Chock-Full-of-Nuts counter while trying to choose a breakfast, I was treated to an analysis of the practices preached by a canny Indian ascetic, then in Manhattan and lecturing to thousands.

         At the bookshop one evening, while she fingered a copy of Autumn of the Patriarch by Garcia Marquez, a rather good looking brunette asked me, “Is there any sex in this? I just finished a Borges and there was no sex.”

         I said, “No, not a lot. It’s about the corruption of power.”

         She set it back on the shelf as if it had suddenly become hot. 

         “Do any of the South American authors like sex?”

         I shrugged as innocently as I could, “I don’t know. Try Vargas Llosa. Aunt Julia and the Script Writer. There is a bit in that.”

         Her voice took on the interrogatory. “Is it good sex? Or just sex?”

         “I can’t say. I wasn’t really looking for that, so maybe I didn’t notice.”

         Skeptical surprise filled her cheeks and eyes. “What! You don’t like sex?”

         We are in the middle of the bookshop, remember.

         “Sex is fine.” I answered. “I just don’t particularly look for it in books anymore.”

         She grimaced critically, with one eyebrow raised now in disbelief. “Have you ever read Henry Miller?”

         I admitted readily, “When I was fifteen.”

         This quieted the contortions of her face and brought a stony stare in return. At this point I figured her for an actress practicing for a role. She appeared to have a Swiss Army knife of expressions ready to pull out for any response.

         She poked back, quizzically, “What does that mean? Are you saying reading about sex in a book is immature?

         “No. Just that I don’t particularly go looking for it between hard covers. Besides, it might stain the pages.”

         This additional detail was uncalled for, but was meant to shock. Perhaps, I hoped, repulse.

         Instead her scowl became investigative, with a hint of frown. “Are you married?”

         “No.”

         And all the while she had been pulling various of the latest arrivals from the display shelf and opening them without reading a word before putting them back. I could see her eyes staring blankly as her mind worked.

         Suddenly, against my last response, she held up the ring on her left hand, false smile stretching the pale pink film of her lipstick.

         “I’m not surprised.”

         I did not know exactly what that meant. I was however ‘surprised,’ when she then suggested we go for a coffee after the store was closed. Inhabiting the role of bookshop clerk, I was immediately taking the part of Dorothy Malone in The Big Sleep

         I am no Jorge Luis Borges wanting to have my cake and eat it too—wanting to be acclaimed and pampered as an ‘artist’ while pretending to be aloof of fame and credit. Case in point, here I am writing a book about myself when I could easily find a more interesting subject. As I often have. But I would welcome fame as an alternative to insignificance. A writer’s greatest fear is to be ignored. Mediocrity was not my aim in life. And though Mr. Borges might see himself as two creatures, one the author and the other himself, I have never wished for such a bifurcation, though I did accomplish it once.

         I’ll tell you about that, because some aspect of all this was in my head when I decided to try writing under a pseudonym. Not as a subterfuge for writing ‘dirty’ books, but one for writing more plainly about topics I cared about but which might be frowned upon by the pseudo-intellectual readers on whom I was dependent for book sales. Not a worthy cause, I readily admit now. Self-serving. Really, I was just looking for sales. Or attention. Or both.

         One day I happened again upon the two cards from Ralph D. Peterson that I had found years before in the books abandoned in my apartment on Avenue A. And in another moment of unbidden magic, I immediately knew what I was going to do with them.

         I went to the Post Office further over on Atlantic Avenue that same day and rented a box in his name, using Mr. Peterson’s ID.

         My first thoughts were simple enough. Publishers did not want me expressing my opinion outright on anything ‘political’ for fear of upsetting my already dwindling readership. The age for political discussion in novels was now past. The correct way of thinking was settled. I had been as much as forbidden, more than once, to speak of abortion in the years following Roe v. Wade, for instance, and I was cautioned to avoid certain other topics such as religion, Marxism, the decay of typography by photo-typesetting, the corruption of science by government subsidy, the malignancy of writers’ groups, the demeaning of meaning by public education, or the obvious oncoming ‘death of the book.’ I’d already had two of my novels rejected for more than one of those reasons.

         My idea was to create a persona apart from my own who might give vent to his thoughts without restraint. A mere subterfuge. I did not particularly like the name Ralph, however, so I redubbed this alter-ego R. D. Peterson. Innocuous. Innocuous enough, I thought.

         I cannot pretend that I planned it all from the first. What I understood immediately was only that I would create an alternative life, a false persona. A true pseudonym. And that I had already imagined something of the man from his precise handwriting on the inside covers of those few books he had read and left behind. All of this was a common enough exercise for me in any case. I was always prone to make up characters to match faces. It was something I might do on a subway car, while being forced by the pressure of other bodies to stare at someone a few feet further away. It was often done subconsciously, in a matter of seconds, as a pedestrian passed the shop window. Many times over the years, in that particular circumstance, the face had returned by the window afterward and entered the shop door and I was nearly always wrong in my imaginings. Warning enough, given the old saw about judging books by their covers, I suppose. The voice I had conjured was not theirs. The facial ticks and textures took on other meanings at closer range. But often enough, the reality was better.

         At first, I decided that R. D. Peterson was a failed poet. Disillusioned by a freshman love affair in college, he had become dispirited  (people still become dispirited today but they now call it depression), had left school, and this had resulted in the change in his draft status and necessitated his flight (I assumed of course that he had hitchhiked) to Canada. I expanded upon my own short journeys to Montreal and Toronto while working for The Gist, and fabricated a series of life altering confrontations. (True, Canadians are not often confrontational, except when confronted with Americans.) Then, skipping forward in time and using the reliable technique of ‘incongruous parts,’ I chose several additional characteristics at random as the thoughts occurred. Ralph liked to grow roses. (Something I knew nothing about really, but I had in mind, of course, the roses on the back garden wall at the Rabinowitz house.) In Ralph’s instance, he had been raised on Long Island and his mother had grown roses when he was a boy while his father, a travelling salesman, was always away. He liked cats (I am allergic to them). He was especially fond of tea, having acquired the habit in Toronto (I’d rather have coffee, even in Toronto). He drank martinis (I can’t stand the taste of gin). I made him an aspiring vegetarian with a weakness for the meats he had grown up eating in the Swedish cooking of his mother. (I wasn’t sure if I had ever even had a Swedish meatball up to that moment.) He liked opera (I was yet to learn the true pleasures of that). And he lived alone, with an unrequited passion for someone at his office.

         And I decided that Mr. R. D. Peterson was gay.

         This last characteristic offered the greatest chance for exposition while also posing the greatest danger. Naturally, I started seeing him as a thinner version of my friend, George Ritts. Less polished, and less generous, but he would have to be that in order to harbor the critical awareness I wanted in him. It is always easier to forgive if you have less to lose.

         But the point of the exercise was to create a character different enough from my own to require some effort when testing him with challenges. I was well aware by then of my tendency toward autobiography.

         Thus inspired, I began to submit articles and letters to various magazines under his name. And this was done with a certain maliciousness on my part, I’ll admit. I was taking advantage of the fact that many specialty periodicals struggled to fill their pages with publishable copy. But most importantly, I could fire away at the peccadilloes of my fellow human beings far easier if standing inside the circled wagons of a favored minority group than from without.

         For my first target, the subject was roses (with apologies to the playwright, Mr. Gilroy).

         I had stumbled upon a copy of The American Rose Monthly and realized immediately the magazine needed some livelier and more colorful content. In every issue I could find, the topic of ‘potting soil’ appeared to be the leader. It was running only thirty-six pages per issue of which twenty-four were advertisements.  I immediately decided upon an approach. Being safely and wholly ignorant of the subject (which placed me squarely in the ranks of most journalists pursuing any story), I’d started reading what I could on the subject and quickly realized that the ‘Whole Earth’ movement had not yet penetrated the pages of many horticultural magazines which were then mostly dedicated to the more arcane arts of cross-pollination, grafting, and the finer pleasures of fertilizers.

         I wrote a letter to the magazine objecting to the “senseless rose,” and the modern favoring of the ornamental over the olfactory, the visual over the fragrant, which had resulted in a hobby pursued mostly by the old and the sensually impotent rather than the young and fecund. Specifically I argued for the superiority of the Damask Rose

         I used the word ‘fecund.’

         The letter, less than half a column, had run in the next available issue, and resulted in four pages of angry responses to my charge. It appeared that the readership, many of them retired, had even more time on their hands than I did.

         I followed that first letter up with an attack on the ‘false advertising’ of the magazine’s own name. The roses discussed in its pages were seldom ‘American,’ even to minor selective cross breeding. Chinese roses, and English roses which had been derived from Persia and the near east via Portugal, were the common subject. Why weren’t native American roses given more attention? With the same degree of careful cultivation, American roses might achieve some of the ornamental distinctions of the foreign interlopers, and they smelled better as well. I waxed grandiloquent on the simple beauty of the American wild rose and ended with the trite, “A rose by any other name was not as sweet.”

         This letter got a direct response from the editor of The American Rose, Herbert Wiley. He pointed out that they had run many articles through the years on that very topic, but the readership appeared to prefer to engage in an ongoing competition of the biggest and most gaudy.

         I answered that I believed he was probably correct, but wasn’t this defect of human nature just a part of the challenge of good editorship. And I included with my comment a short attack on artificial fertilizers and in favor of the kitchen garden compost heap, the entire factual contents of which I had re-written from a copy of Mother Earth News.

         Mr. Wiley responded by offering me a job.

         What he wanted was a monthly column, for which he could pay me $75. Given even the modest amount of advertising revenue he was pulling in, I figured he could afford it, but I did not want to worry about another deadline demand, or additional reported income, nor the IRS versus the false identity of R. D. Peterson. Besides, I figured to be able to speak my mind a bit more freely about roses if I was not obligated by payment.

         I abjured and included a sarcastic peon to the alien Japanese beetle which was only in this country following the flowers we Americans insisted on importing. I added an argument for the positive effects of a formula of pine soap and olive oil and another using baking soda which I had cribbed freely from a 1901 issue of the Scientific American as a replacement for some of the more noxious pesticides then in use.

         This correspondence, in fact, went on for more than two years, until I could not stand the subject any longer and simply stopped. Half a dozen letters from Mr. Wiley followed my surcease, asking what was wrong, was I sick, could he be of any assistance, and the like. But by then, I had accomplished more than I had hoped for and there was no good in beating the matter to death. Besides, I actually knew something about roses by then, and there was no good in spoiling my ignorance any further.

         While I had been writing my monthly letters to the American Rose, I had also interjected myself into a half dozen other publications. The Cat Companion was my favorite of these. Cat lovers are, at the very least, the most opinionated people on earth (leaving rose lovers in the humus) and if there is any possibility for extra-terrestrial life, they will probably be as vocal out there in the heliosphere in ages to come as well. Cat Companion had no need of more letters—a quarter of the contents appeared to be reader comment on subjects like declawing, neutering, hair-loss and correct diet—but I chose it as the vehicle for my subterfuge simply because it had such a particularly rabid readership. The mere suggestion on my part that the keeping of cats as pets was a sort of ‘enslavement’ (with no overt but nevertheless quite obvious allusions to the thralldom and dependency of public welfare), evidently incurred more letters of response, according to the editor Margaret Sayers, than anything they had ever published. All of them insisting that their cats were totally independent creatures who could not be forced to do anything they did not want. I followed this with a missive on the abuse of cats by owners who overfed them with foods not common to a cat’s natural culinary habits while depriving them of the exercise and nutrition naturally available in ‘the kill.’  I became an advocate of the natural mouser. I thus discovered that most cat lovers are pacifists, believed they were the most benevolent of owners, and refused to believe that the bestiality of mousing was necessary or even natural.

         In response, I warned of the plague.

         My letters to The High-Life, a magazine ostensibly dedicated to the fine arts of the mixed drink, not the acrid perfume of grass, were for the most part less adversarial. I did take some neat shots, so to speak, at any moron who thought he could properly drive a car after three highballs. But I mixed this sort of thing into recipes I borrowed directly from the pages of various British publications of the 1930’s, including Punch, The Spectator and London Illustrated News—all of which were accessible in bound volumes at the Brooklyn Public Library. I found that if I took a fairly urbane tone and stirred my entries with ample bitters of sarcasm, they were almost always published. Thus I could attack the sophisticated alcoholic with abandon by interjecting stories of debauchery, dissipation and depravity between the measurements for obscurely named tonics and bitters only available by ordering directly from Singapore or Bombay. I took the greatest pleasure in shaping the calibrations to such unsubtle estimates as “36 wet ounces of rum, 24 dry ounces of coconut shavings, 32 moist ounces of ripe mango, mix and let mingle for an hour or two before pouring. Serves six, clothing optional.”  The double entendre possible to such staples as banana or melon liqueur and schnapps or triple sec were endless.

         I was, in fact, surprised after several months, to get a letter from an assistant editor at High-Life suggesting I might want to frame my thoughts in long form as an article for them, for which they could pay me the princely sum of $750. Given the amount of female pulchritude which burst colorfully from their pages, frolicking amidst well tanned and tuxedoed men, which evidently gave them the sales and profits that made such an blanket offer possible, I had to reject that as well. (They could afford a great deal more.) Instead I offered to continue writing to them regularly with my thoughts on various topics which might to be of interest to their readership, and if they chose to publish them, I would be happy for that recognition alone. In the meantime would they consider an article about the low quality of American whiskies?

         Recognition of the name R. D. Peterson was what I was after, after all.

         There was then no popular publication available to me, or apparently to the Brooklyn Public Library, devoted to tea. Instead, I wrote short letters to various food magazines like Epicure and Gourmet with the too obvious intent of proselytizing the subject, but with the hidden objective of kind ridicule. Tea drinkers were easy targets, after all. “The British Empire had not suffered through the conquest of half the earth just to have the product of their blood, sweat and tears reduced to stale content of a small paper pouch on a string.” I found ample material in an argument for the product of the island of Ceylon versus the mainland—especially given the low cost of the near-slave labor available around the central city of Kandy to keep the prices down. This raised loud protest.

         Vegetarian magazines were, as a group, almost humorless. There was no rhyme I could make with the word ‘tofu’ that they would accept. Insinuations concerning the after gastrointestinal effects of ‘meatless hamburgers’ made with beans and sprouts did not entertain them. It took four or five letters before I made my mark. The gauntlet I took up was the mass production of tasteless gas ripened strawberries in the Central Valley of California, a subject I had dipped into on a previous occasion for a piece on farm workers at The Gist. I vociferously attacked the ‘seedless watermelon’ as a tasteless ‘pepo’ and a product of modern engineering gone awry. I noted that the heavy production of hybrid corn to feed hogs and cattle had resulted in a product that had increased carbohydrates without the nutrition. (Note that this was years before the phonied production of ethanol for the government mandated mega-avarice of agribusiness which had reduced the best farmland in the nation to a chemical fertilizer wasteland.) I objected to the artificially matured tomato (gasified) as not only tasteless and odorless, but even deficient in those properties that would make it a good device for expressing one’s deepest feelings and emotions toward those pirates who had falsely labeled them ‘vine-ripened.’ It was just possible that a protester wielding one of those hard and ‘bruise resistant’ objects might be charged for assault with a deadly weapon?

         Opera was a tougher nut for me to crack, or at least to crack jokes about. It was then already in poor taste to make fun of fat people. It was uncouth to note that the price of admission at the Met was beyond the means of the average middle class lover of Puccini, and the true opera lover  (of the very sort who packed the Italian Opera halls of the 19th century and had made Verdi, Puccini and Rossini national heroes). It was unsophisticated to mention that operas written after the First World War could not draw an audience because they were simply “unbeautiful, unlistenable, and unintelligible.” I did all of that, of course, by way of a more straightforward analysis of the cost of the then relatively new Metropolitan Opera facility in New York which filled many city blocks formerly occupied by actual human beings and businesses, and the fact that it was built with taxpayer funds via tax deductible gifts, and was to be enjoyed by a small minority of the very rich as a kultural kaffeeklatsch. But over two years of constant effort I managed to get only three of my letters published in Boffo and I finally gave that one up. But for another reason. With movies reduced to space-opera, I had started liking the real thing. Not ‘modern opera’ of course, but the original, where characters entrapped by grand plots expressed emotions with song and melody in ways that could actually make you cry. It is always harder to kick the dog you favor.

         In the meantime, R. D. Peterson was busily writing to almost every other major American magazine concerning this topic or that. Or so it seemed. And the critical subtext was usually ignored. In Sunset Magazine I attacked the inflation of the money supply by the Fed that was impoverishing the elderly and making savings impossible through a simple tale of discovering ways to stretch a retirement dollar. Even late in the game I was able to address the mean spirited political hash that was the much touted opera Nixon in China and managed to point out once more the abandonment of those millions in South Vietnam who had made the mistake of allying themselves with the United States as well as recalling the unfinished business in Korea where China continued to prop up a horrific dictatorial regime as evil as any on earth.

         The endgame was simply that I would write a ‘book’ about the collapse of American culture and all of those things that disturbed me which I could not effectively touch in my fiction, using the most unlikely angle of approach, and at the right moment, mention the title of this book in each of my letters to those magazines which had grown most fond of my opinionations. I would thus have all the advance advertising necessary to insure it sold sufficiently well.

         Then the High-Life came back with another offer. They would pay me twelve hundred dollars a month to write a column on whatever topic caught my interest.

         And this had come just at a moment of financial distress.

         I was thus bought. As with any ‘working girl.’  It was only a matter of price.

         But not exactly like the average whore, I thought. I was there after my own amusement, after all, not the pleasure of the publication. Though I had never reckoned on this accomplishment from the first as a degree of success, I was suddenly somehow willing to accept the consequence.

         And the prospective target of wholesale hedonism which the High-Life offered was too much to refuse. I had actually met the editor and publisher there, Malcolm Frist. A small man in nearly every way but physical height, and he was as petty and nasty as his magazine. I had encountered him at various literary parties through the years. He would not have published one of Angus McGuire’s stories if paid to do so. Too many adjectives. Too many adverbs. He much favored the Hemingwayesque sentence. But as R. D. Peterson, I was a different animal. Importantly, I was, like Mr. Frist himself, homosexual. I had not made an issue of my nom de plume’s sexuality in my letters, but it was sufficiently implicit between the lines.

         I did two things right, then. Both of them against strict editorial policy at the High-Life. I refused to have a picture of myself posted with my column. The other was that I retained all rights to the material excepting republication in the magazine itself.

         The Peterson Papers was the title of the column as well as the later book. I had once read an abused copy of the Ponkapog Papers, published in 1903, by Thomas Bailey Aldrich and been enchanted by the range of interest found by that great editor, poet, essayist, storyteller, and friend of the Gilded Age, but I knew this reference would be too obscure for Mr. Frist as well as his subscribers. I offered as a subtext the title, ‘Confessions of an unsophisticated sort,’ and suggested this, and Frist had agreed on it immediately, seeing the open range this approach offered. But he wanted desperately to meet me. I said that was not possible and that my anonymity was the most important thing I had in the world. Implying again, delicately, the matter of my sexuality and the motive of staying in the closet. In the correspondence that followed, he guessed that I might be any one of a dozen authors from Dick Cavett to Gore Vidal. I told him I was much flattered by the comparisons (and happy that he was so far wrong).

         And do not ask me now how I presumed to get away with all of this. The only answer should perhaps be chiseled on my headstone. ‘He had no clue.’ But then the entire lark came to an abrupt end. I met Sarah and simply had no time for it.

***

40. In a Republic of Books, somewhere south of Southie

         We are what we do. More so than what we eat, I believe. Our ancestors ate just about anything that moved or that remained in one place long enough to harvest. There was no menu, even if they might have been able to read it, just hunger. And need.

         “Your work will shape you, as it does the carpenter’s hands.”

         It was one of Mr. Billington’s espousals that we should each, “do as much of what we love as humanly possible, by reason, if we spend too much time at work on what we hate we will come to despise ourselves.”

         My full enamor with the nineteenth century truly began by accident, or happenstance, or both. A month after opening the doors at A Republic of Books, in 1975, I saw a notice in the papers about an estate auction that was taking place not far away—to be conducted at the house of the original and now long deceased owner himself. That very day. This would be my first chance to enter into one of those as yet unsubdivided Park Slope mansions of lore.

         The store was empty on that summer morning, all the intelligent readers having already abandoned the asphalt and brick of Brooklyn for the wooden boardwalks and sand of Jones Beach and Fire Island. I wrote a note out on the back of a scrap envelope, taped it to the window of my store, and locked the door.

         As I had sadly discovered in my previous good fortune when finding shelves for the shop, books had long since become dispensable in the modernization of old Brooklyn townhouses, there being less interest now in the classics which had once occupied those linear feet. The auction was well along by the time I arrived and registered with the agent at the door. His desk fit easily into a black and white marble-floored portico, trimmed above in layers of hand-routed oak and stained glass. The auction was already visible to me from there through open double doors, and an empty foyer, and was staged in what I guessed to be a miniature ballroom.

         The entire place was a fabulous brick and brownstone that appeared a little shabby only because it had been unoccupied for many years during a prolonged probate battle. But I saw no books. The shelves that lined the walls were already emptied. I sat in my jeans and short sleeves on a folding chair to the rear of an audience of bow ties, blue blazer jackets and what passed, at the time (it was the 1970s, remember) for fashion, but had the look from behind of an opened crayon box. I stared jealously from that vantage at crimson velvet sofas trimmed in dark walnut, and Tiffany lamps, gleaming table settings of fine silver, and sets of pink and blue Wedgwood china. Each lot was brought up separately to a small permanent stage beneath a faux proscenium that I could imagine had once been the perfect spot for a jazz band or a recital.

         The full assortment of treasure was something to cry over. There was a pale marble sculpture by Saint-Gaudens, and another in brass by Remington; Chippendale chairs; an art deco bedroom set, ready for the gavel. And it went on and on like that. Each lot carried forth by two fellows in sports jackets, dressed much like the others, but looking a bit less groomed and from their blank expressions I guessed they would have much preferred to be at the beach as well.

         At last, several first editions came up by Mark Twain and Henry James and others of that stature, plus four or five sets in leather, but all quickly rose in price beyond my reach. And then there was more china. A little dispirited by this, and feeling sad for the dissolution of someone else’s dreams. I was about to leave when the fellow in the vestibule stopped me.

         “I thought you wanted the books?”

         “Yes?”

         “There’re comin’ up in a sec. Just wait.”

         And I did.

         An hour later it was announced that there were seven lots of books in total. All boxed and ready for quick removal. Approximately 1000 books per lot. To be sold, as is. The audience which had already suffered through missing a perfectly splendid day outside, immediately began to disperse. And without complaint, I got all seven. 7000 books, sight unseen! I paid $770 dollars plus the auction fee, having outbid a standing absentee offer of $105 dollars per lot.

         It was a heady experience and a bad example to me for the future. Few auctions I attended through the years were nearly as wonderful in result. But it was done.

         For many weeks following that day, my shop was cluttered once again by those large moving boxes filled with the finest of booty. Great books! Glorious books! Fabulous books! English and American editions of Dickens and Stevenson, Trollope and Austen. All the Brontes were there, and Gaskell and Eliot, Thackeray and Kipling, Hardy, and Scott, as well as translations of Hugo, Flaubert, Dumas, and Verne, and every Russian I ever knew from Chekov and Dostoyevsky to Tolstoy and Turgenev, but also that great Pole, Seinkienwicz. There were a dozen Germans I had no knowledge of before, like Spielhagan, Fontane, Morike, and Keller, along with the more common Goethe and Heine, and of course all the Americans I knew best from Twain and Melville, to Hawthorne and Poe, James and Irving, along with at least fifty I knew next to nothing of at all, like Jewett, Chopin, Ina Coolbrith, and Alice Brown. All the poets that I had always intended to read but had not yet gotten to, were there: the Brownings and Wordsworth and Tennyson, along with the Whitman and Shelley and the Keats and Kipling. Kipling was the most modern of that lot. And this told me something about when they had originally been purchased and read.

         Most were in sturdy cloth bindings of dark green and maroon, blue and brown, with the gilt of their titles still bright, though some edges were rubbed—perhaps by second reading or a hundred dustings through the years. All the deluxe editions in leather had apparently been removed and perhaps sold to an interior decorator before my arrival at the auction. Very few of the nearly 7000 were first editions and most of those that remained were the authors who were more obscure, such as Thomas Bailey Aldrich. There were no histories or biographies, though certainly there was a lot of that reused as background to the fictions. None of Darwin, or the science of Huxley, or Hitchcock or Agassiz. There was no philosophical texts in the bunch though I suspect much of that to be hidden in the stories. Not even Emerson or Thoreau.

         But I was drunk and in a delirium for all of what I had during the months and years after. It took years to make my way through it all, and the banker’s boxes redecorated my aisles in stacks of four at every corner.

         The most fabulous thing to me about them was that they were all read. Every single one! I could not find a single page unturned or signature uncut. And because I had gotten the idea from a few of the books, which had been given as a gifts ‘to Clara’ on her birthday or a Christmas, that the reader might have been just one person in that great household, though I could find no mention of a Clara having lived at that address, my brain sought an excuse. Yet how could a single person possibly have found time to read all of that?

         I couldn’t help myself then. I made up her history in my head. That was, of course, the invalid Clara of Serendip, who disappears at last, having fallen into the pages of one of her ‘trasures,’ never wanting to return, after being given over to the care of her Irish nurse, Miss Megan and thence ignored by her dynamic family, for the more material treasures that pleased them better. Clara can simply no longer exist among them and makes her final escape into a better world she knew of.

         When Clara’s mother peeked in at the door on that Sunday morning, as she usually did in passing, she saw only the nurse standing at the window, with her jacket on her arm and her small velvet cap still pinned on her head from church.

         “You.”

         Miss Megan turned, saying, “Who, Ma’am?”

         “You! But where is my daughter?”

         “I’m sure I don’t know, Ma’am. But I believe she said she was going for a walk.”

          And it was just then that I also found yet another means to make my already narrow aisles even less passable.

         We never had the space in the shop to stage full scale readings and such, but by another accident, early on, I was present one afternoon when an amorous student from Brooklyn College was romancing the object of his passions in the aisles and reading aloud the famous verse from ‘How Do I Love Thee’, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as he pursued her from one section to another, with an old copy (one from the auction, in fact) in one hand and the other gesticulating as wildly as only the most dramatic mind-lost gesticulation can be.

         I was inspired by the act, if not smitten by the object of his passion. (She looked so young—already then a sign of my own early aging.) We had so few customers at the time that it seemed a perfect idea for making things appear to be active and interesting. So I called up Josh Green, one of the old staff at The Fore-edge. He was an instructor at Brooklyn Academy of Music, and though I was not much interested in what they usually offered there, I thought he might have some idea. He did.

         The idea was this: that students might come down to the shop whenever it pleased them and stage events, right in the aisles. The purpose for them, as he saw it, was to climb down from the stage and make their art more accessible. I begged him to do it if it was understood that the books were the matter. That the effort was not for them to shine alone but to illuminate the books as well. He understood.

         The key to the thing, and the quick success of it, was that there was no schedule to it. It was as spontaneous as the impulses of most twenty-year-olds. If you did not happen to be at the shop when the event occurred, you missed it. Thus, many years before the first ‘flash mob,’ we had violinists wandering the shop playing music, some of which I actually liked. Theatre majors staged scenes from Shakespeare and Ionesco, as well their own works, bantering back and forth from aisle to aisle as customers stood back in shock and delight to let them pass.

         And now there were other sounds to hear than their own breathing and mumbling, for those who cared. Especially after the influx of older books stole more of the gloss from the new stock on the shelves, giving them a little more luster instead.

         I can say for certain that my shop was haunted. At night, as I attempted to sleep in my narrow loft space above at the back, I listed to the complaints of Mr. Thoreau about the failures of his fellow man, and the cautions of Mr. Emerson to give them the opportunity to better themselves in their own way. It was there that I first heard Ambrose Bierce make his unrequited overtures to Miss Jewett. There were times that I slept to the sounds of children playing hide and seek about the aisles and only figured them at last to be Dickensian by their dress.

         But alas, and alack, most of bookselling is a banausic pursuit; a routine of the most mundane tasks and the ordering of petty matters of consequence, from answering the phone to changing light bulbs and sweeping the floors, checking orders, placing orders, checking bills, or paying some portion enough to keep them from being referred to a collection agency, ringing sales in on the register, taking the cash in hand, giving change, or imprinting credit cards with a little machine that ate the three-part flimsy of the forms as often as it did what it was designed to do, and all while answering the same questions repeatedly again and again on any given day.

         They would say, “Is this the price?”

         Yes, the number is there on the flap of the book which you may have wisely noticed has a dollar sign before and a decimal mark in the middle, and that is indeed the price.

         But you say instead, “Yes Ma’am. That’s one of our new books. The review ran in the Times last Sunday.”

         “Do you have a used copy?”

         You might have said, ‘I believe you may want to go down to the Strand for that. They often have new books which are discounted as review copies. And I hear Barnes & Noble up the street has some titles at twenty percent off. But the publication date on the book in your hand is for this coming Friday, so you probably won’t find it used in too many places quite yet.’

         But, pressed for time, you say, “Not yet. I’m sure they will come in over time.”

         They answer, “This one looks a little used. Do you have a fresh copy?”

         You might say, ‘You mean, after you stood there and read it for twenty minutes and cracked the spine repeatedly so that it does look a little more used than it should? No. We only ordered two copies and the other one sold yesterday.’

         But you say, “Not at the moment. Maybe next week.”

         This business is conducted while in the presence of other customers and must be done as pleasantly as possible, especially the answering of questions, without the easy ring of sarcasm to your voice, no matter how stupid. Sarcasm is such a low art, when the opportunities are great. If a customer is rude, you must be aware that your own response in kind is going to immediately cost you something if heard by others. If you are churlish in response to their boorishness, you will not only further alienate the particular cretin in question but any other nitwit within hearing distance. The customer is wrong more often than right but you must find a way to let them discover this for themselves because the temerity to tell them they are mistaken, or ignorant, will usually create an ‘unpleasant atmosphere.’

         All of this is measly, and not at all part of the ‘romance of bookselling’ you had imagined.

         So why do it?

         Because there is more to it, of course. Just as making love is not all in the preparation.

         From the first, I absolutely and adamantly refused to have the expected and predictable bookshop cat. I maintained this position steadfastly for several months.

         It was about a week or two after the auction when I noticed that a very pretty cloth edition of Emerson’s Essays, which I had placed on the shelf reluctantly with the thought that I would rather read it than sell it, had lost about an eighth of an inch of the fore-edge from the cover. Gnawed away.

         Actually, Mrs. Wilson noticed it.

         “Mice.” She said, holding the cover out to me as evidence, like you might hold up a a bag of poop to a dog’s nose as proof of their bad behavior. And with the same voice.

         Mrs. Wilson, one of my few part-time employees, freshly hired, and a retired English teacher, had much experience with making her case to young minds that refused to listen. She had advised a cat immediately upon her arrival. I had refused based on the fact that I was allergic to them. I lost.

         We got a very skinny orange and white tabby from the Brooklyn Animal Shelter that afternoon. I called her Marbles. Mostly because I was so clearly missing mine. The good thing was that Marbles gained weight very quickly. The bad thing was that my sneezing usually occupied the first half hour of my day. And the allergy was not helped by the fact that Marbles liked my bed in the loft as much as I did.

         Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica changed everything on July 5, 1687, setting the foundation for modern science. On March 9, 1776, four months before the actual statement of politics that would make the practice of his theories possible, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations reconceived not only the economics of men, but the entire social dynamic. Charles Darwin irrevocably altered our way of seeing ourselves forever on November 24, 1859, with On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. And though the essence of each of these works might have been written eventually by someone else, it is hard to look back now in history and see just who that would have been, or when. Newton’s fellow craftsman in the higher maths of calculus, Leibniz, with his rationalism and a priori dependence on what was expected to be found, and his German need for order, does not appear to have had such a broad sense of the cosmos. The Scottish Enlightenment had produced a dozen geniuses but none as patient and deliberate and lucid as Adam Smith. Alfred Russel Wallace was as brilliant as Darwin, perhaps more so, but an arrogant and impatient man already enamored with the alchemy of transmutation, the ‘scientific’ solution of that time, and would not have overwhelmed religious objections to evolution if given another thousand years. A touch of the pox at any of those moments and we might all still be living in that world lit only by fire. 

         But all writing is not of the unique nature of a Newton, Smith or a Darwin. Most of it, as you can readily see, is of the caliber of the average twenty-first century bestseller, a product of marketing, which has been calculated using some lower form of single-digit math to find a baser and seemingly unquenchable need amongst the largest possible audience, and one that is better off, after all, decomposing in a Staten Island landfill. Why add your sum to that, I thought?

         There are many who have read my essays, but never the novels. They don’t believe in reading fiction. They “don’t have time.” But this excuse is seldom close to the truth. They already waste precious moments of their lives on the useless, pointless, and fruitless speculations of the dyspeptic, disgruntled and the disenfranchised. They watch television. Proof enough of that. They even spend egregious sums of hard earned cash to go to the movies, most of which they can expect to be badly scripted, poorly directed, and inadequately acted, but they go anyway simply to be doing something. However, they will not read a novel.

         As with most things, I have a theory for this.

         This conjecture is that they are afraid of themselves. The particular conversation required in a novel, between the author and the reader, is not the matter in the non-fiction text where you are being told what to think. Most people would prefer to go to films where the pace of action does not allow for contemplation. (This too is tied to the death of conversation.)

         The case for fiction is a more subtle cause, though it has changed our history again and again. Orwell had written hundreds of essays in more parochial support of his political beliefs before he cast his own doubts into the minds of thinking socialists with Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. More importantly, whereas the essays were read by thousands, those two short novels were read by millions. And the classical theories of Adam Smith were studied by a mere fraction of the number of readers, in over two hundred years, than those who read Ayn Rand in just one generation as she made sport of economics with Atlas Shrugged. H. G. Wells brought our minds to bear on both time and space in words that Newton never could and inspired the thoughts of astronauts. Frederick Douglass, seemingly indefatigable, made his case against slavery most eloquently, and personably, to tens of thousands at gatherings on stage alongside the best writers of his time. But most famously, Mrs. Stowe, a rather less elegant author in writing style though better in dress, made the case for the millions. Lincoln is said to have said to Mrs. Stowe, upon meeting the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “Is this the little woman who made the great war?” The anecdote may not be true, but the sentiment certainly was.

         Most of what passes for history is fabrication for a purpose—as illiberal a taking of fact and fashioning of fiction as any novel. That is not meant as criticism, unless done badly. It is a compliment, to my lights. Facts have always been fungible. To have used the facts that are known, to discover the shape of the unknown, is only art. That ‘history’ more strictly attempts to interpret what has actually happened is noble enough, but does not change its nature. The facts will remain.

         Fiction, on the other hand, need not obey the laws of gravity.

         Take the Stowe reference noted above. As often as it is retold, it is called ‘apocryphal.’ Really? Apocryphal means false. Do these critical authorities know that it is false for a fact—as in their having any proof of falsehood—understanding that a negative cannot logically be proved? Do they have facts that contradict the very possibility of the words being spoken? No. Simply, they do not have a documented source for the quote. That is all. But they are certain in their doubt.

         It may be true that an engineer’s text or an exposition of mathematics is factual—at least within the context of math and the known limits of the matter—as far as that goes. But of what use is it without a purpose? And as soon as you venture out upon a sea of purpose, you are afloat. If not adrift, you are as much at odds with what will be as what has been. You have imagined your facts into a future circumstance, or caged them by the limits of the past that you know. That, simply put, is fiction, with or without the label ‘science’ or of ‘fantasy.’

         True, I think of myself aspiring to the lights of Herman Melville and not the more prolific James Patterson. Most writers know they are producing crap, and I suspect Mr. Patterson does as well. They are trying to fill a fiscal need, if not simply a gap in the terrain of a future landfill. Well enough. But their choice of wants is too often made for the sake of the highest financial return, and therefore, as they believe it, addressed to the lowest common denominator and that is more akin to the mistake of the great Leibniz, calculating human frailty based on past assumptions. Assuming the worst. In that way, their concern is for the moment. Financial reward. Or popular acclaim. Or the affording of a better brand of whiskey.

         But every time I have looked, the moment was past. And I have never been able to claim a hold on the present.

         I make no case for the value of my work. The work itself must do that; but any more than Darwin might have impressed someone with his theory if he had not first voyaged in the Beagle and made his thousand observations, I worry that my own exploration of the smaller regions of my own head will be insufficient. True, I have always had some objective in my work that was not a given. My own voyage may be a lesser one, my circumnavigation less risky, my Galapagos a mere Atlantis, perhaps, and the whole of it might rise in worth only to the uppermost stratum of the compost pile, or sink instead; or, then again, as I want it to be, kept upon a shelf in a home where it might be read by someone someday and appreciated as at least worth the time it took to read and think.

         Even that last bit is also a partial lie. I have written to please an audience more than a few times. Not often successfully. But I have sought the laugh frequently enough. And I don’t condemn the James Pattersons among my clan for trying to entertain. I just wish that they would try harder to do the job with a better product. I like to read too, and tire of looking for the good book; spending more time in the search some weeks than in the actual enjoyment of another imagination. It is the reason why I have so often returned to old friends on the shelf for refuge and comfort.

         Consider poor Melville. A mere deckhand on a whaling voyage to the South Seas. If those natives of Tai Pi Vai, in a seasonal need of more protein in their diets, had eaten Herman Melville instead of nursing him, we would never have had Moby Dick, and tens of thousands of literature majors during the 20th century would have been saved from that shipwreck of glorious overstatement and epistemological worry.

         Our man, a Yankee sailor aboard a whaler in the south seas, having deserted his miserable ship the Acushnet and escaped to the interior of the island, was already sick with an infected leg when he found refuge among the generous natives of Nuku Hiva. Though unable to communicate and likely in a delirium fever, his several weeks stay in the valley of Tai Pi Vai, enhanced a bit by a few accounts he found later in other books, became the novel, Typee and the start of a great if insolvent career. And never lacking the impulse of self-importance, I am often somewhere south of Southie, myself. Brooklyn has been my Typee.

         When A Republic of Books had opened in 1975, we started out to be a new bookshop with some used books mixed in to cover what titles we wanted that were out of print, and to give the place a little character. New books can be rather boringly uniform and shiny. In the end, we were a used bookstore with a few new books just to cover the recent stuff that was worth having. Frankly, I liked that much better. 

         There were several ways of acquiring the used titles. The most common source was the ‘walk-in,’ the person who wandered through the door with a bag of books hoping to sell them either out of a need for cash, or for credit against other books, or simply with an apartment already overwhelmed by those weighty rectangular objects and desperate for space.

         Importantly, we often ordered titles from other booksellers using the catalogues which once were issued by used book dealers (they liked to call themselves ‘antiquarians,’ but few were) and thus mailed our own out in turn to those other dealers who had affections for literature in common with our own. This aspect of the business is for the most part bygone now in the age of the computer and the online database. A few high-end booksellers still maintain the old manners but we were never really part of that carriage trade in any case.

         Weekly, usually on Tuesday afternoons, I would set out on foraging missions with a short list of needed items in hand and scout the local Salvation Army depots or St. Joseph’s donations centers and the like as well as other book dealers along the way who might be looking to get rid of some stock at a reduced price.

         Once a month or so I might attend an auction. Auctions were often favored by interior decorators and individual collectors able to pay prices higher than we could budget for volumes that might linger on the shelves for years. But when whole collections of books were offered together, hundreds at a time, the potential to find a few profitable items to pay for the lot would often be there.

         However, the greatest fun was to be had in the ‘house call’.

         Going into other people’s homes to look at collections was akin to the visit to a foreign country. Or a sort of spiritual and psychological burglary. They had asked you there to buy their books. What you got was a candid glimpse of their lives. A color snapshot in 3-D. They would so often be concerned with your opinion of what they had been reading, they’d hide away what they thought was too revealing—especially the pornography or romances, which I have often thought of as one category. Meanwhile, the unread copy of Middlemarch reveal far more.

         They would push ahead of you into the cluttered space of a basement.

         “No, not that box. That’s just the stuff I took to the beach to read. You wouldn’t want that. I only want to sell the books still on the shelves.”

         The shelved books still showed the gaps where the ‘beach’ reading had been removed before my arrival.

         Or the exact opposite. They did not want to sell their better books, just the crap that still had sand in the bindings.

         But all the while, general literary tastes being what they have been, I would be more interested in what else was there: the old radio, the boxed games from an age when families pursued such trivialities together, the now unused manual typewriter, a box of postcards from motels with the lipstick colored decor and the sweep and feel of landed rocket ships, the photographs of better times, framed on the mantel, and the dark paintings set aside in the attic.

         It was during the first years after opening the bookshop that I started the routine I continued through over two decades. For four or five hours every morning, from seven or eight to noon, I wrote. Often, I started before that, if the idea was already on my brain when I awoke at six.

         I’d built a loft just above the office at the back of the shop to save on having to pay the additional rent on an apartment, and in that narrow space, lodged beneath the twelve-foot ceiling, I had pretty much everything I needed for daily survival. I’d sawn the legs off of a chest of drawers so that it would fit in the little more than three feet of vertical living room that I had up there, and I put up a thick wooden rod from the side of that to the wall at one end so that I could hang what clothes needed to be hung. The mattress filled one end of the space, close to the window where I could get a little light, or open that for necessary air in the summer. In the middle between the chest of drawers and the mattress, I pieced together squares of carpet samples so that I could avoid the splinters from the four by eight plywood sections I used as a floor. Where the cutaway opened for the ladder down, I had barricaded several boxes of books so that the whole thing looked like a make-do storage space from below.

         Mr. Feeny, the landlord, came in dozens of times over the years after that and never caught on. But most importantly to me, I could get down to my typewriter in the office beneath pretty quickly, and from there I could still be out in the bookshop to relieve Lauren, my first assistant manager, within seconds if she needed help, or by the time the lunch crowd got heavy, as heavy as it got, which was not very much, especially in the first years.

         Lauren went to pick up her kids at school by three, Monday through Friday. Mrs. Wilson, a retired teacher, worked most Saturdays. For a time I did Sunday alone until Sheila came on for that too. I had one high school kid named Darius who worked from four to eight, three nights a week and another, Sheila again, who did the other four. I remember them all very well. My first employees.

         But because I could not afford much more than minimum wage, they came and went as their own needs changed, but all of them ‘part-time’ so that I might avoid withholding taxes.

         Now in a pinch, I might remember half the part-timers who followed after the first few. I remember more faces than names. But I’m sure I have forgotten some of them completely and I regret that too. I wrote a novel called Memory Lost about that subject ten or twelve years ago. I’ll try and remember to get to that later.

         A young woman who had written herself a novel that was then on the bestseller list came by the shop one day. She stood right in front of the counter and stared back at me as if waiting for a response. I looked again. I actually recognized her face from publisher’s advertisements.

         I said “Molly Jones?”

         She said, “I thought you had forgotten me for a second.” Then she moved in for a hug which I did not oppose, though I’m sure I must have looked nonplussed.

         Her eyes scanned the aisles and shelves and then back at me, “It all looks the same. At least you haven’t changed.”

         And it was only then that I had realized that she had worked the evening shift once for almost two years. I had never even associated my Brooklyn College girl Molly, whom I vaguely remembered as being plump and disturbingly sexy, with the author who was now so austere and stylishly thin. But then again, she had married since, so the surname on the book jackets had changed as well.

         Perhaps I should get on with it.

         Memory Lost was perhaps too difficult a book to write. The thought of the distress it would cause never occurred to me at the time. It is my nature that such thoughts seldom do occur to me until after the fact. The book was begun and done in six or seven weeks. The idea was certainly simple enough: that what had been lost on September 11th were the lives unlived as much as the lives destroyed. This was a similar theme to the one I had approached differently given my outrage at abortion in The Prevalence of Zombies, which had come out 1997, and once before that in Wonderful Wuz in 1984. This time I could not manage any humor for the subject, nor sufficient horror. It was merely sad. Like a medieval choir, the tenor of it never let up, and the monotone made sitting through it difficult. I have found used copies of that book since then that were clearly never finished. The publisher mistakenly took it on the merit of timeliness, I think. They were all publishing books about that act of terrorism, and here was a bit of fiction—actually one of the first of those at the time. And though it relieved much of my own angst of that moment, I would take it back now and re-write it from beginning to end if I could.

         Shortly afterward, Tim Bailey died and my perspective on memory altered once again.

***

41. Sarah

         My friendship with Holt Curry occurred in a most indirect manner. Bourbon was not the drink of choice in Manhattan in the 1970s. The closest anyone came to touching a bottle was just to flavor a highball. But Helen Morris had taught me to savor it, drink it neat, and avoid the cheaper brands, and this was the whisky I ordered whenever I was out and about, at least when beer was not a better option. And most publishing parties kept as poor an assortment of bottled beers as they did of American whiskey.

         I did not like literary functions. But they were fairly constant, and an easy way to introduce yourself to one author or another, meet new editors, and for catching up on literary gossip, though they were given more often to the purpose of finding a bed partner for later in the evening. I went to a few of these, and my habit was to ask for about two ounces of bourbon in a glass and nurse that through the hour or two that I was there.

         One evening I did just this at the open bar and was told that they did not have any bourbon on hand. I had noticed a liquor store on 72nd Street when I left the subway and so volunteered to go down and buy a bottle. But, before I reached the door, a hand came down on my shoulder and a voice said, “Do you need some help with that?”

         Holt was a true devotee of the spirits who had sworn when he was in Vietnam that he would never drink a cheap bourbon again. He was afraid I would pick out the wrong thing and insisted on coming along with me, to supervise. He is also a big man, at least six foot six, and when he lays his hand on your shoulder, you know who is in charge.

         In the liquor store, with Holt distracted by the telling of a small tale at the expense of the publisher whose party we were attending, I decided to show off my knowledge, (borrowed, of course, from Helen Morris), and went for the best bottle I saw on the shelf. He laid another hand on my shoulder then, grasped the bottle by the neck, gently lifted it from my fingers to set it back, and then picked a brand that cost half as much.

         “Those people up there aren’t going to care what it is. They’ll put all kinds of crap in it anyway. This tastes about as good, because it is, and after the third sip or so you won’t know the difference.”

         That then was the basis of our friendship. Drinking was pretty much what I expected to do whenever we were together from that time forward. But this was not all to the bad. I also learned a great deal about a good many things on the cheap. Holt is an extraordinarily honest man as well as a raconteur. People who first meet him take him for a naif because of his Southern drawl and odd expressions. His face manipulates words and meanings lost to dictionaries. In fact, he is a sophisticate who outclasses most of the company he is in, and a Harvard graduate to boot. But his sharpest tool is his honesty. I suspect this is something born of his height. He has never needed to lie in order to get along. Born and raised around Charleston, South Carolina, and a graduate of The Citadel, with ancestors in every war going back to the time of the French and Indians, he is the sort you imagine would have gone to West Point—but he didn’t. He was too tall.   

         But we had more than one thing in common, despite our different lineages. A particular one of those was that Holt had also stolen a car when he was seventeen, on the night of his graduation. If he had not done this along with the daughter of a Senator from South Carolina, it might have gone unnoticed. Instead it ended in a statewide manhunt. And if he hadn’t then confessed the truth of what they had done to her father, the tempest might have blown over even still. Charges of seduction were in fact dropped, but Holt had gone right into the Army, despite his height, in 1965. You can read all about this in his second book Isle of Palms, which is mostly about returning home. So, we were also about the same age as well.

         I suspect that I so quickly adapted to our friendship in part because of a lingering sense of loss about Roger Terrill. That, in spite of the more obvious similarities between the two men, was something I would not have admitted easily except that it soon came out on its own in part of a novel I was writing.

         At the time of our meeting, Holt was a crime reporter at the New York Post, and loving every minute of it. His yarns about human depravity and mayhem were delivered in a soft baritone voice and steady cadence that left you completely open and defenseless to the gory climax, no matter how much you prepared yourself for it. He wrote all that down too, so you can ‘hear’ all of it for yourself by reading his many mystery stories.

         He invited me out to his ‘shack’ in East Hampton for the first time in July of 1978. Sort of a birthday present. I needed the vacation and accepted readily. Having heard the stories about the ‘Hamptons’ and the luminaries who occupied the place during the summer, I was perhaps even over expectant. But Holt’s house was, in fact, a shack. It was a former servants’ quarters which had been moved further back from the encroaching ocean when the main house had been partly swept away in a hurricane during the 1950’s. The remainder of that old mansion lay in heaps among the beach roses as you came in from the main road. The surviving structure was gray, not from paint, but weathering. Most of the paint had long been scourged away. There were two floors, but the upstairs was ‘condemned,’ and Holt’s plans for the rebuilding, displayed on large sheets of bluish vellum, were tacked decoratively throughout on the tongue and groove pine of the inner walls of the lower level. Holes in both the floor and ceiling were covered by old metal advertising signs that Holt had picked up for free at the junkyard, and nailed in place. On the floor these patches were then covered with cheap throw rugs and carpet remnants and when you walked you often got a metallic buckle of response to your step from the sign beneath. Lying in bed you found yourself staring up at the gaping of the pink cheeked, blonde headed, Sunshine bread girl who smiled happily back at your every move.

         The plumbing worked, essentially. The toilet was enclosed somewhat, but the shower was not. Washing yourself at the side of the house was a public display of whatever God had given you.

         Holt’s girlfriend at the time was an editor at Random House. Not his editor I should add. But a very pretty young lady who had gone home with him after one of those Manhattan literary parties, and with whom he had found a compatibility which he did not question, as was his way with the world in general. I suppose her physical assets overcame any other disappointments between them. We’ll call her Jane.

         Jane’s great strength as an editor was the ability to speed read. I witnessed her doing this while she wore nothing more than a towel around her lower parts, drinking coffee and eating multiple bowls of cereal, every morning, for two weeks. She would not eat again until Holt fired up the grill in the evening. In between, she lay sprawled on a towel down on the beach, most often, unless children were around, totally naked and reading more manuscripts—just there beyond the hillocks of sea grass and roses that played out in front of the ‘shack’ toward a constantly heaving of the sea, and would occasionally frolic that way in the surf. I sympathized completely with Holt’s tastes in companionship, but this was difficult for my libido at the beginning, and I often thought Jane knew it and took advantage of the fact.

         “Angus, would you be sweet and get me something to drink at the house ? . . Angus, could you get me another towel? This one is full of sand . . . Angus, I left my sunglasses in the car . . .”

         But I never objected when I had the chance, that I remember too.

         For his part, I was aware that Holt wanted to make life easier for me, and he persisted in inviting other female friends over, as well as some of his buddies in the neighborhood.

         Most of those luminaries had ‘cottages’ more in keeping with the pictures at the back of the New York Times magazine section. Many of those were unqualified mansions. But the fact was that Holt had the best stretch of beach in the neighborhood. When the ocean had claimed the main house, it had left what might be described, especially at low tide, as a small lagoon. It was only about twenty yards wide, but when the tide was out and the sun blazing, the water warmed to a near bath. At high tide, the sea wall, which had been built decades before in an effort to save the main house, now worked to break the waves so that swimming there was the best. All of this made Holt even more popular with friends than the ‘nature girl’ habits of his Jane.

         His immediate neighbor, his own agent, and oldest friend in the vicinity, who also shared some of this beachfront, was the literary agent Toni Kidd. She was then about sixty and not into exhibitionism, but seemed to enjoy the company Holt gathered, nonetheless. It was in fact, while staying at Kidd’s beach house (a small shingle-styled beauty from the turn of the century) that Holt Curry happened, by mere chance, to be witness to the estate auction when his own property came up for sale. That story has some amusement to it.

         The place had been in probate for more than ten years after the death of the previous owner. Holt was on the beach that day, and noticed the commotion next door and went over to investigate wearing only his bathing suit. Realizing what was going on, he had run back, grabbed Toni—actually carrying her in his arms—and brought her over to the auction and made her sign for him so that he could make an offer.

         After engaging her in conversation over the first days, I could not resist asking Toni if she would like to consider me as a new client. She said no. Right off and with no hesitation. She was already then looking forward to retirement and clients like Holt made her life difficult enough as it was. But she said that she would check around and see if anyone else was interested.

         This worked out when Melvin Hays called me a few weeks later, confirming once again the dull but oft’ proved saw, that it is all about who you know. But the better story is still there at the Hamptons.

         Beginning on Thursday of the week, late, the first wave of weekend visitors arrived from New York City and infested the several ‘cottages’ nearby. On that night, Holt was known to build a fire on the beach which he billed as the ‘early birds’ party if the weather was right and the tide low enough. By this, he meant not a gathering of first arrivals but a celebration with those who would stay up with him until dawn and watch the sun rise out of the Atlantic in proclamation of their good fortunes as human beings to be alive in such a place.

         That night, as was my good fortune, the tide was out.

          Skinny dipping is a wonderful sport under most circumstances. In the moonlight, it is made wondrous. All the flaws and physical imperfections we are heir to are obscured, mercifully, and what small assets we possess are magnified by shadow. And all of that was, in my case, further enhanced by extreme nearsightedness.

         There was a wind that night. It was actually near being cold. But the water in the ‘lagoon’ was warm, inviting, and in fact seductive against the chill. Most of those who arrived came wearing shorts and shirts and were more interested in the hamburgers and hotdogs. Holt kept searing them at the flames of a broad grill atop an oil barrel cut in halves, and had not even thought yet of swimming. The fire—built up out of broken timbers from the old main house which had been gathered and stacked in a heap off to one side—whipped like a celebratory flag and radiated a fine dry heat. Beach umbrellas were soon opened and one edge of their tops set into the sand against the breeze and within these shelters semi-naked and naked bodies gathered in the warm glow of the fire.

         That was the night I met Sarah Unger. By the time dawn had arrived, we were even holding hands.

         I suppose you are lucky if you really fall in love even once in your life. And after the fact, discounting the pain of love lost seems to be a natural defense of the psyche. Long after you have been through that defeat, you find yourself wanting again for the first years, months, weeks, days, and hours. As Peter Rabinowitz would readily tell you, he was a far happier man because he was still in love with the same woman after forty years. All of that is well and good, of course. He is an exemplar to the rest of us who have failed so miserably. But that is not the point.

         And writing about the bungle of a love affair is banal. Unless one is a monster, there is no true extreme to make the loss unique, no matter how you re-imagine it. And this is made all the worse if you still care about the other. The chance that you might do something bizarre is unlikely just for the reason that you don’t want to hurt that person you had once loved so greatly, whatever the reason for the failure. Putting the details in print feels petty.

         But falling in love is incomparable. Every moment of it, both pain and joy, is splendid and unlike any other you have ever experienced before.

         And falling in love at a beach orgy is the least likely thing I can imagine.

         I say ‘orgy’ as I have said it before in recalling that night. But in all truth it was not anything of the sort we had read about in books of the time or frequently heard gossip of. There was no wanton exchange of bodily fluids with multiple partners. It was not even a mildly libidinous bacchanalia. In truth it was a rather innocent affair, on the order of a couple of teenagers first discovering what their bodies might do, against any better judgment.

         I believe that in the 1970’s, as stupid as it may sound, there was a great loss of love. An imagined innocence was lost which had made the realities of the moment less onerous. The 1960’s ‘generation of love’ suddenly had children to feed and dishes to wash.

         Sarah Unger had been a hippie. She was still, in many ways, a hippie when I met her that night amidst the furious battling of a water fight in the lagoon there at Holt Curry’s shack. Her hair went thickly to her waist. She was not given to shaving her parts to meet the standards of the fashion magazines, and I remember being completely fascinated with the dark nest of hair at her armpits as much as anything, and later the feel of the small dark hairs on her legs. It’s the odd thing that stays in the mind.

         Our trajectories were completely different. She was from a very middle-class home in Westchester, had gone to Middlebury College in Vermont, and was then still in the middle of a protracted divorce. She had two children, both at home that evening with her parents in Larchmont.

         But the following morning she abandoned her assigned hosts at the cottage up the lane and spent the next week with me, there, thus obscuring the sounds that came from Holt’s bedroom in the night, or perhaps making those that we heard somewhat inspiring. What she found to desire in me I cannot tell you. What I found in Sarah was a depthless warmth, kindness, vulnerability, sweetness, enthusiasm, intelligence, resourcefulness, imagination, cleverness, humor and a true appreciation for good coffee—which she could always make better than I—as well as yet another connoisseur of the fine bourbon Holt served up.

         Holt drove a ten-year-old red Cadillac convertible with white leather upholstery that just barely accommodated his lengthy body. The white convertible top did not work well and at night he spread a canvas across it like a boat. Once or twice a day, by whatever whim that came upon us, we four would pile into ‘the boat’ and fly over the long narrow roads to one place or another. The best was Montauk, and a beach there where Holt could surf, and the rest of us could watch. Just another thing he had learned to do in Vietnam and which he tried to teach to each of us—without luck in my case—but Sarah had a natural balance and grace which was worth any wait for the right wave, just to see.

         Holt wore a straw hat with a red string poked through the brim and circled around his chin that made him look like an enormous little boy. He had fashioned this so that it would not blow away in the car, but he wore this hat even while surfing. He liked Hawaiian shirts that he had bought years before in Saigon, and wore cut-offs rather than actual shorts or a swim-suit. His laugh came up from his chest. He sang bawdy songs in French. Riding with him up the long road to Montauk, we felt like children in an endless playground.

         In the evenings, we gathered at the grill, without the bonfire, but with the bourbon, and I got to meet most of the local literati who haunted the place and made the pilgrimage from station to station to make their presence known. Disappointingly, the lack of real ‘presence’ among these literary luminaries, when met face to face, was manifest and only exaggerated by the lack of clothing. I got to meet the small-bosomed and the hairy-chested there along with the tall and the short and the lean. For the most part, I was generally disillusioned. There were exceptions, of course, but many of them drank too much and talked too much and frequently exhibited a lack of judgment in what they had to say about one another, and I will not further any of that here.

         But this pattern of behavior each summer did not change for us for several years. Every July, even after Jane had gone her own way and Lydia had taken her place, Sarah and I were invited out for a week or so.

         In that one way, I was luckier than Holt. He was married four times over the succeeding years. I was married just the once. True, his eight children by three of his wives are all still quite fond of him, as well as the wives themselves it appears, as they happily continued to gather at ‘Holt’s Lagoon’ each summer, frequently even coming on the same days, and did so long after there was little additional space for anyone but ‘immediate’ family, or at least until Hurricane Bob took away the old shack with the new second floor and all its improvements just a few years ago. Holt, of course, was no longer spending the summers there by then as he once did. He took to renting the place out for most of the ‘high season’ and used the money to buy a derelict antebellum Victorian that once belonged to a ship’s captain in Beaufort, near Charleston, South Carolina. There he has long since retreated and keeps a magnificent library of old history books. I suppose, in a way, his returning home is not completely unlike my refuge here in South Boston…But I’ll have to think about that.

         I was not so fortunate, however, as to gain a new family in my marriage to Sarah. She was unable to have any more children due to a mistake on the part of a midwife at the commune in Gilford, Vermont, where she had spent several years in the sixties. Her two daughters, Molly and Danielle, were already teenagers, or nearly so, by the time I came into the picture, and their personalities were well along in being formed by Sarah’s father, Mort Unger, who was a dynamic personality if there ever was one. Mort owned what he referred to as a ‘haberdashery,’ in Manhattan, had made his fortune in ‘textiles’ after the war, and as that market moved overseas, he had finally reduced his business to a single retail operation on Seventh Avenue. Mort had been a member of the Communist Party in the 1930’s, was unrepentant, and did not let the fact be hidden for more than ten or twenty minutes of conversation. I took this as another manifestation of the liberal guilt over being lucky enough to be born, that I was already familiar with, and kept my thoughts to myself—for the most part. But I always had the feeling that he and Gertrude never looked upon me as a son-in-law so much as a guest during our visits.

         For the most part, I should add, Sarah’s parents were quite tolerant of me, but simply never attempted to understand my interests. Perhaps purposely on their own part, in order to avoid argument. But this even extended to making me bring my own bourbon when we came, to avoid having to drink Mort’s rye, a liquor I had never enjoyed even the smell of since my days with Pat Evers. They were as passionate about playing bridge as some people are about chess. Card games always bored me unless it involved articles of clothing, so I sat to the side and read a book during our visits and let Sarah’s oldest daughter, Molly, take the fourth spot.

         The girls, Molly and Danielle, were more direct in their wants. They did not want to leave their friends in Larchmont, or the much bigger and more accommodating Unger home, with rooms for each of them, or to change schools, and though they often came to our smaller apartment in Brooklyn to visit, especially as they grew older and became interested in the jewels of the city, they found me boring. I was sympathetic to the last matter at least.

         Holt’s first real literary ascendency had occurred before I met him. He had been a Lieutenant in Vietnam, just as Roger Terrill had once been, though at a different time. But his first novel, exploring the intimate drama of a single platoon during a forty-eight hour patrol, was not the commercial success Roger’s first effort had been. It involved too much of the war and people were tired of the subject in the early seventies, even as the conflict continued. His second book, which was about the difficulties of his homecoming, did little better. His luck finally came with his crime stories, gathered in his work for the Post, centered on a  street reporter named ‘Timothy’ too shell-shocked to be afraid.

         He didn’t call them mysteries. He explained them once to me and I wrote it down almost immediately. “The mystery is a confection. I know it’s fun, but somehow I’ve never managed to smile at the thought of a murder. And I’ve no interest in the sociopath either. Those folks are the sort of aberration that can happen anywhere, I suppose. Maybe that aversion comes out of what I’ve actually seen. I don’t know. But crime fascinates me for other reasons. There is a terrible suspension of disbelief on the part of any criminal. A schizophrenic fantasy that overcomes them. I’m essentially talking about the professional criminal. The ones who choose that as a way of life, rather than the nine-to-five the rest of humanity is in it for. The odds of the criminal getting away with what they are doing for very long are miniscule. Even if the police don’t catch them, their cohorts will. Their friends are all their true enemies. There is no honor among them. Not even the pretense. They trade in the little knowledge they have. They believe they are somehow freer than the rest of us, yet they live small lives, determined lives, at the fringe of that normal portion of happiness that the rest of the world manages to actually survive and thrive upon. In the end, they do not rest in peace.”

         Thankfully, he finally became bored with those smaller lives, even after the success of the ‘Timothy’ series, and finally did returned to the parts of his own life which had changed everything for him.

         Most of the better writing about Vietnam has been of the non-fiction account and memoir, like Michael Herr’s Dispatches or Philip Caputo’s Rumor of War. For all the numbers of those who served there, over that ten years or so, the conflict produced very few writers of note willing to tackle the subject matter in fiction. Roger Terrill, Joe Haldeman, Winston Groom, Tim O’Brien, Holt Curry, and more recently, Karl Marlantes are among the best of those who did. They are the self-chosen.

         For a time, not having served, and probably ashamed of it in some way, I avoided the subject in my own work. But Holt made the point to me that I was fortunate that I could look at the whole debacle from the other end, without the face of death watching and whispering at me for attention. What had happened at home during those years was even more important, he thought, than an accounting of the mangled minds of those who were sacrificed to national hubris. More people by a wide margin had died in car accidents during those same years. More had died of drug overdoses. And yet still, more lives had been ruined at home by a simple loss of faith.

         Holt had seen this for himself on his return, and it had scared him, and he’d then taken his talent and run away with it to the grimy edge of human experience rather than continue to face what was at the heart of it. Now that he has returned to that deeper chord in his work, whether it sells to the thrill seekers, or those who crave the new more than the good, he is a happier man.

         My own true confrontation with mortality—with that face which was already familiar to Holt—and with those whispers which interfered with all that was quiet in the world, happened with Sarah’s death. Unlike what I knew of dying before, which had always been sudden and unexpected and offstage to my own performance, her passing had taken its own time and was at the center of my life. Over little more than a year, she had fought it—a time that felt as brief afterward as a couple weeks. She waned like the moon, still bright to the last sliver of her spirit, and then gone in one night that was as dark as anything I had ever known. Without reason, she was taken by a malevolent shadow, overwhelmed as inexorably as the coming dark by the imperceptible turning of the earth. Cancer is a metaphor too easily used and I have assiduously avoided it until now, but its whisper has echoed in that empty chamber of my heart ever since. I wonder if my avoidance of the subject is at all like Holt’s deliberate evasion of Vietnam in his work for so long, or is it just another manifestation of my own cowardice; an avoidance of the primal directive to swim beyond the safety of the lagoon and surf with the demons.

         Holt invited me down to Beaufort that spring after Sarah’s passing in 1992. I had not yet been to the house there and it was in such disarray from his efforts at restoration it reminded me very much of an outsized version of the shack at East Hampton. He is as good a craftsman with his hands as he is with words. What he does he does well, but it takes him twice as long as it would for a professional, and then there is the time between each project where he talks it out, and argues with himself if there is no one else willing to listen. However, the one room that was completed to his satisfaction at the time of my first visit was the library. This was also the place where he wrote each day from dawn till noon.

         The house is somewhat narrow in shape with a kitchen at the back. The library is thus elongated as well and the ceiling high, with shelves built-in from bottom to top and the appearance of this is impressive. His workspace, an antique kitchen table he had found at a yard sale for ten dollars, is not large and is open beneath ‘for the air’. This ‘desk’ is at the center of the room, near the window, with just enough space to either side for his chair to roll through. You can see the marks from his tennis shoes where he pushes off from the lower shelves to roll his way over to one book or another when he is feeling too lazy to get up. He has a garden ladder in the corner that he pulls out to reach the top items. And there was no computer then (that was well before the internet) as there is none now, and the surface of the table is always obscured from edge to edge by layers of manuscript in some mysterious order. His typewriter is now a fairly new one, and large; something he bought in Switzerland in the 1980’s, and he will give you a demonstration at the drop of a hat to show you how quiet it is.

         Outside the small kitchen is a screen porch which was thick that spring with the perfume of the flowers at the fringe of a yard that mimicked again the shape of the house in its length. The flowers there were not familiar to me and I was not sure which smell was which, except for the gardenias that clustered like snow on the street side and the honeysuckle that climbed the fence separating him from his neighbors. Lydia proudly told me all about each one of those plants and I promptly forgot.

         There is not a front yard to speak of, just a low fence and shrubs that appear to be the home of countless lizards. Lydia’s dog, a female highland terrier who is more fond of Holt than of her mistress, guards the house from front to back and can be heard throughout the day in her constant inquiries as she scampers back and forth on the wood floors. Holt said this click of her claws on the wood reminded him of the ticking of a grandfather clock and hurried him in his work.

         I was there a week, before I had to get back to my own responsibilities. Enough time for much soul searching and brotherly conversation. Time enough to stare at the moon from my bed, through the wooden blinds, and feel the ribs of pale light against my chest and to finally get most of a full night’s sleep without the whispers.

         I don’t truly remember the kind of moon that was there the night that I met Sarah. Only that there was one. And I only know the weather because of what else we did together. She had been my moon that night. Near blind without my glasses, and stepping carefully in the murk of ‘Holt’s Lagoon,’ I had first found the blush of her reflection from the firelight there in the water, just before I looked up to see her face.

         But in the novel I wrote for her, I was yet unable to confront the fact of it. I could only write about our falling in love. Hidden Chambers of the Heart was written before she had gone, in the long waiting for what was inevitable, but yet denied. It was published the way it was left then, when she had read the last paragraphs that I had too hastily written for her at the last.

***

42. The mysteries

         I wrote the first in a series of seven mysteries concerning Danann Dal Riata in 1980, while recovering from the closing of The Fore-edge. I cannot say that I was legitimately depressed, not in the way I’ve seen such darkness descend on others, but I was feeling rather low. Depleted. Tired. The appropriate term from my youth was ‘wasted.’ I had been defeated in the battle, again, but this time for one of my chief aims in life, and I was certain that the right moment for what I had wanted to do with that literary magazine—‘to reestablish the importance of the story as a necessary element to the understanding of the narrative of our lives’, was now past and could not be recaptured, or the effort ever redone. (In retrospect, this was probably wrong, but it is the way I felt about it then.)

         Various associates of The Fore-edge suggested I needed to rethink the project from the ground up, get some new financing, play with a more expensive format instead of the cheaper newsprint, use a couple of saddle stitches, four-color covers, and a broader newsstand distribution. All ideas which I had considered before and rejected for one reason or another—partly because once we had established ourselves in that newsprint format I had so wholly believed it was the right one and allowed us to set ourselves up right beside the newspapers that were ordaining what was important from day to day, but predominately because control of the magazine and its fate would have passed from the writers and staff to the nameless bean counters who distributed periodicals to the newsstands nationwide and did not count returns by the physical copies unsold but by the covers stripped and sent back, making garbage of the rest. According to a friend at one newsstand, this was an invitation to fraud, as the covers were stripped and returned on newer and smaller publications to balance overdue billings on the bestsellers. I wanted no part of that.

         Sarah did her best to raise my spirits. That September we went to Ireland and wandered about as much as we could do on bicycles, mostly in Antrim and the old Dal Riata. I left the bookstore in the hands of Mrs. Wilson, who seemed at first quite pleased with the idea that she would be boss. I was gone a month, and when I returned she had lost enough sleep to make herself sick.

         It is worth mentioning here that most of that estimable woman’s difficulty centered on delegating—something which, given my own incompetence, I did quite readily. As a former teacher, the rest of the staff must have appeared in her eyes to be children. She mothered them. She worried over them. And she gave me an idea.

         Mrs. Wilson was a bit heavyset. Not tall. She cut her hair in a style that reminded me of the Betty Crocker image on packaging in the 1950s. She spoke in a deliberate and restrained voice—that is until she lost her temper, when her words had the quality of being independent of any sentence structure as they were shot forth, each separate, from her lips.

         “You . . . Can . . . Leave . . . NOW!”

         The offending customer would usually scamper away through the door as the sound of her command reached back into a primordial unconscious as well as it did into the shop, bringing reinforcements from whomever was on duty with her at the time.

         She had no problem calling the police if any difficulty appeared beyond her abilities to handle. Several of the local Brooklyn constabulary had been her students and referred to her in reverential tones. In any case, they always appeared promptly.

         At the time, Margaret Thatcher was the new Prime Minister of Britain and she was shaking the old socialist state up a bit. We had avoided Belfast on our Irish tour, but the shaking was still being felt out in the hinterlands of Antrim and County Down. I kept my own opinions to myself about whether I agreed with any particular policy of that ‘Iron Lady,’ or not. That was irrelevant. It was not my country. But I liked her style. She did not suffer fools. She was not afraid to act on her convictions. She was consistently well informed and always appeared to have her eye on the compass and her hand on the tiller. And she reminded me of three people in very different ways. One was them Mrs. Wilson and one was Miss Lawrence. The other was my mother.

         I see that The Keeper of the Dead was actually written in early 1979 and published in late 1980. So my memory of the sequence of events is not perfect, but it is still about right. The idea and first notes under that title concerned Ed Kiely, who lived atop an ancient and forgotten ossuary in South Boston. Hence the title was the same from the start. As a favorite customer, had been a fixture on my paper route as a kid, and the uncovering of the tragedy beneath had stayed with me through the years.

         But as things do when I try to remember that bright time when every detail was new and nothing really more important than anything else, the story quickly complicated itself to include Tim Bailey.

         I had wanted to write something about Tim Bailey from the very first as well. Long before he died. But even his first heart attack didn’t inspire me. Quite the opposite. After his wake in June of 1978, I felt unable to think of him in the way that I often dealt with other characters built on the people I had known.

         Following on the stunning blow of Roger Terrill’s death, for instance, I had the advantage of more than half a book already, originally written while we were on the road together, and then immediately thereafter, I had that raw material to return to and finish. With Tim I had nothing. Every note I had previously set down in an attempt to put him on paper had been tossed away out of irritation with myself over missing the mark.

         And then, in that utterly magical trick that the mind works within itself, this reversed entirely. In an instant. One afternoon I was sitting in Prospect Park with Sarah and quite irritated that our romantically planned picnic lunch, in a spot we especially liked high on the rise at the edge of the trees, was being disturbed by the persistent efforts of a sweating and scrawny fellow atop a riding-mower as he attempted to cut the grass at the edges of a stone abutment.

         For his part, I saw that this fellow was really quite happy. He was obviously whistling up a storm as he went along, but we could not hear a note of it over the sound of the machine. On his head he was wearing a pair of winter earmuffs beneath a soiled New York Yankees baseball cap. Sweat darkened his green Park Service shirt in splotches that at first reminded me of Miss Lawrence, my old high school English teacher. Then that one note of visual imagery caught at another. The entire tale felt like it was written within the few seconds after.

         I will tell you a bit more of that story here because the book has been out of print for nearly twenty years now, and did not sell well enough at the time, but is still a favorite of mine.

         I reimagined my friend Tim as a Vietnam vet, but much like the scarred and one-eyed Korean vet that he actually was, working as a groundskeeper at Mt. Calvary, an old New England graveyard. All summer long he cut the grass between the gravestones. In the fall he cleared the leaves. In the winter he plowed the paths for the few visitors. In the spring he cleared the fallen branches and planted new shrubs and flowers. His name in the story was Daniel Pratt and he was the son of Alden Pratt and the grandson of Ashton Pratt, who was in turn the son of another Alden Pratt before him. The stone markers for the graves of his own family were all gathered close there, one plot amongst the hundreds of others, in the midst of the thousands of headstones that played out in rows across the uneven land, shadowed by the massive oaks and sycamores which had grown large on the nutrients in the soil.

         Occasionally, on days that were particularly cold and gray, when it happened that he was close-by the brown stone marker where his brother had been buried after a car accident, Daniel would study a particular empty swath of lawn with his good eye and remind himself that was the place that would one day be his. 

         Tim Bailey was an odd fellow, actually a member of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, but in more ways than that one. I decided to work as much of this into my story about Daniel as I could, because Daniel was a generous sort who had lost a sense of caring about himself as well as the feeling in the right side of his face, and spent all of the emotion he could manage without pain, on others. He lived alone in a small house by the raised bed of an old rail line which was no longer much used but afforded him a quick means of getting to work, because it also passed directly by his destination at the Mt. Calvary Cemetery. For this, and the other reasons, he saw few people from day to day. And, with his face disfigured by shrapnel in the war, the one blue glass eye not quite matched in color and looking back at him from the mirror each morning with an unhappy cast within a bed of sallow skin, his reflection displeased him because of the disquiet his face caused in others. He kept his distance when he could.

         Nevertheless, two others kept their eyes on him.

         One was Julietta Noyes. She had gone through grade school with Daniel, and loved him ever since, but had been rebuffed after his return from the war in Vietnam and had kept her distance as a consequence, all the while hoping he might come to accept his scars if given time. My Julietta was, of course, none other than Hildred Lawrence in thin disguise. She also taught English as the high school of my mythical New England town that looked strangely like the Hingham, Massachusetts that I was somewhat familiar with.

         The construction of my story was based on a mystery which I had in fact encountered for myself at a Quincy graveyard one time when I was doing research for Head Island, more than ten years before. I had never found the time to follow up on the puzzle.

         Near the entrance to the same graveyard in Quincy where my mother’s family are buried, there is a newer stone for a young fellow who had died in May of 1969. Further to the back of that place, and closer to the family plot of the MacAleers, there is another stone, also clearly new. This one, unlike the other, was often marked by a small pot of fresh flowers in season, and interestingly, the date of death is the identical May 19th, 1969. Both of the occupants of the two graves were born in 1953. To have died on the same day in the same town seemed to me to be a terrible coincidence.

         My character Daniel is, as I have said, odd in more ways than one. The cemetery is large and takes more time to keep neat and trim than the 40 hours a week he is paid for. He works most days from just after dawn until dusk. And this situation is only made worse by his deliberate habits as he goes about his chores—always careful not to bump the stones with the hand-pushed gas mower that he uses for the close work rather than the riding mower he applies to the ‘fairways’ as he called them. He carefully moves the potted flowers left by families, and then replacing them and fixes the flags of the veterans which have fallen in the wind. And this deliberate process is made slower still because he talks to the dead as he goes. He knows many of them well, and addresses them, according to his own intuitions, by first or last names.

         “Good morning, Angela. I see your mother brought geraniums on Sunday. They are a really splendid pink! Not at all delicate. Even a tomboy like you shouldn’t be ashamed of wearing them . . . Hello, Henry! We can fix that veteran’s tag right up, but the brass needs a brushing. It’s just a little loose there on the post . . . Mrs. Stetson! What I have here is a genuine begonia. Right from Paley’s. Not big. Not showy. Discreet, I’d call it.”

         He often spent as much as twenty dollars a week on flowers, even after the discount that Mrs. Paley gave him. Too many of the graves—in fact, most—were neglected by the families of the dead.

         Daniel’s hobby for years had been to go to the public library or the Historical Society and look up the names for people he did not already know. Many of those could not be found there, but for the ones he could trace, he took notes and wrote short biographies, connecting them to any history of their own moment or the present that struck him as interesting, and these short essays he then sent in to the local newspaper. It was his belief that there was always a story to be found if he looked for it . . . Henry Cushing had survived on birds’ eggs for two months after crash landing on a small Pacific atoll in 1943. Ezekiel Dodge had died of apoplexy in 1799. What exactly was apoplexy? Daniel explained that in some detail. Dorothy Loud had been a great beauty from 1810 to 1902, married four times, and lived to be 92 years old. She bore fourteen children by her first three husbands, each of whom died in a different war. What sense of life had allowed her to overcome such tragedy as that and persevere?  

         This column, ‘Reading the Stones’, had been a regular feature in the weekend edition of the Gazette since he started doing it, and was even more appreciated for the fact that Daniel never asked for payment from the newspaper even though it had proved to be the most popular item for older residents of the town, other than the sports pages.

         Then, one day, Daniel looks twice at a particular grave.

         “What’s this? Who are you, Russell Willett? January 15, 1941 to May 30, 1959. Just before my time, really. I didn’t care about anything in 1959 except for the Town Hockey and the Red Sox. I got to see Ted Williams play that year. Did you? I might have known you, if you’d stuck around for another ten years . . . But where’s your family? The Willett plot is over there beyond the sycamores. You must be a different Willett, I guess. And nobody is looking after you, I can see. I’ll cut weeds from out of there and then you’ll be able to get a little better view all around. You were just a little too young to have been a veteran, weren’t you? But that date . . . That date sure looks familiar.”

         Mowing the grass and whistling his way on through the graveyard, Daniel kept the date in his head for weeks until he found the match. Another grave, far from the first, had the same exact date. The person buried there, had been seventeen, just like the Russell Willett. Her name was Deborah. A good strong name. One boy and one girl. The coincidence took him to the library and the micro-filmed pages of the Gazette for that month in 1959.

         Deborah Anne Stetson had died swimming in the harbor. Late at night, after the school prom. Russell Willett had died in a car accident the same evening. However, the coincidence did not end there. The address given for each was only two blocks from the other. They were both just graduating from the high school. According to the paper, Russell had been a member of the football team. Deborah had been a cheerleader. They undoubtedly had known each other and Daniel now wondered how well and if there were more connections to the two accidental deaths on that same awful night. And, one more thing, he thought it was actually more curious that even the Gazette did not make more of a connection of the coincidence at the time.

         In his weekly newspaper article, Daniel ran the accounts of both and then the question: was there anyone still in town who knew them and could explain the connection any further?

         The rest of the story involves the resolution of that mystery, and the justice brought to another character unhappy with Daniel’s persistent pursuit of an answers. But more importantly, it is about the emotional realization by Daniel that he has not died within and that he can in fact care for himself again, as Julietta Noyes already does, and he for her. Simple enough, I thought.

         Not so.

         Pat Norris had been a nurse at Boston City Hospital when she had met Tim Bailey for the first time after he came home from Korea. He had attended the therapeutic sessions she conducted at the Hospital, to relieve the pains that lingered from his several injuries. They became friends.

         Pat was an exceptional nurse. She took her job as an avocation and not as work. But Tim had not been able to accept the idea that Pat might love him for something more than his damages. He had seen this before. He had even witnessed the emotional ties of other soldiers to their nurses. He understood compassion but could not fathom how it was that the nurses found these battered souls appealing. He did not want pity.

         Pat knew her work, however. She waited. Twelve years, in all. Calling him on his birthday. Sending cards at Christmas. Writing him long letters about her own job and how she was doing.

         I had learned of all of this at Timothy Bailey’s wake. And that story was right in front of my eyes, and I hadn’t see it until I saw that fellow cutting the grass at Prospect Park.

         ‘When there is no one else to care, I’ve made that task mine to share, to trim the trespass of grassy edges, recall the weathered names and dates and pledges, right the fallen stones when needed, and place my heart with flowers there.’

         I have not forgotten about Mrs. Wilson, or Margaret Thatcher or indeed, my mother. The way stories come to mind is a complicated process and beyond any precise explanation, but at least I can relate the obvious.

         My first mystery did not sell well. I won’t attempt to guess the why of that. But I was determined to work in that genre for the time being. Just for the challenge and the distraction of it.  I liked the structure of it as well As is often the case, a ready structure offers a great deal of freedom in other aspects, like meter and rhyme can do for verse. With most other novels, the context of the story must be established from the ground up in order to coherently relate the actions of the characters. This establishing process can take much of the energy out of a simple tale, so all sorts of devices are added, attached, hung, hooked, and tied on to give weight and the motive power necessary. And that is like taking the Rolls Royce on a trip to the grocery store. It is an extravagance of unrelated detail that’s just isn’t necessary. Not in my mind. In a mystery, someone is in danger. Someone has been killed. The momentum of the tale is life and death. You can hang a nice little story on that and not worry that it won’t carry the weight. Your purpose is not the puzzle but a viable portrait of the people involved. Readers just have to like the story enough to follow along. I suppose my relation of Daniel Pratt’s adventure in Keeper of the Dead did not catch the right note with some. Or many. But I liked it nonetheless.

         My editor at Doubleday had liked it as well, but she thought I might need to repeat the recipe again if I wanted to build a following. I objected. Daniel was not a detective. He was not about to go investigating every murder in the graveyard. At least not to my mind. Not then.

         Shortly after this I was visiting South Boston. Sarah was with me, for the first time, on my home ground. My mother seemed to be immediately taken with her and they spent much of the two days at the kitchen table drinking coffee and talking.

         For my part, I was in the throes of deciding what to do about The Fore-edge. I hid in the parlor where I could be easily addressed with a shout, but was isolated enough to concentrate on my self-made problems. Above me on the false mantel that framed the disused hearth were each of my own books, apparently unread. I had watched them there as they accumulated through the years. Nearer the window to 6th Street was a small oak bookcase with several odds and ends and among them the old and battered copy of MacManus’s Story of the Irish Race that had come to our house after my grandfather had passed. Idly, I picked it up.

         Just about at that moment, my father came down the stairs. He was officially retired then, his added weight fell heavily on his right leg at every step, and he was not apparently any happier than he had ever been. He saw me there in the parlor and came in and sat down.

         “How’s the new book selling?”

         “Don’t know. It didn’t get much attention.”

         “It’s a good book. Don’t worry about it.”

         I was surprise by the implication of his words. “Did you read it?”

         His hand gestured up at the mantel.

         “I read them all.”

          Now, I was not aware of my father ever lying to me outright. Hedging at times, exaggerating when necessary. But never the outright untruth.

         “You’ve never said anything to me about any of them before.”

         “No. Well, that’s about you more than me. You always ran off and did the opposite thing to whatever I said. I figured you were doing well enough, without me poking into that business.”

         This made me cry. An extraordinary thing. Right there in front of my father I had tears in my eyes that I had to push away to see clearly.

          I said, “I’m sorry.”

         He was nonplussed.

         “Nothing to be sorry about. It’s the way it is. ” He hesitated a moment, “Has your mother ever said anything?”

         “Once. Maybe twice. She was unhappy with the sex scene in one of them.”

         “She had a right. That sort of thing is embarrassing to read. I know it’s the way now, but it’s pointless. No one is going to ever get that sort of thing right on paper.”

         I was now stunned. In a matter of a few moments I had received my first critical comment from my father concerning my work, apparently positive, and then a jab.

          I said, “Maybe I’ll get it right someday.”

         He said, “Not likely. What a man and a woman do in bed is not the story of anything. The beginning, maybe. Or the end. Just the way of the world. It could have been the thing that happened before or after, but that’s off stage, as they say, isn’t it? I think they put it in nowadays for the pornographic value. It draws a certain type. Not your mother. Nor me.”

         This was about the longest comment on anything I can remember my father ever making. And he seemed to have considered it well.

         I said, “Yes, sir.”

         He said, “What they don’t write about now—well, you do, I know, but the rest of what I see down at the library these days is pretty tawdry stuff—what I don’t see is stories about people trying to make a life of it and what they find along the way.”

         I was then first aware that since his retirement, my father had started walking down to the South Boston Branch of the Boston Public Library on Broadway and sitting there to read for several hours at a time.

         Attempting to sound objective about a subject I had ranted over a dozen times in print, I said, “I guess that’s not movie worthy material. There’s no Star Wars in that.”

         “No. Just people…You want some lunch? I was going to go over to L Street for awhile, but I need a bite first. The blood sugar is down . . . What’s that in your lap?”

         “Story of the Irish Race.”

         “Ah! Now that’s a story.” He nodded the confirmation of his words. “Men were men, then. And women were women. The sex is brief and the grudges long.”

         I was surprised yet again, “Have you read this too?”

         An eyebrow actually curled on that steady face, bent against the doubt in my voice.

         “Some.”

         I was now suddenly, and once again, reconsidering a lot of what I had thought about my father; this time as if another human being had come to occupy his body without getting rid of the first. Like the very opposite of a body snatcher. A two in one! But I couldn’t just say that, so I said, “It was another planet then, I think.”

         “No,” he nodded back his thought about it, before his words came.  “It’s just men and women in all of that as well. But I always had trouble keeping the names apart, myself. I recall when you first had that book out years ago, at your granddad’s. You were quite taken with your own name just then. Your mother thought it was cute.”

         Still being flabbergasted, I admitted, “I was.”

         “You’ve done well by it. Do you want a beer with your sandwich?”

         I nodded as he went back to the kitchen. I could hear my mother’s voice asking him a question to confirm a date for something. Her voice nearly had a lilt to it as she spoke to Sarah about me and one childhood incident or another and in the short bark of his baritone Dad offered single word confirmations to her remembrances.

         And right there and then, Danann Dalriata was born. Right out of the air.

         Detective Dalriata, was middle aged, finally promoted after years of being overlooked because she was a woman and now being promoted because of her gender, which she thought was pandering. The new quotas that the politics of the times demanded it but she was as angry at that as she was for simply being overlooked before. Her previous superior has just retired. She had been his brains all along in any case, and he had kept her on his team because of it. I envisioned her as that inexact mix between Margret Thatcher, Mrs. Wilson, and my mother. She solves cases with intelligence rather than muscle.

         Dalriata is a mother, and a wife. The normal aspects of her personal life are in constant contrast to the grim of her police work. That was the set piece of it: the normalcy of her daily home life set against the abnormal world of violence she tries to subdue. Unlike my Daniel Pratt story, it caught the fancy of a fair readership. All of the books sold well. The movie option was renewed several times before it was finally dropped. But then, Hollywood had never had a serious interest in actual female characters, especially in series. They wanted cliche’s.

         The critics varied. Feminists seemed unable to get their ideological arms around the fact that Danny was happily married. Social reformers wanted her to take on ‘bigger causes’ instead of investigating the individual cause of a murder and the darker places in an individual human heart. My editor at St. Martins repeatedly put forward ideas for combining the two options. I give her credit for trying. But that kind of alchemy was not my interest. The gold I sought was in the more common places. And in any case, that series paid a lot of bills.

         What has kept me writing so long after the sales of my books have fallen to the few thousand who had developed some medically undetected virus for my stuff (or was it an immunity to the virus instead?) I cannot say. Habits don’t change so easily, even when exposed to the antiseptic of common sense. And habits of the heart are even more resistant to a vaccination of reason. 

         I have had nine publishers through the years and I am grateful to them all. I was never actually treated badly. In return, however, I was not so fine myself, in so far as my not giving them what they wanted. Gerard Strauss would likely be publishing me today if I had not been so difficult. (Or at least his son would be.) I’ve never heard of the firm dropping an author cold, even after Gerard’s death, when his son sold the company to a German conglomerate.

         That’s a funny thing, too.

         Funny, perhaps, if you think of the 18-year-old Private Gerard shivering in the cold of that monastery cellar, keeping himself alive with a small portion of his K-rations supplemented by rat meat and copious quantities of hundred-year-old brandy while sharing what he had with his female cellar mates, all while the Germans waged war over his head; to consider then that the firm which was his life’s work had been sold off to the children of his former enemy. Or would he have thought of it that way at all? Would he have forgiven, and seen the turn of events as kismet if not a sort of karma? I’m not sure.

         However, something else my father said that day of my visit with Sarah long ago rang true. And the fact that he was then going regularly to the library to read in the afternoons brought other thoughts on the meaning of that. The story was the people, not the plot. The plot was merely the excuse to show the people for who they were. No more really than the cemetery plot is any true reflection of the soul of the one interred.

***

43. Wandering the Chesterfields; unwritten letters

         I started smoking Chesterfield cigarettes when I was sixteen. I had the idea, I think, that it was the thing to do, probably taken from the four-color ads on the back covers of the magazines I’d found at Tim’s barbershop. Jack Webb smoked them. So did Willy Mays. In fact, even Rod Serling smoked them on Twilight Zone, so they had to be the better brand. I had no idea if they were or not, but given the powers of persuasion, I could never smoke anything else and enjoy it as much.

         I quit smoking when I was 30. Sarah did not smoke, and when she tried to pick up the habit from me, probably as a way to offset my stink (like my eating more garlic because she liked it on nearly everything she ate except ice cream) I saw it might be better for the both of us if I simply quit instead. 

         I do know that shortly after Sarah’s death, I bought a small used edition of Lord Chesterfield’s Selected Letters along with an auction lot of other books and my interest, sparked by the name alone rather than the insistent reference to the work by other writers, caused me to pull it out to read for the very first time myself. You hear about Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son, and occasionally see some of that sage advice repeated, but I knew nothing about the man, or his son. Perhaps I had it in the back of my head that I was going to pick up on smoking again as well, now that it no longer mattered.

         Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (September 22, 1694 to March 24, 1773) was not a philosopher, but an ambassador, a King’s Council, a statesman who opposed the majority, as well as a wit strong enough of mind to consort with philosophers. But he did not pose for himself some problem of thought and then seek the solution. He was a practical man and dealt with the realities he faced, just as they were. And did so better than most.

         My own appreciation of Lord Chesterfield, aside from his cigarettes, begins with his justice toward the people of Ireland when he was Viceroy there. And then for his long support of Samuel Johnson, in spite of Johnson’s petty turn against him. For his appreciation of Montesquieu. And his independence of action and thought in the House of Lords, a circumstance where few others had the grit. I especially like his wry sense of humor, worthy of a P. G. Wodehouse, as in the name given to his own opposition faction when he joined with William Pitt, “The Broad Bottom party,” called that for the series of essays Stanhope wrote under the name “Jeffrey Broadbottom,’ in opposition to King George II. The list of accomplishments is long. That Charles Dickens didn’t like the man, given all that there was to begrudge in eighteenth century England, bespeaks more of the human flaws of that great fabricator than of his object of ridicule, I think.

         Most famously, Lord Chesterfield wrote that series of letters to his illegitimate but acknowledged son over a period of thirty years, only ending upon his beloved Philip’s premature death. For a few months after reading the selected letters I sketched out the beginnings of an historical novel in epistolary form, centering on the Lord’s love affair with Madelina Elizabeth du Bouchet, the mother of Philip, and ending with his son’s impoverished widow Eugenia selling those letters that her husband had received from his father and kept, in order to support herself. (To the everlasting benefit of us all, I should say.) It seemed a wonderfully tragic story and deserving of something good.

         I had always been frustrated over the failure of my first and still unpublished attempt at an epistolary novel, Desperado Lover, about that erstwhile Methodist and killer, John Wesley Hardin. Thankfully, after a short time and with thus less effort wasted, it was clear to me that I was not the man to write this tragedy either—not only because I would need to go to England and France to get out the details to make it full, but because I was constantly irritated with that eighteenth century patrician point of view (what put Dickens off of the Lord as well, I suppose) which was so common to the upper classes then, even to the best of minds. It is one thing to have the tones delivered on the sweet breath of Mr. Wodehouse’s prose, and another to receive it from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.

         As often happened, what reading I did for the project led on to other things, however, and also to odd thoughts about my own lack of paternity—that is, about my role as father to the children I never had.

         Much of this came out in Billington Again, set against the same period of time with Lord Chesterfield and the second of the books in that series, and still unpublished, as well, I am saddened to say. As much as it alludes to the two of those mysteries that were published, I can save the recapitulation here, but the facts of the story which relate best to my own spoiled hopes for fatherhood show that I had a great deal of trepidation and fear for myself in that regard. I could not then so much blame Sarah for what was, but myself for not doing something else about it. We might have adopted a child. I think Sarah would have agreed to that. But I never agreed with myself.

         I do remember some such thoughts in my head as I wrote the book, and in retrospect it is once again disappointing that I did not do more when I was able. At least to get that story published at the time. Perhaps by a university press. Or to adopt some kid or two who needed more than a foster home. Better that than the nothing I did.

         The key characters in Billington Again, Abby and her daughter Etta, were slaves owned by Henry Macauber. John Billington has effected their manumission through a subterfuge and then given them a physical home and refuge at his bookshop, even as his own fortunes are damaged by war and the British embargo. In the midst of defending himself against various suspicions that he had been a spy for the British during the occupation, John has also undertaken the project to teach both mother and daughter to read and write. Meanwhile, Abby has continued to do what she believes she must to survive in the havoc of Boston in 1776 and eventually secure her own independence as well as that of her daughter. The notes of dear Trudy in all of that are clear.

         In the first of the Billington books, John’s life had previously been ‘spoiled,’ or so he thinks, by the loss of his ‘true love’ who had run off with his best friend to the west of Pennsylvania in order to escape the war. John is clearly unsure there whether it is the loss of her that makes him so unhappy, or the loss of his friend. (A common theme, you see.) Now, in Billington Again, never having been a soldier and not even used to the rigors of hunting, John must kill Macauber to finally realize the freedom of bth Abby and Etta. The bookseller must turn to murder.

         So the situation is simple enough. We have a lovelorn bachelor bookseller and social outcast for his family heritage who is in near financial ruin and under suspicion of being a spy for the British, befriending a slave in hiding from the long legal arm of her owner. In an effort to protect her young daughter amidst a ravaged Boston, with war all around and traitors in their midst, the slave has been surviving by a little prostitution, the selling of a few folk nostrums, and some midwifery, even while some believe her to be a witch for her skills among the other poor blacks of the city. So far, so good. Is that so hard to believe?

         Now add this: I wanted it to be a love story without sex.

         Not so good an idea, I was told. My agent at the time, after arguing for an extra chapter to be written and inserted in the appropriate place (so to speak), sent the story out reluctantly. This after my original publisher for the first of the Billington novels had rejected the book on grounds of the previous book’s poor sales. The publishers who willingly read it afterwards (there were some I attempted to strong-arm based on past associations) usually sent disrespectful notes in return. Typically, three or four lines amidst the typical boiler plate.

         Condensed, the comments amounted to, “You expect readers to believe that a horny white guy would not take advantage of such a situation, especially if he loved her. There’s no pay-off!” They all liked the relationship with the daughter, however. An editor at Athenaeum suggested that I turn that alone into a children’s book.

         The agent sent the novel back and I put it in a box and sent it home to South Boston along with various of the other uncorrected, unfinished, or unsold manuscripts I have a habit of keeping.

         But the matter that occurs to me here and now is that I think there is a desensitizing that has taken place. Violence and sex go hand in hand in the current zeitgeist. What I sought was a simpler violence done out of hate and lost love. Something more elemental if not elementary.

         With the danger of the evil Macauber finally overcome, Abby and Etta apply with the Town Clerk in Boston to take John’s last name of Billington. Though John has never had any sexual relationship with Abby, mother and daughter both love him.

         His own feeling toward Etta has become that of a father. But the news of the application gets around. New scandal erupts. John offers to marry Abby, and she refuses, knowing that no priest will perform the ceremony because of her race. That evening while on her way home, Etta, now sixteen and known to be the daughter of a whore, is raped by two brothers who themselves are the illegitimate sons of a tavern maid that Abby had once helped save as a midwife when she was first brought to Boston by Macauber many years before.

         Frustrated by life in general and his failed efforts to do what he thinks is right in particular, as well as knowing that no justice will come to Etta otherwise, John hunts the rapists down. Having killed once before, he has no compunction. He throws the first, who cannot swim, into the harbor to drown. The other runs away, leaving Boston. (I had already thought he might come back to haunt John another day, if the opportunity arose in a fourth book, which it did with Billington Says.)

         I think that it was the ending of my subplot that may have sealed the fate of the story. “A downer” they called it. But I saw no hope of happiness for Abby or Etta in the situation. (Any more than I have ever believed that Trudy went on to find happiness.) I was insistent, however, on the importance of the other ideas that I had worked within the book. John exposes the true traitors in their midst, those who had accused him of treason and that same admixture of elitists and absolutists which infect our society to this day. In a final chapter I note that John remains a loyal friend, introducing Etta to the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment while Abby teaches her daughter the craft of medicine, but that both mother and daughter die in a smallpox outbreak in Worcester 1787, just in the midst of Shay’s Rebellion, even as three-fifths of the Republic of their dreams is being born.

         I was aware of my desire for children, especially during the first years of my marriage, but I knew from speaking about the subject too often that it bothered Sarah in ways that I supposed I could not comprehend. Time passed, as it will, and the wish had been buried long before. Perhaps more easily, given my selfish preoccupations.

         Instead, as a venting of those frustrations, I wrote Star Traveller, a science fiction novel, again in letters written by a man who fears that he might be the last living member of his race. In that story Martin Fields is returning home from a mission to Alpha Centauri B, after some years of commanding an AI corps of assorted robots, and having no human associates. His greatest desire now is to be among other people. He has even harbored some hope when he set out that there could be a woman somewhere at the end of his final journey who might accept him. But having been awakened following some unknown collision in space, he discovers that he has lost control over the means to place himself back into ‘deep sleep’ for the remainder of the journey. He knows too, given his new speed, and the distance and the time necessary, that he will not live to reach his destination.

         This crises is further darkened as he deciphers the last messages received, which indicate that there has been a war in the solar system that was his home. His accident may not have been random, in fact, and there has only been silence since. He does not know now that there are still survivors of the civilization that has meant so much to him.

         His letters then, are written, (with the ghost of Lord Chesterfield watching over me) and sent, one each day, to children he does not have, will likely never have, while his abiding hope for them is the only thing that keeps him alive.

         At least Star Traveller was well received.

         Lord Chesterfield, or is daughter-in-law, had the right idea, after all. Cigarettes were a passing fad. The market for letters were a better bet. And his, at least, are still worth reading today.

***

44. Del Sarto’s Lament (the Browning version)

         How do you feel compassion for someone who knows so much and heeds so little? It seems to me that we all bear the grudges of our own work. The case against Andrea del Sarto is likely unfair. It was made by his pupil, Vasari, an apprentice who achieved his fame among artists not by his own art but by writing about his betters. In any event, Del Sarto was likely an average fellow in every way but one. He was a genius! Known in his own lifetime as an artist senza errori (without error). His true failing was not his besotted love for his Lucrezia but to have been born at the same moment in time as da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael! How does one excel perfection?

         I often hear that same jealousy manifest in the words of Browning’s dramatic monologue about the painter and his love, and wonder how the artist managed such an anxiety—or the poet. In Browning’s case, despite Tennyson of course, and Matthew Arnold, he had reached the heaven he could grasp in the hand of Elizabeth Barrett (“Your soft hand is a woman of itself”). Poor del Sarto could only envisage such perfection, and did, over and again, as if the wish were the command. But his Lucrezia had her own interests at heart.

         Did he steal the coin of the French King as accused? Really? As likely as a King can buy heaven! Del Sarto’s biographer, the scribe Vasari, doomed to be a mere spectator, must have felt the greater jealousy for this common fellow, a tailor’s son, who has risen by magic and bootstraps to the ranks of the immortals. The maggot that spoiled the meat of the matter was Lucrezia, the demanding, the unfaithful, the scold . . . Or was she? Had she indeed turned down Vasari’s own advances while the master was away? Had “the serpentining beauty, rounds on rounds” refused the sorcerer’s apprentice and thus gained immortal damnation in print? This is what is written.

         When I attempted to re-write the story from Lucrezia’s point of view, however, the Browning poem itself changed completely in nature for me. A young and beautiful widow who had little choice between whoring to pay the family bills or sitting as a model for an artist who adored the ‘perfect brow, and perfect eyes, and more than perfect mouth, and the low voice my soul hears, as a bird the fowler’s pipe, and follows to the snare,’ so much so, he would happily marry her. Perhaps she did not love him, but he did love her. Wasn’t that enough?

         Del Sarto comes away the better man. Mortal and in awe.

         “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” you say. When Browning first saw del Sarto’s ‘Portrait of a Woman with a Volume of Petrarch,’ in Florence, with his own Elizabeth at his side, he must have known that answer.

         I imagine Browning reading the brief life of the artist as written by the pupil Vasari and being at first disappointed. How do those words that depict the man who is described as ‘soft’ and ‘of little spirit,’ then reconcile with the painter who was so admired by his contemporaries—much less the genius in that portrait? I believe it must have been the very conflict of what the poet saw with his own eyes in that painting and what he had read about the painter in Giorgio Vasari’s The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, that made the poem possible. Conflict is the source of all art, they say.

         I set my story in several acts, like a play. No! More like an opera. I had a recording of Puccini’s Tosca with Maria Callas just then that I played while I wrote, played until the groove hissed in complaint, the Italian not interfering at all, but the music doing good work on me. Life with Sarah then was too peaceful to manage such a drama as I reimagined it, without some additional turmoil for inspiration. I think I might have even wished that it were a play I was writing instead, but I had had so little luck with getting any of that work produced, I finally kept it as a short novel.

         The first scene of act one is set in the rooms of the young Andrea del Sarto where he is living with his buddies and fellow painters Francia Bigio (Franciabigio ) and Jacopo Sansovino. They are full of themselves, and the swagger of themselves, and of the future. They swear their fealty to art and to each other—forever! Their rivalry and their friendship is established. I should add here that I was imagining Francia as the virile young fellow as seen in his very own ‘Portrait of a Young Man Writing’, and Andrea as his equal in that artist’s self-posed ‘Portrait of a Sculptor.’ Look at those faces if you get the chance. (No immediate need for a pilgrimage to Florence these days. The internet will transport you in seconds.) You will see the men they were! Go to Florence if you can afford it later—off season if you can.

         The second scene is then set just after the premature unveiling of Francia Bigio’s fresco, ‘Marriage of the Virgin,’ on the cloister wall of the Convent of the Servites. He realizes then that the unfinished creation will be judged in comparison to del Sarto’s just completed work, ‘Birth of the Virgin,’ which is nearby, and the embarrassment of the likening so enrages him that he tries to destroy his own effort with a mason’s hammer, only to be restrained in the act by the friars.

         The next act is played in front of the ruin of Franciabigio’s fresco, which has been left as it was, a stain on the artist’s career, while del Sarto has risen further in fame. And it is there that del Sarto sees the widowed Lucrezia, whom he has already met as a model in the studio where she has been sitting for Bigio. He thus knows of her beauty but not that his friend is in love with her though tongue tied and overcome by his own passions. Nor that she has refused Bigio’s previous advances made without testament of love.

         Andrea del Sarto sees Lucrezia’s face as she stares up at his friend’s damaged work, shedding tears (she has posed for the face of the Virgin that Bigio hammered away and she thinks the disfigurement was really done because he hated her). In her, del Sarto sees the Madonna weeping for her lost son. The vision enchants him. Then and there Andrea falls in love with her himself.

         Wanting time with her to make his own case, he asks her to sit for him as well. The next scene is again in the studio. Andrea is asking Lucrezia to marry him, and she accepts. The debts of her family are weighing on her and she has lost hope that Bigio will ever forgive her for not letting him sleep with her. All the while, Bigio watches from the wings. The idea there was that the reader should assume that Bigio will break out into a rage once more at any moment. But instead, in shame, he does not and only slinks away.

         In the next act, with del Sarto having succumbed to the blandishments of his own fame, that rage is finally realized when Bigio comes to the small apartment that is home for del Sarto and his wife, Lucrezia, and finds that Andrea is away—as he often has been—this time on his infamous assignment to the King of France. Her loneliness is clear. Jealousy and pent-up lust combine. She submits, but is immediately distraught and humiliated by what she has done. She understands now that Bigio, unable to confess his love, has let it turn to spite. And just then, having begged for months over and again, for del Sarto to return, he at last comes home, and sees what has happened. The two men fight to the point of killing one another. Bigio, the stronger, overcomes del Sarto, but then, suddenly aware of what has become of himself, he leaves, shamed once again.

         In a coda to that climax, Del Sarto, wandering the rooms in shock, looks at the hundreds of portraits he had done of Lucrezia that are all about them and understands what his pursuit of fame has done to his life.

         “Why do I need you?” he says “What wife had Rafael or Michelangelo? . . . God and the glory! Never care for gain. The present by the future, what is that? Live side by side with Michelangelo! Rafael is waiting up to God for all three of us! ” He turns to his disheveled wife, who has followed him while trying to find the words to find excuse for herself.

         He says, much as Browning had it, “I might have done it for you. So it seems. Perhaps not. All is as God over rules.”

         He chooses to stay in Florence then, in spite of promises to the King to return to Paris. He builds Lucrezia a better home with the money the King had advanced him. At last his love of the woman is greater than his love of immortality.

         In the final scene, weak with the plague that is ravaging the city, del Sarto reviews his life in a delirium which encompasses much more of the Browning poem. Lucrezia, always weak of spirit, is afeared of the sickness, and has abandoned him. All that he has of her now are the paintings.

         Who was this woman, after all?—the one that he had tried to capture in paint (and did so splendidly) or the one who had abandoned him at last? Do we know? I think so.

         That book did not sell well. It was poorly reviewed, the most common complaint being that I had so liberally used the lines from the Browning poem (I don’t think any of them had ever read it before or they would have understood that the poet had in turn borrowed liberally from Vasari). It was called a ‘soap opera,’ by a few, as a pejorative. I took the single noun from that as a compliment and moved on.

         Sarah was always very much enamored of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. So much so that she made me save for a trip to Italy so that we could go to Florence and see the place where the two great poets lived when they were there. I was already working in the shadow of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues and trying to do something of the kind in prose. I was easy to convince. But it was not quite the Browning version that I rendered out of the experience.

         We went off-season, in the fall—October 1987—just before the Christmas rush at the store. This had already become our favorite time of the year to travel. A quiet time. Much in the spirit of Sarah herself, who would rather listen to the mutter of the wind at the sills than to the sound of her own voice. How, in turn, had she taken to such a fellow as me, who can never shut up!

         I’m thinking I’d like to write a book about a reporter. One from back in those times when a journalist might think the facts were more important than the politics. One who would put his life up against getting it right. And one who could really write.

         Januarius Aloysius MacGahan died at the age of thirty-three (almost thirty-four). As some few men do, he had done more by that age than half a dozen who live the full four score. Alexander is said to have died as young. And Jesus Christ. I would put MacGahan closer to Christ.

         He was born in New Lexington, Ohio in June of 1844. Of Irish stock. (Hard to figure where the January came into the matter, unless he was born quite premature.) He died in Istanbul, Turkey in June of 1878. Typhoid is a very hard way to die, from what I’ve read. But it is the in-between that counts, isn’t it? What he did, instead. Unsure of what he might accomplish with his life, he studied a little law and a lot of languages (he spoke fluently in seven by the end, I believe) and wrote in several. Good enough. Well enough to be famous at the age of twenty-seven. But you’ve never heard of Januarius Aloysius MacGahan, have you? Fame is fleeting. Go ask a Bulgarian.

         In the right place, Germany, at the right time, 1870, where he was . . . What? Studying German, I think, and in need of funds. MacGahan wrangled a bit of work through an acquaintance, The Civill War general General Phil Sheridan (this was a young man who made friends easily, no matter their rank), who happened to be advising the Germans during their brief war with France. There, he became a special (as in you are already here and we don’t have anyone else available).  correspondent with The New York Herald. As it turned out, the right man for the job, his dispatches describing the rout of the French went viral at a time when the word really meant something, being picked up by all the papers. He stayed on in the aftermath of that to cover the revolt of the Paris Commune, and was nearly shot for his trouble and only saved at the last moment (with the parting cigarette already placed between his lips). Soon enough, at the request of France (wanting to be rid of someone who could not be relied upon to lie for his own gain), he was reassigned to St. Petersburg in 1871. This was the Russian summer of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Chekov and Turgenev. But MacGahan did not stay put. While recovering from a riding accident near Yalta, he met his Barbara, Varvara Nikolaevna Elagina. She also was a writer, and journalist. I’m thinking their letters through winter and summer of 1872 were hot. When things got hotter again in 1873, they married. I can’t find a picture of her, but I’ll bet she was his match. I know they had a son named Paul, but before he was born, MacGahan was off again to cover the Russian invasion of Khiva, a dry place that I never knew there was. (It’s now in Uzbekistan, with one foot in Afghanistan.) The reporter’s account of this desert journey, Campaigning on the Oxus and the Fall of Khiva, was a bestseller in 1874.

         From there he was soon off to Spain, to cover the Third Carlist War (or was it the second?) of 1874. In either case the peasants were getting screwed and were thus revolting, as peasants often do, and for good reasons. The pretender, Carlos, didn’t make it to the top, in either event. But MacGahan covered that.

         In 1875, MacGahan went for a cruise on the steam yacht, HMS Pandora, in search of the fabled Northwest Passage, a mania of the time. They didn’t find their way but he got another book out of his time spent Under the Northern Lights.

         1876 was a larger year. The Turks were again busy killing tens of thousands of Christian Bulgarians who didn’t want to convert. MacGahan covered that for the London Daily News (by then he’d told William Gordon Bennett of the Herald to go jump in the Seine). His description of the massacres riveted the world. In response, Russia came to the rescue of that country in 1877, and MacGahan’s articles kept Britain from entering the war on Turkey’s behalf. Bulgaria won its freedom.

All in all, a good life’s work. For a reporter.

         But which story should I tell? The steam yacht in danger of crushing ice and a frozen death? My hands hurt just thinking about it. Or his crossing alone of the desert of Kyzyl–Kum to see for himself what the Russians were doing there? No, perhaps a bit too much of Colonel T. E. Lawrence to that. Had he learned to speak Basque as he followed the rebels on the banks of the Ebro out of the Cantabrian Mountains? Hemingway had done some of that in For Whom the Bell Tolls, had he not? Could I bear to deal with the slaughter at the church in Batak during the Bulgarian revolt, as he had? Even if I used his words? No, I’m not so brave within sight of blood. How about his days ferreting through the barricades of the Commune in Paris, and his moments before a firing squad just prior to a timely release, or his talk with an ailing Victor Hugo that then convinced him this uprising was not in the spirit of ’32 or the June Rebellion that the great author had imagined in Les Miserables, but yet a new sort of beast among men instead.

         But Paris! In the peace that followed the insurrections, they would always have had Paris, surely. Rick has promised us all of that (if only a few wars after). Following his exploits in Spain, MacGahan took his Barbara there before he left her once again. (Like Hemingway had later taken Hadley with their son.) Imagine what his regrets might have been as he said goodbye one more time to his Russian beauty?

         Maybe I’ll write a book about that.

***

45. The Long Arm of Spithridates

         I was expelled from the public school for one year when I was thirteen. That is a longer story, which I will save for another moment. However, I am just reminded of this exile, having come across a mimeographed sheet of paper, in a box of similar effluvia, in the basement. It is a notice issued on October 10th, 1960, and signed ‘Reverend Stuart Elliott, Principal,’ in the same uniform pale blue ink as the text. That was the single year I attended St. Aaron’s, the small Catholic middle school that then struggled for its existence only a few blocks from here, on East Broadway.

         And this yellowed notice, the blue nearly faded away, recalls a fine moment. A triumph!

         It begins with this: “History is written by the vicar.”

         At least that is what I heard from Mr. Henderson’s tooth-filled mouth.

         The vicar was, I assumed, Father Elliott, known to his charges more familiarly as ‘The Vicar’ because of the better possibilities in rhyme, and at the time the principal and commandant of our school, part-time instructor in Latin and Greek, and full-time head of the history department which consisted of the always right Reverend Elliott as well as Miss Reynolds, a lay teacher, so to speak. It was assumed by every one of the boys and a majority of the girls in Miss Reynolds’ American History class that everything she said was true. And the ninth grade was difficult enough without having disputes over the facts of history.

         However, a controversy had erupted when Miss Reynolds, who could not hide her many virtues beneath the drab and high-necked dresses she wore, anymore than the bright blue of her eyes, had contradicted a statement previously made by Father Elliott concerning an upcoming holiday dedicated to the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus. Miss Reynolds belonged to a radical faction that favored Erik the Red. That very surname ‘the Red’ had produced an immediate response and proclamation from Father Elliott stating among other matters that, “Discovery entails recognition of a new fact. Mr. Red was more interested in cod, and his meandering may or may not have taken him to the shores of America, but with no more understanding of what he had found than a dog that finds a turtle.”

         Mr. Henderson, most improbably, a lay teacher as well, smiled involuntarily throughout the day because his lips had difficulty enclosing both incisors and cuspids. He taught math and civics. Or attempted to. Geometry made some sense to me. Basic algebra was barely plausible. The mention of advanced algebra and calculus posed a mathematical impossibility which was beyond my comprehension. However, ‘civics’ struck me, even then, as a sort of ‘rules for gang warfare.’ The majority dominating the minority in order to get its way.

         Prudently, I sat at the back and avoided his attention. Mr. Henderson’s eyes took on a strained squint when he spoke, likely the result of his facial muscles flexing around his abundant molars. In any case, the combination of his smile and the strained squint in his eyes made me certain he might have a trophy knife from his days as an Allied agent (a fact confirmed by repeated rumors) when he had participated in the guerrilla campaigns against the Nazis in Yugoslavia during ‘The War,’ and which tool he could at any second pull from his desk and use to slice all our throats. Specifically my throat. More specifically me because I never knew the correct answers to his questions and this tended to close his eyes long enough to believe he had fallen asleep waiting.

         One day he smiled as he repeated himself, “History is written by the vicar,” scanned the room and allowed his eyes to come to rest in my approximate direction. “What do you have to say about that, Mr. McGuire?”

         In that I had thought myself successfully obscured by the bulk profile of Deborah Collins who sat directly in front of me, the sound of my name was a jolt, and it must have audibly taken the breath out of my lungs.

         I leaned out from behind her hair (hair that fell in in such vast quantities it seemed to me to be impossible from such a small head) adjusted my glasses, and stared back with my best representation of innocence.

         “I did not know that Father Elliott had written anything. Except for the school bulletins.”

         Mr. Henderson’s lips miraculously enveloped both his incisors and cuspids and came together in a sort of kiss of consternation. Eyes closed momentarily.

         Silence enveloped the room for half a minute before he answered, sotto voce.

         “What?”

         And then repeated it again so that the word splattered against the back wall. His eyes squinted now in agony. His anguished smile was enormous.

         Deborah Collins looked down at the worksheet on her desk and whispered.

         “He means ‘victor.’ Not ‘vicar.’ “

         I was suddenly sitting in midair, like a character in a Tex Avery cartoon. There was that beat of time then before I would inevitably fall to my doom.

         But genius blossomed with the balloon of an invisible parachute above my head.

         “Father Elliott says, ‘To the victor go the spoils,’ but he says it in Latin and I can’t repeat it exactly that way, and I guess that means that whoever wins can write the history of the battle.”

         Mr. Henderson’s face transformed. From agony, it metamorphosed into bliss. His eyes shone. I thought I saw tears.

         During that very same October, Miss Reynolds informed us of the great ruler of Austrasia, Charles Martel, ‘Mayor of the Palace,’ and his defeat of Abd al-Rahman emir of Cordoba at the battle of Tours. The story she related in thrilling detail was from a book by the English author Edward Shepherd Creasy. I see the cover now, held up toward us in her hands as if the shield her breast. The importance of this manual act I have always considered instrumental.

         St. Aaron’s was a poor school. The textbooks we used were often the older discards eschewed by the larger schools in the diocese. They arrived well thumbed, and marked, edges chewed, and with colors added to illustrations by unknown hands that were not appropriate. It was the brilliance of Father Elliott to supplement these with his own texts; books he had acquired over a lifetime. These, and not the industrial Catholic texts that so easily stultified any inquiring mind, were read aloud by the teacher, and often by the students themselves. Tests were frequent.

         It was in this context, envisioning the genius of Martel to have established the first standing professional army in Europe at a time when the usual seasonal conscripts went home to plant or harvest, and the medieval leader’s deliberate use of tactics to overcome the superior numbers of his opposition, that I first understood the idea of turning points in history. If Martel had not succeeded in defending his realm—against Moslem invaders who had marched (‘swept’ was the more common verb) from the Arabian peninsula, following the death of Mohamed in 632, through Northern Africa, over the straits of Gibraltar into Iberia, and thence to the heart of France, where they readied to overwhelm the only unified Kingdom in Christian Europe, all in a mere hundred years— everything thereafter would have changed.        

         Such thoughts linger on. The bountiful Miss Reynolds could not have known.

         Imagine if Greek mythology and ancient history had been written in Aramaic by the Persians. That was the initial thought that prompted my writing Cyrus. But my figment of a character was not wholly an Irish lad bestride the streets of an alternative history 19th century New York, armed only with pen and uninhibited libido, as presented in that story. He had roots in deeper soil. Had the satraps of the Achaemenid empire defeated Alexander, as they so nearly did at Granicus in May, 334 BC, and then reconquered Macedonia, to rejoin their efforts to conquer the whole of Greece (if only in self-defense against those troublesome city-states) while their ruler, Darius III, staved off for a longer time, the internal corruption that inevitably destroys most such overwrought dominions (even as our own collapses about our heads as I write this), then by extension, Ireland would certainly not be the place we know of today. Or New York.

         I am usually bored by alternative history. ‘For want of a nail’ has endless variation, nearly all of it missing or simply avoiding the reality we must live. My objective was not just to reimagine history, which I do already before it is spoiled by the scholar, but to consider a specific impact of conquest as a human puzzle. Alexander’s victory, following his near death beneath the battle ax of the Persian General Spithridates, and his rescue by Cleitus the Black, is one of the great historical moments, and made tragic in the Shakespearean sense when Alexander later murders Cleitus in a quarrel.

         I had always thought this was perfect material for a theatrical presentation. (Like the novel I wrote instead, I had called the play ‘The Arm of Spithridates,’ as that was the appendage which Cleitus whacked off of the Persian General before it could finish its work on the great Alexander’s head, but the longer reach of which would bring down the Macedonian in the end, nonetheless . . . Maybe one day I will get back to it).

         However, instead of drifting away from my original inspiration, I managed to cling to the initial premise through the usual storm of ‘what if’ for the entirety of a novel. That book too is, sadly, yet unpublished. A personal favorite and representative of what I have been about these days.

         The idea was this: we know of ancient Greece because of Homer, and a few of the others whose work survived the fire and pillage of later conquests. (I have even given thought to the important question: did Homer’s wife turn a blind eye?)…However, because of Alexander, we know far far less of the various Darius, I, II, or III, or have any serious knowledge of the original Cyrus. And this is just another iteration of the age-old truth, history is written by the victor.

         Thus, if you compare the exploits of my Irish namesake Aengus with those of, say, the Greek Theseus, you will see many similarities. But there is far less, in the facts, of old Aengus because his story was related by Catholic monks who had no use for a heathen hero, and his land was then conquered again by the English and ruled for five hundred years. Yet, had the Catholic conquest of the British Isles failed, or never even happened, what is the broader myth and legend that we might have had today? We might never have benefited from the aging Yeats when he spoke of the ‘The silver apples of the moon / The golden apples of the sun.” Nor would we have had a ‘Shakespeare’ to inspire thoughts of Greek tragedy out of the actions of brave Cleitus.

         But would Jesus Christ have had such success with the children of Hannibal? At least the language they each spoke, a derivative of Aramaic, was closer than either Greek or Latin. Might we have gained by hearing our Saviour’s words directly from his mouth instead?

         We know little or nothing of the religions of those earlier peoples of Persia, the Parsua and Medes, and the Assyrians, who had previously occupied the homeland of the Achaemenid, and what we do know of them at all is told to us by Greeks such as the brave and wily Xenophon and that very father of written history, Herodotus. And we know the Greeks so well because the Romans held them in high esteem, an aesthetic judgment for which I cannot help but give great thanks. And the Romans we appreciate because they defeated Carthage, or else we would all be speaking some modern variation of Phoenician (a Greek word itself), a language derived from a people who were themselves a Canaanite clan of the sort we so often encounter at odds with the Jews in the Old Testament, and they in turn were clients to the mighty Achaemenid.

         Those Phoenicians, remember, were not only good with numbers, a necessity for a trading folk, but master shipbuilders and it was they who founded Carthage, but also built the fleet for the Achaemenid King of Kings, Xerxes, an armada which the Greeks then had to destroy at Salamis in order to keep their independence, and that was all and well before Alexander nearly lost his head.

         Imagine if all that we knew now had come from that other source instead. What would have been, had the gods of Canaan ruled?

         Instead, we have Herodotus, Xenophon and Homer . . . and of course, Edward Shepherd Creasy.

         My young hero Cyrus has run away to Nue Bretyn (New York) from his home in Eire. This then is the center of the universe, in that year of 1872, dated by the Jerusalem calendar from the birth of the Christ. The twelve Celtic Nations are in tumult, at odds over possible war with the Rus and the Slavic league who are now attempting to restrict their traffic by taxation and permit, or by force. The a’Thulit (Native Americans) have refused sides in the conflict, and Nue Bretyn is a free state unwilling to limit trade to any partner. The world now awaits the decision of the seven Chanani Republics (the Carthaginian nations that might have been). With the Chin and the Indie already at war, conflict threatens to consume the Earth.

         Because there was no Alexandrian conquest, the world is a different place. But I had hoped to avoid a pure fantasy. I wanted to see how things might logically be if Spithridates had been a more famous name than Ptolemy. Acclaimed by Darius for his bravery at Granicus and the loping off of the Macedonian’s head, he is appointed to the Kingship of Egypt, just as in actual fact, Ptolemy had later been appointed by Alexander. It is Spithridates who then successfully conquers the Greek City States when they rebel against taxes, not a failed Darius IV. As Persia falls finally into dissolution beneath the weight of its overreach, it is the Greek infused culture of the Phoenicians that unites the Mediterranean as a single mighty seafaring power. There is no Rome and never will be. With the western world united by seafaring merchants out to make a buck and not interested in killing their customers (a millennium and a half before Britain would have risen to that role). The tribes of Atlanta (North and South America) are trading actively with Europe and Asia by the year 1000. Without isolation, and with the exchange of language, culture, and invention, a different map has been drawn of the ‘civilized’ world at an earlier age.

         Without a Roman Empire to fall, there were no Vandals or Goths or Visigoths or Ostrogoths, or Alans. A history where a Celtic Europe had absorbed its natural German cousins, the Franks, the Angles and the Saxons, and successfully resisted the onslaughts of the Xiongnu and the Huns (“a land of a thousand bees” the invaders had called it) because there was no central authority like Rome to sack or destroy.

         Jesus, the Aramaic speaking visionary of Canaan, has little need of translation for his words—he is speaking the language of the empire into which he was born—and his good words of philosophy spread without the intercession of a Roman papacy. And the anger of Mohamed is thus later contained by the tribal Arabic of his homeland.

         My point was not to rewrite an entire history of this ‘other world,’ but to light a match to the obeisance of thought that still sees all things in terms of a central ‘Roman’ state (and thus the need for such centralized power). With the removal of Alexander, the Greek ‘golden age’ of Hellenism did not come to an abrupt end but was instead adopted by the sons of Spithridates. The ideals of thought found in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle infiltrated a merchant culture that took the necessity of private property as a key to a free society of individuals and was thereby reshaped.

         I did not imagine that all the evils of a state-centered political philosophy were suddenly at an end. Most of the world’s cultures had already been formed around a central authority of chieftains, kings, and potentates, and founded their governments on the ruthless use of such power. In my imaginings, however, it was the Greek wisdom adopted by the Celts that fit so well with their council culture and the integrity of each person. Just as every community had a say in their allegiances to the greater nation, each citizen retained a voice in their community, importantly, including women. As the freer society of the Celtic tribes progressed more quickly through the discovery and innovation possible without authoritarian dictate, they brought their neighbors in the Carthaginian world and those merchant sensibilities along with them, and the rest of the world followed along in their wake and in its own ways.

         However, my own unique conceit was not that the Irish tribe would be at the fore of this possibly better world, but that many of the native tribes of what we now know of as the Americas would be quick to see the advantages of such decentralized cooperation. And even better, in their trading with the post-Carthaginians nations, they might assume much of Greek idealism as well. My Nue Bretyn is the center of this new world order, the hub of trade from East to West, a teeming city of airships and sail ships, and earth-going wagons of every size and shape powered by internal combustion, steam, and ‘gravity wind.’

         Still, all of this conjecture was not meant as anything more than context and backstory. My Cyrus cares for little of it. His personal ambitions trump all political concern. He longs for adventure and for wealth, but finds only love. Poor lad.

***

46. Writing wrongs on the Raft of Medusa

         It may have been ungrateful of me to criticize those who appreciated my young hero in I Am A Time Machine! But I don’t think my motives in that story were all that obscure. And when I expressed myself on the matter at the Hugo Awards ceremony, it was not my intention to be rude, even though it was, in fact. Sarah said she was mortified. But I was disturbed by the idea that I should be nominated for a prize for doing something I had not done. I failed to realize, not for the first time in my life, that much of what I had accomplished in my stories had nothing to do with my own motives, any more perhaps than did the more frequent flop. Writing and reading may be lonely pursuits, but as I have said, they are still the two parts of a conversation.

         Poor Russell, the college student in that story, has come to believe that he is, himself, a time machine and that he can travel backward and forward at will to observe past and future. He’s nuts, of course! A casualty of current dogmas. But I did not say he was nuts. That was supposed to be assumed. Silly me. The idea that his true love, Polly, comes to believe him, was intended only as a statement about love and our willing suspension of disbelief while so intoxicated.

         Levus, the professor who tries to save Russell, is fashioned as an obvious portrayal of F. R. Leavis, the British scholar; not a villain, but a man attempting to see the truth through literature. He is the hero, after all. And he is the designated ‘me’ in the story (someone in the audience laughed a little too loudly at that contention), not Russell, which is the reason why Levus is so well married to Duchess. Theirs is the better example offered and rejected by Russell and Polly. The idea that Russell would be seen as a rebel against authority never occurred to me. That’s a fact. My entire focus was on the power of imagination to overcome reality and the importance of that to human beings faced with terrible circumstance. This is revealed more than once as Russell comes to trust Polly and tells her of his terrible childhood. The disappearance of Russell and Polly at the end of the story was not to indicate their escape into another time where they might be happy together. That would never be. It was the very opposite.

         How could this be misunderstood? But, as usual, the fault is not in our stars.

         On our honeymoon in 1979, Sarah and I had stopped at Brighton to attend the World Science Fiction Convention, held in England that year, at the request of my publisher. It didn’t seem to be that much of an imposition. They were paying for the rooms and meals, and as it turned out, it was a good diversion.

         I was there ostensibly to represent them for my award nomination. At least I Am a Time Machine! had drawn some attention. But I’d advised them against this, already being unhappy with the positive reviews I was receiving for the wrong reasons, but as usual my thoughts about promotion were ignored. Besides, my story was not the usual SF material and I thought it unsuited for the sort of Star Wars, Star Trek and Alien atmosphere that was then overwhelming that genre.

         I was correct about this. No one was really interested in my disagreeable tale.

         Walking out for a breath of fresh air into a stiff Channel breeze on the boardwalk that late summer evening, with a moon that was small and bright and as artificial as a street light suspended high up in the bed of stars above the sea, we found ourselves standing close to a curly headed fellow named ‘Tom,’ who looked only vaguely familiar. His match had blown out. I had an extra pack. We all got to smoking then, bent against the wind and suspended by the rail. He liked American cigarettes better than the British. He commented on one thing, and we on another, and pretty soon we had a good conversation going on about the need to bring back dirigibles and other such lighter-than-air craft. I was already at work on The Flight of the Z, by then and he was a fan of the author and engineer Nevil Shute, and recommended that writer’s autobiography Slide Rule, which I later read and found to be wonderful. Shute had worked on the building of the first British dirigible, R-100, back in 1920s. It fact, it was that very conversation that inspired us days later to visit one of the last surviving aerodromes which still stood just north of there.

         The next day we again saw our new curly headed friend at breakfast in the convention hotel. He was quite the center of attention, being the star of a television series I had yet to see called Doctor Who. I made a point of catching a few episodes during the remainder of our trip that year. But in fact, I couldn’t stand the show. A matter of taste, I suppose. Wry British humor glazed upon slapstick baked over Shakespeare. To my mind it appeared to be just one missed story opportunity after another. The scripts had only a marginal rationale. The acting was intentionally arch. The element of the absurd, British pluck set against the intolerable, which played so well to me in the Monty Python sketches, was here artless and flat for lack of what to me was comic timing. I was informed that they were not intended to be funny. But whatever my poor opinion, the show was a hit and all criticism was pointless.

         Instead, I wrote a juvenile novella as my response, which I described to my agent over the phone as being ‘off the cuff.’ This was not intended at first to be any sort of a pun. My hero was actually ‘Dan Wright,’ which name, when spoken quickly, could sound like you were saying something else. (I had to be careful not to offend the sensibilities of librarians, but I knew the kids would take to it.) My Dan was captain of a small spaceship called The Ethos, which was automated for the most part, leaving him plenty of time to get in trouble. The mission he had accepted (as is so often the case) was nothing less than the usual, single-handed, saving of mankind. Mostly from itself.

         But soon enough (in obeisance to another editorial suggestion which I guessed was made as a diversion from my own ulterior motive in naming him Dan Wright), he was calling himself ‘Captain Cuff’ as a disguise when meeting new friends or adversaries (the cover illustrations were all too cute in depicting his shirt cuffs as always too long). The series had a definitive end in my mind. I only wanted to make a point of what could be done with similar resources as those used in the Doctor Who television show. Instead it took off with a small life of its own and for a time it was a modestly successful paperback series.

         (And I should note here, in my own defense, that I worked diligently to avoid a heavy-handed reliance on the story gimmick. That device was spawned when I read about a successful mystery author who said he wrote his stories in reverse, from the last line to the first. I assumed it could be done, of course, like learning to walk backwards. You will eventually get someplace. But I didn’t see the advantage if the journey itself was the point and not the trick.)

         The device I had used and plotted was that Captain Cuff would become younger and younger with each adventure as a result of the ‘reverse time’ travel necessary for him to go hither and yon (and thus the very cause of his problem with shirt cuffs), so that at some point he would be too young a child to command and unable to continue, in that his advice was being totally ignored. A sort of ‘from the mouth of babes’ resolution. I thought it might be funny. But before that happened, the publisher dropped the mass market format from their mix, leaving the plan incomplete, and I refused to sell the stories in the more expensive package they offered because the price would be prohibitive for the intended audience. It was for kids, after all. Whether I was right on that point or not, I can’t say in retrospect. Besides, I thought I had made my point. (I obviously had not.) My agent went bananas. I changed agents and that was that.

         Captain Cuff’s deal was not to force his will on anyone (even if he might have, given his increasingly diminutive size) but to impart information so persuasively, and at just the right moment, that he would be listened to. The reader was to see the intelligence of it, even if the other characters in the story did not. Though the plots were short at around 40,000 words, and always involved some life or death struggle and a little romance (at least during his older years), they required more than a little work to accomplish.

         Each of them took about six weeks to complete with corrections. I followed my regular writing regimen each morning, but found myself constantly sneaking looks at reference books later in the day while at the counter in the bookshop. Feeling a little lost in that future heliosphere, I was on the phone with my friend Paul at least once a week as well. He said he enjoyed it as a diversion from his regular work at DEC or Wang or wherever he was at the time. I hope he did. But whenever a new one of the series appeared, and I sent him a copy, he would read it in an evening and shoot it back to me with red marks all through for the scientific issues I had not dealt with correctly or the philosophical ones he could not abide. Most often it was my numbers that were circled and another written in the margin, with an exclamation mark attached (so often you would think that the exclamation mark was one of the original gifts of the Phoenicians). But the thick red strokes always appeared to me to be angry. I think it was perhaps because he had probably explained those things to me before and I was supposed to remember them.

         Or perhaps, where Paul might have been more perturbed, was with Captain Cuff’s politics. Cuff was an absolute, though unspoken, libertarian. The villain in each episode was not so much a particular human being as what human beings did to one another through force in trying to do good via naturally faulty government. But the idea that a single person (or child!) would or should assume authority against the will of ‘the people’ was beyond Paul’s understanding of things. Ideas of right and wrong were subjective in his way of thinking. The actual calculus involved with assuming any group of human beings to be more correct than any single person, given the dynamics of group politics, did not dissuade or persuade him. The fact that Captain Cuff never imposed his will on anyone, even when he could, while his enemies were always trying to impose their will on him (in the last two installments he is being chased by a truant officer for not being in school) was not an argument to Paul. It was merely a fantasy.

         I was happy enough when the series was finally over, though now I wish I had done better with the chance and perhaps taken more time with each episode. The idea was good but my execution was faulty. I had done nothing better than the original catalyst to the series. In fact, less. Dr. Who is still with us today. I had written my own stories to be something which, in the end, they were not and that fact was on my head alone. Not the publisher’s. I should have tried harder, and taken more time with them. The voice of Gerard Strauss can be heard above the din in my head.

         Sarah and I went to Paris in 1979, following the awards ceremony, and again in 1984. On both occasions we spent several days at the Louvre and there, footsore, I sat, at first by chance, but then for several hours more on an uncomfortable marble bench before that great painting by Gericault, The Raft of Medusa. I knew at my first sight of this depiction of the last survivors of a shipwreck that I had a book to write with that painting at its core. I can only guess at the number of writers who have also been inspired that way. Certainly my previous experience with Watson and the Shark played a similar role to this. But there was something more in the idea of Gericault. It was the matter of the importance of despair to renewal.

         A side note to this, and about the same time, is that we were invited to a dinner at George and Harold’s loft. It was a big affair with over twenty people in attendance. At the start of the meal, George tapped his glass with that fat gold ring on his hand and said a prayer. This astounded me. I had no idea yet that he was in the least religious. But his conversion to Catholicism had taken place on a trip to Italy with Harold the year before and he had never made any fuss over it. Harold told me it had occurred rather suddenly as they stood before Caravaggio’s The Calling of St. Matthew at the church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. Harold was still a skeptic but found himself being persuaded. Such a miracle is the power of a painting.

         My own inspiration was to set the desperate moment of my story far from the rage of the Atlantic, on the arctic deserts of Mars, where the survivors of the space ship Medusa, an isolated part of an attempted colonization, are faced with the choice of cannibalism and death or hope and renewal.

         It was on that first visit at the Louvre that Sarah had said, “I would rather die than have eaten the flesh of another human being.”

         I was glib, “Would you feed that flesh to your child if it meant their survival?”

         She was not cowed, “Yes. And I would kill that other person to feed them, if that was the choice. But if the choice was for my life alone, I would rather die.”

         She had written the key to the story for me. Right there.

         Obviously, it was the choices of parents that made societies. It was they who might purposely look beyond themselves to the future.

         By the time of our second visit to Paris, I had written two drafts of the thing and neither was good enough. Sarah had read them both, of course. But she hadn’t said a word before. She was often silent when I had not gotten the thing pinned down.

         She stood up close that second time, upright to the rope as children do, and stared at the painting for half an hour or more, as if she were wanting to count the painter’s strokes. I sat back and looked at her as much as the work. Her legs and hips were always disturbing. Finally she came and sat next to me again.

         “You are too damned happy, I think. You have never lost everything, as these people have. Despair does not come naturally to you. You are too much the optimist…If you want to recreate this—if you want to show people at their worst and being better than they have to be, you have to give them a reason. Not some ideal of philosophy, but something they can see and touch and taste.”

         “I suppose then, first I need to think what the worst would be.”

         We both stared up at the Gericault again.

         She had offered then, “What if you were blind and could not read or write?”

         I said, “I would think of the stories anyway. No matter. They’re still mine.”

         She looked at me with her usual squint of concern. “What would be the worst for you then?”

         I said it as soon as her question was spoken. “Losing you.”

         She would not be put off by some misdirection, even if the fact of it was true.

         “Then lose me. Imagine if I died. Imagine that!”

         And I tried.

         But the sense of despair I had wanted to achieve at the beginning of that story was greatly diminished at the insistence of Miss Janson, my editor, who could not be convinced that anyone would read it if I went on in that vein for the first sixty pages. Bad enough that I had recapitulated the horrors of the Donner Party there on the red planet. Some relief was necessary. Some hope. I was unsure of my ground on the matter. I had tried too hard to imagine the worst, I guessed. So the horror of it was cut in half. And given that the book then sold better than anything I had written since The Endeavor of Jim, I supposed she was correct. Or perhaps this was only a furthering of that mistaken interpretation I had encountered with I Am A Time Machine! And after the fact, my own criticism of The Mars of Medusa rested on those missing pages. What is the value of life to someone without hope? Why would they then strive for the better? Children.

         I then re-wrote most of those early pages in rough while sitting on that stone bench, with the other tourists passing before me; while looking between them, over shoulders and through crooked arms, the writhing of their bodies becoming extensions of the work in my mind at times like dark shadows at the fore. I didn’t think the final salvation of the characters in my book could be felt as I meant it to be, without more of that. I pressed the publisher about it again and again over the following years. The paperback sales eventually diminished. I wrote several other books in-between time which did not do near as well. At last I was able to make it a provision in my revised contract for their getting the next book I wrote, that I could put back the darkest pages in a revised edition. In 1994 they reissued The Mars of Medusa at the original length along with their fall catalog.

         Unfortunately, most of those copies printed could be purchased afterward for a dollar, found on any remainder table the following spring. And the publisher declined to even look at my next book. But I wasn’t up to caring at that point.

By then I had lost her.

***

47. At swim in the ‘Cea’ of catastrophe

         “Pliny tells us of a certain Hyperborean nation where, by reason of the mild atmosphere, lives of the inhabitants are commonly ended only by their own will; who, when they had reached an advanced old age and were weary of and satiated with living, had the custom after having made good cheer, to leap into the sea from the top of a certain rock, appointed for that service. Intolerable pain and the fear of a worse death appear to me the most excusable of inducements.”

                            A Custom of the Isle of Cea

                            Michel de Montaigne

         A genuine contempt for death is yet another characteristic attributable to my father that did not make it through the gene pool to my shores. I had to learn this by observation. He was not a man who pretended any particular bravery. Nor did he speak of himself more than was absolutely necessary. I took this to be secretiveness and quite wrongly as some possible shame for a past deed. Instead, my father’s complaints always seemed to me about petty things.

         “Put the tools away.”

         “But I’m going to use them again tomorrow. I’ll just have to take them out again.”

         “So put them away now.”

         (I was wrong on this count too, of course. I’m quick to curse if I’ve failed to put away any tool of my own and then later can’t find the bloody thing where it should have been.)

         He was especially unfond of idling engines. One time I saw the Edison truck stopped at the relay box on the corner, vibrating with a stuttering purr loud enough to hear half a block away. The driver had left his motor running. My father was walking home from work at the time, approaching the house in that deliberate trudge that he affected in order to hide his limp. As he passed, he simply reached in and turned the key.

         The workman was there in a flash. 

         “Why did you do that?”

         Dad stood there and waited for the fellow to get up close.

          “You forgot to turn it off.”

         “I didn’t forget. I left it running on purpose. What if it won’t start again?”

         “Then it shouldn’t be on the road in the first place. Have it towed to the shop.”

          “That’s none of your damned business.”

         “The sound is my business. And the exhaust. And the bill I pay every month.”

         “Don’t touch my truck again.”

         “Don’t leave it running.”

         At this point the fellow was nose to nose with Dad and another guy working on the job was there too. A few more seconds passed.

         The fellow said something like, “I’ll have you arrested if you touch my truck again.”

         My father turned his back to him and walked on home.

         Which needs another side note on a more recent distant past.

         In the 1970s, whenever I went home to see my mother, I would always be sure to get my hair cut. My father was as partial to long hair as he was to idling engines. In those later years, Tim had two other barbers working with him but I would wait it out so as to get his hands on the matter. 

         And during one of these visits, while biding time for Tim to get free, Donald, one of the other fellows, asked me how I was doing.

         I said “Fine. Pretty good. Well enough.”

         “You writing any more books?”

         Now Tim would never ask me in that way. He might get me to tell him, but he would go on about my mother for five minutes first, or about a mutual friend, or a recent development down at the L Street Bath House, with everyone within earshot agreeing that it was not the same as it used to be. Something like that.

         I said “Yeah. When I can. I’m working as an editor right now too.”

         Donald said, “What is it you’re editing? Another one of those radical magazines?”

         I thought that no one present had ever read The Gist, but I already knew well that they all had an opinion about it. (In fact, I was yet unaware that Tim had subscribed to The Gist for a short while to have it in the shop, laying it out with all the others for customers to read, before cancelling it in dismay following one nasty cover illustration or another.) But the word had circulated that it was a radical left-wing rag and opinion about me had shifted in that direction. I didn’t mind that at the time, anymore than I did ten years later having some uninformed twit thinking I was a conservative. The problem was, almost no one knew what a ‘libertarian’ was, any more than the ‘literary’ designation of our new venture defined us from our old one as a ‘news’ magazine.

         After stumbling a moment over a longer explanation, I simply told them, “It’s a literary journal.”

         Donald asked, “Like, with stories and poems, you mean?”

         “Yes. And some reviews. A little criticism. That kind of thing.”

         “And you’re the editor?”

         “Yes. But there are a couple others with me.”

         “But you’re the boss editor?”

         “Yes. I suppose. Yes.”

         “You get to pick and choose.”

         “Yes. Best I can.”

         Donald turned away from his customer in the chair, with a comb in one hand and trimmer buzzing in the other.

         “My sister writes poetry. You want her to send you some of her poetry?”

         I was unprepared for this just then, despite it being a fairly common inquiry.

“If she’d like to, sure. She’d want to address it to Helen Morris, though. She’s the poetry editor.”

         This was a half-truth. We had no ‘poetry editor’ per se. Helen simply did all the necessary work in that department.

         There was a beat of time. Donald turned back and took a swath of hair from the head of Jimmy Connors and then asked, “This Helen, is she pretty?”

         No good in hesitating there. “For a poetry editor I’d say so.”

         This was a readymade set up, of course. If you running a magazine, you should always have some version of an answer ready for this type of question.

          But Donald fell quiet. He’s a smart one.

         Someone else asked (I think it was the customer sitting in Donald’s chair), “How do poetry editors normally look?”

         I said, “A bit long in the face.” A postage stamp of Virginia Woolf floated to the surface of my brain.

         Donald turned to me, on cue. “Really? Why is that?”

         “Because they have to read so much bad poetry, I think.”

         Donald could hear the shtick in my voice. He smiled. “Yeah. My sister’s poetry does that to me, too.”

         Someone else asked what the name of the magazine was.

         “The Fore-edge.”    

         “Is it on the newsstand?”

         “Yeah. I just saw it, right down there at the newsstand in South Station when I came in yesterday.”

         Tim, long silent, now turned to me and spoke. ‘Does your father know about this?”

         I heard the reservation in his tone of voice.

         The light began to seep through. “What? The magazine? I don’t know. I suppose.”

         Tim nodded. But it was not for a ‘yes.’  “What do you mean, you ‘don’t know’? You’ve told him all about it already, right?”

         “Not yet.”

         “How long have you been working on this magazine?”

         “Most of the last year. A little more.”

         “And that’s the first issue down there at South Station?”

         “The second.”

         “And you never told your father about it?”

         “He doesn’t care about all that stuff, Tim. He doesn’t read that kind of thing.”

         “Is it like the stuff in your books?”

         “Some of it.”

         “He liked those.”

         Tim was onto something that mattered to him. That was on his face, accented in the fold of the scar just below his glass eye.

          I asked, “How do you know he liked them?”

         “Because he said so.”

         “When?”

         “When you wrote them. When they were published.”

         I felt as if I had set myself up for this.

         “He never said anything to me about them, one way or the other.”

         Tim attended to the last details with his customer as he spoke. The talc fumed in the air between us from his brush.

         “Funny thing. Did you ever ask him what he thought?  Because he came in here with a stack of copies under his arm and gave one to everybody he saw that day. Like they were cigars and he was a new grandpa.”

         I was a bit stunned. I think I said, nothing. I was flabbergasted. No. I had never asked my father what he thought.

         Tim flipped the hair off of his apron and waved me into his chair,

         “Well, I don’t suppose I want him to know I knew about all that before he did. He’ll go as dark as a day in February. You tell him today and I won’t say a word about it until he mentions it to me. And then I’ll act as surprised as I can do about it.”

         Yes, sir.”

         A good deal of what I know about my Dad—the good parts—I learned from Maeve Brennan. At some point I figured out that they had once had a relationship, but she did not tell me that. That was just my own brilliance in piecing together parts of the puzzle. And part of that cleverness was an assumption that their affair had occurred after he married my mother. I often projected my own guilty conscience back at him.

         Her son Charlie was a buddy of mine. Charlie had health issues that turned him toward other forms of recreation, like books, and thus our friendship had been established upon an accumulation of make believe and the supposing of ‘what if.’

         Often enough we would sit at the little red Formica table in their kitchen and eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and swallow down quarts of chocolate milk together. Occasionally Maeve would ask about my parents as she fixed our sandwiches, and how they were. From one thing or another I intuited a greater interest in my father and discovered that she knew things about him that I did not. For instance, he had worked at the A&P as a boy, doing the same sort of things I had done, but long ago, when she had been a cashier there.

         Maeve was not a small woman. Not fat as much as wide beamed. Wide-hipped. Large breasted. Broad-faced. Hair a bit too bottle red, and not at all like the chestnut of my mother’s—at least by the time I took notice of such things. She worked at an insurance office on Broadway near K, with her desk right at the window and often she waved at me and smiled more than just politely when I passed on my rounds. I would look then for the smile. It was a happy thing to see on a cold day.

         She said once, “How is your father’s new job?”

         I shrugged, “He didn’t say. But not so good, I think.”

         He was working in the shipping department at Gillette then. He didn’t like the bunch he worked with.

         She said, “He’d rather be outdoors. He should probably think about driving a truck again.”

         I’d heard a remark about the job he’d made to my mother, and I said, “I think he’s hoping they’ll move him into that.”

         Politely, and clearly as afterthought, she said, “How’s your mom?”

         “Fine.”

         Nothing much more than that. For all the years.

         But when Dad died in 1999, she was at the wake and then at the funeral.

         I first learned some of the fact of their relationship at that wake. It was a smallish gathering. A couple dozen, at most, strung out in the function rooms over at Greene’s Family Services. The facts were caught in-between the lines of things people said. But then Harvey Peltz, a chum Dad had often sailed with out of the Boston Yacht Club when they were boys, had been sparked by a story about Dad running a boat up on the rocks at Thompson Island. Harvey’s restraint was already weakened by his fifth or sixth beer. He started talking about how Dad would take Maeve out in a skiff, supposed to go clamming down by Wollaston Beach, and disappear until after dark, coming back with his buckets empty, but a smile on his face. Just the sort of thing you hear at a wake.

         Tim Bailey shushed him quiet and shot a look over at me, but he saw that I had heard. Maeve was standing in the other room, right next to my mother, and she turned just at that instant and looked through the opening at me.

         I got more out of Harvey when I walked him home after. He could hardly stand by then and was remorseful for having talked too much. But could he help himself now that the spigot of memory was open?

         Another time Dad and Maeve had gone all the way to World’s End and the tide turned against them and they got ‘caught’ there. It was Maeve’s father who had driven around through Hingham to get them. As big a man as Dad was, Maeve’s father was bigger then. He beat the daylights out of Dad and then took them both home.

         There was no good in asking Tim for more on that. He wouldn’t have said a thing.

         So, with Harvey safely home, I walked over to Maeve’s. This was after midnight, but she was awake in their kitchen at the back, drinking tea, and I could see her through the glass. I knocked there, and she waved me in.

         She said, “I thought you’d come.”

         So, she knew me that well and better.

         We were alone in the house. She had been divorced again for several years and her son Charlie was off in California working for a computer company by that time. I poured water for my own tea and sat down and just right out asked her about Dad, and what had happened between them.

         From the perfectly composed face of a tough, sixty-eight-year-old woman, her features collapsed and she had suddenly started to cry—to fold in on herself and wail like I have never heard a woman cry before. She just let it rip. All the pain of a lifetime at one go. I have often wished I could do the same. I stood next to her chair and held onto her shoulders for maybe five minutes or so. And when the sobbing was over she stuck her head beneath the kitchen faucet, like a person might with a garden hose, washing her face clean of all the smear of make-up and then wrapped a dish towel around her hair and sat down at the table again, drinking her tea, and told me everything I would know until the day I finally read my own mother’s letters.

         The L-Street Bath House was not exactly a club in any proper English sense. It was better. It was a place where my father could retreat away from female expectations, sit in the steam room until he was ‘pinked up’ and then take a cold shower, after which, in warmer weather, he would often sit in the sun with an assortment of other ugly fellows and play cards wearing nothing more than a small towel.

         There was a steam bath on Eighth Street when I lived in the East Village, which I passed regularly, but it was the habitué of fellows who had far less interest in female company than the old guys at the L Street, and though I was not inclined to join in those ceremonies, I thought of my dad every time I passed that place. I think of him whenever I see a small boat out across the water leaning from the wind. I think of him now late at night as I read a book and the cooling of the house makes the wood crack like someone has started upward on the stair. I think of him when I leave the water running too long.

         I am only half Irish and thus only half as good a liar as I might have been if my father had married Maeve Brennan instead of Bonnie Ann MacAleer. You’ll have to forgive me this then, for it is not my fault. I believe I have done the best that half an Irishman can do. I never really imagined more about my father’s love life than what I knew.

         But I knew Maeve all of my own life and a considerable part of hers. I knew all of her husbands. I played and fought with all of her kids, including the girls. And so did my brother. I know my brother Eddy once had a romance with Maeve’s daughter Gwen, for instance, but nothing more about that either.

         Having an older brother who is close in age is a difficult proposition. Most of what I did as a child was more than likely a reaction to what my brother was doing. He liked sports. I avoided them. He swam out beyond the Head Island Causeway and I wandered the beach by myself and collected flotsam.

         My brother was a bastard, for sure. Still is, perhaps. And certainly others have called me that, but the truth I was yet to know was that my father only married my mother because she was pregnant. And that was well after he had already let his unofficial engagement to Maeve Brennan be known before he’d left for the service in the winter of 1942. The wedding was all but scheduled. And then they had argued the first day after he was home on medical discharge in autumn of 1944. She had been stubborn on some matter on which he would not give in. She did not say what that was now, and I did not expect her to say.

         “Just nonsense,” Maeve was what she whispered to me. And he had stormed away. But she had thought he would get over it sooner.

         She stared at her tea. “Instead he found your mother at a VFW dance the following spring,” (I did not tell her then that I already knew it was a little more complicated than that.) “She was serving punch and cookies. And then he was caught in his own jamb.”

         That sums the situation. But it doesn’t do it justice. Whatever faults he had, I could not believe that my father had been a cad.

***

48.  . . . and some other things left beneath a drawer

         My mother’s first love was a man named Fergus Dean. His letters to her, at least one per week from mid-February 1942, up to the week of October 16th, 1944—one hundred and thirty two in all—were in several cigar boxes on the floorboards beneath the built-in drawers of the closet in her bedroom—my parents’ bedroom for all those years.

         I pulled the bottom drawer out to empty it of an accumulation of odd clothes she had never thrown away. Just another small step in cleaning up after her death. The gold foil on the boxes gleamed at me from beneath, exposed suddenly to the light against the gray boards, and I had one of those moments when you know you have found something special. I swear too, in that instant of first catching sight of them, I knew what they were—or at least what they were going to be. I knew she had hidden them there, and that they would have some answers to questions I had asked myself through the years.

         Letters are just one more of the things we have lost with the internet and the telephone. Don’t tell me that email is the same. If you think so, compare any email with a letter from the same person written before the age of Yahoo, as I have. And worse, actual letters written today are generally shorter. The impatience inherent to text messaging, and to twittering, makes the comparatively slow process of writing too great a burden on current sensibilities. Whereas my mother’s letters—and most personal letters—were once hand-written, the average college graduate today cannot even write in a cursive script. They  have enough trouble printing for more than a paragraph, mixing their capitals with their lower cases. Handwriting, the miracle of civilization and thus the ages, is being lost.

         There are a hundred other differences, not the least of those being word choice and spelling, all of which you will find if you look (no wonder the authorities of high-lit adored the terse Mr. Hemingway over his verbose contemporary Mr. Wolfe), but most profound is the loss of consideration, a respect for the subject, and musing, rumination, and the human philosophies born out of the simple mix of daily living to be found in the deliberateness of a letter to someone you know.

         All that is in the nature of conversation, and contained in my own argument for good writing, and the novel, over any other art form.

         In those same cigar boxes there were only twelve letters from my mother, all written between October 1944 and the following January; all them unopened but tied together by yellowed cotton string. Those twelve had been returned together by the Post Office in June of 1945, after a determination of casualties from the sinking of the Princeton. I read all of the letters, both his and hers, at one go during a sunny afternoon this past April, almost immediately after I found them.

         Fergus Dean’s letters were short, terse, a la Mr. Hemingway. He would not have been able to give her crucial details of his life—nothing at least that might be revealing to the enemy were they captured. As a pilot, he certainly knew more. He mentioned the weather quite a lot and how he was feeling, the antics of some of his friends, and some incidentals of daily living, like the size of the bugs on Saipan, which he bragged were as big as his hand. He mentioned the smell of the spaghetti they ate on Sunday nights at the base that reminded him of home, even if the taste did not. And he said that he missed her. Each one ended with a number. The same number: 1- 4 – 3.

         I knew what that was. The simplest of ciphers. The flashing symbol of Minot’s Light on the shoals off Scituate, seen through a November fog. I suddenly knew more than I had ever wanted or imagined.

         Of those letters from her to him, the first atop the smaller bundle of the ones returned unopened had the flavor of all she wrote. I removed the letter with a ceremony, cutting through the flap very slowly with my pocket knife, like a filet, thinking about the fact that it had last been sealed almost sixty years before, and unfolded the two crisp sheets filled with her distinctive and well formed script. The nuns would have been proud of her had she ever gone to a Catholic school.

January 16th, 1945

Dear Dear Fergus,

         The Navy is hiding your letters. None have arrived this week again. But I have re-read some of the others and noticed things I had missed before, so they felt new.

         Time passes so slowly here. Days run together. The waiting is all the problem.  I think you know, even though you say ‘you love your floating bucket.’

         The Fore River stinks of low tide this week. Cold and dank. And it settles into the hulls of the boats and makes you feel your bones. But then I think of you and it is suddenly warmer weather again and even the stink went away. At least for a little. I can’t lie.

         The 7:15 bus at Dorchester Avenue is never on time unless you get there late, in which case it is early, so you have the wait, and to think about things. I look into the sky very often and think of you there. This morning the clear heavens were as blue and white as the acetylene we use at the shipyard, and with the yellow behind me from the sun coming up with the wind and catching at the edges, the cold of the air burned my skin as if it were hot. A plane came across going to the airfield in East Boston and it made me wonder how you stay warm up there. For the first time. I had never thought of that before. I feel so stupid!

         I will knit socks for you. My mother will teach me. If I can learn to weld I can learn to knit as well. I should be a multi-purpose woman for you when you return.

1 4 3

Your Bonny Anne

         My mother married my father in November of 1945.

         Of course, I realize, I would not have been the person I am had Fergus Allan Dean lived and my mother married him after the war. I might have been a Fergus instead of an Angus, but I don’t believe that’s the spark of my curiosity. What intrigues me is the story there. As the story always does. And if that story is clear to me, I see that my mother would not have lived her life out here in South Boston, nor in Quincy near her parents. Fergus was from Weymouth. He had joined the Navy to become a pilot. If his last letters are an indication of the dreams he was fashioning while lying a bunk deep within the U. S. S. carrier, Princeton, he would likely have become a commercial pilot after the fighting was over. And I wondered for the first time then why my mother had become involved with my father so soon after she had lost Fergus in the war. Or whether I would ever know that, or have a right to such knowledge.

         One other survivor of old Southie that I still knew in 1975, Jimmy Green, was back at the Boston Globe about the time Peter and Phyllis Rabinowitz died and I knew I would soon be losing my apartment in Brooklyn, so I even went so far as to return home to Boston to check the possibilities out. In early 1975, A Republic of Books was not really off the ground yet. I must have been worried about my prospects, and there was still time to back away from that folly. 

         Just off the train at South Station, Jimmy took me out to lunch one summer afternoon. I have the notes for the encounter right here, fresh out of a box in the basement.

         We leaned against his car, out on the asphalt but just inside the brim of shade from a near-by building and across the road from Speed’s hot dog wagon, eating our chili dogs but still breathing the fumes off of Speed’s gas grill and laughing, about all of it. The world was coming to another end. What could we do?

         There he was, wishing he could write novels the way I did, and there I was looking for some regular employment at a local rag. There were no jobs open for writers like me anywhere in town that he knew of. Not ones that paid a weekly salary. I shouldn’t bother even applying. Everyone he knew was already trying to get in at one or another of the television stations. He warned, if I thought most newspaper reporting was no better than whoring, I should get a whiff of those pancake fumes under the studio lights some time.

         But at least he wrote a nice piece in the Globe about my latest novel.

         Jimmy’s head is probably on the block today, given his own age, but he summed up the state of things fairly and succinctly at that hour.

         He said, “Journalism is a racket. You know about rackets, right?”

         In an effort at one-upmanship, which was just part of the way between us in the old neighborhood, I said, “Dancing.”

         He was appropriately perplexed. “What dancing?”

         I smartly explained, “The New York Irish street gangs held big dances each year to get attention and new members and the like. The more brazen the better, showing how they might operate to frustrate the cops. Each event tried to be wilder than the other, and people called those affairs ‘the rackets,’ for all the noise they made, and that’s how the various forms of fraud and extortion they practiced in whatever neighborhood they controlled came to be known.”

         He glared at me in the way he used to when we were in high school together and I was being a smart ass. “I should know better than to ask you an open-ended question like that.”

         I shrugged with feigned innocence, “My great grandfather came over right into the middle of it. It’s just family history.”

         He ignored my explanation. “I’m just talking about the newspaper racket here. It’s still your basic extortion. Pay to play. You write a nice piece on Hack A, and Hack A’s campaign throws some of his ad money your way. You give a nice report on the Playground Committee and when you need some inside angle on the Sewer Commission, you get first peek. Now most of that is political, but it’s all the same deal with the car dealerships and the movie chains or whatever. We run good stories on the ones we like and bad stories on the ones we don’t. We get the ad revenue from the ones in power.” I remember him saying this as if I might not already be aware. “It’s like, you never show up the incompetence of the cops or you won’t get in the door to see the reports at the police station when you need to. The only reason to read the papers now is for the sports scores and the comics, unless maybe you’re looking for an apartment or to cut the coupons . . . And maybe for the dating services.”

         Jimmy was married, so I wondered what he might need with the dating services.

         I said, “Why do you do it then?”

         Jimmy was holding his hotdog away from himself, shoulders hunched, so the chili wouldn’t drop on his pants. My question caught him off guard. ‘Wasn’t it obvious,’ was in the reaction. From the look on his face, he took it rather seriously, and he held that big heap on his bun right out there in midair and studied it for half a minute while he considered his answer.

         “I don’t know. I shouldn’t . . . I agree with the politics, okay. They’re all crooks anyway. I know. But my crooks at least want to do well by doing good. That much is all right with me. You know that. That never changes, right? You might as well be for something as against it. You and I have argued enough on that score. But the fraud of pretending that what we’re putting out is the real news, that bothers me. It does. I go to church on Sunday, but I only hit the confession booth about once a year. I’m not a bad Catholic, exactly. I don’t think so. I don’t cheat on my wife. I don’t beat the kids, not like my dad used to knock me around. But there’s a lot of stuff I have to ignore, and that gets to me.”

         I will tell you this: it was the look on his face right then that made me finally give up the thought of ever trying to write for the newspapers, once and for all. For those seconds, I believe Jimmy was looking into that particular crack in the cosmos where the fires of hell let you see what kind of hell it is that’s right in front of you.

         One of my great grandfathers, Francis Delaney, came to America on a sailing ship. Not an unusual occurrence. But it was 1901 and well into the age of steam. He was an Irish sailor then on a Norwegian whaler. Maybe one of the last of its kind anyway, as far as I can tell.

         After a tough couple of months in a stormy season, the ship had put in at New York harbor for some repair or another and he had jumped over the rail right into Brooklyn. Actually into the water first, and then cut his arm on the broken shell of a mussel while climbing the pier. Family legend has it, he said ’I had blood in the water then, and I had to stay,’ and that was his story in the years after, repeated many times. Yet another expression I need to find a place for in something I write, someday. Maybe that was why I had such a fondness for the place myself. Brooklyn was in my genetic memory. Could be Lysenko was right after all.

         But to get work back then, Frank Delaney had to give himself up to the gang that controlled the neighborhood. Same as today. And being Irish, he was used to having an English overlord, but the illiterate Irish louts and thugs who ran the rackets in New York were contemptible beyond anything he could stomach. So, in 1905, he ran away again, set out on foot with two dollars in his pocket, right up the Boston Post Road, and went to see about a cousin of his there who had gone to Boston years before. So, a couple of generations on, that was where I came along.

         For my own part, that day in 1975, with half a pound of beef parts and peppers and onion in my stomach, I decided to double down. I went back to Brooklyn, went through with opening my own bookshop, and instead of writing for someone else, I wrote a whodunit. Just for myself, if that was the way it was going to be. The bow-tied thugs who ran the publishing business were not going to keep me back.

         My previous book, The Unfortunate Happiness of Peter Brim, had done well enough in sales, but they wished it had sold better. The editor at Simon and Schuster had liked the way I played with contradictions and suggested the idea of writing an outright mystery. I was not the kind of writer who can write on demand. That was too much like work. And I figured at least I could try to do one a little better than the usual. No need for ‘speckled bands,’ ‘red-headed leagues’ or ‘dancing men,’ nor the more modern dancing of the ‘nitty-gritty’ in the mean streets for that matter.

         The vicarious entertainment that the safely suburbanized middle-class appeared to get from reading about the urban ghetto was sad to my mind. Not a ‘there but for the grace of God’ sort of fascination, but a guilty fixation. However, it seemed to me there were enough mysteries in everyday life to keep me occupied for at least one more book . . . such as, why do men take money for their souls when they still have the feet to walk away?

         I recently read a short article on the internet about an apartment in Paris which had been left untouched for seventy years—a woman had locked the door and left it as the Germans approached the city during the Second World War. She had regularly paid the rent for the rest of her life, but never returned. It was a time capsule of that moment in history. I suddenly felt nostalgia, not for her life of course, but my own. And, too, I wonder why. What would make her do that? Had her lover died in the war and keeping the apartment been a part of her remembrance?

         This sort of discovery had happened to me on many occasions during the years of managing my bookshop. Such revelations had inspired me to write many more short stories than I could properly count today—or at least offered the needed detail to the alternate life I was attempting to conjure on the paper. And one in particular comes to mind for other reasons as well.

         In 1993, or thereabout, I went into an apartment which was right on Mulberry Street in Manhattan, a couple of blocks from the old Fore-edge offices. The owner of the building was Mr. Linn, an ancient looking Chinese-American gentleman, stooped but not short, his bald head mapped by liver spots. He had remembered me from our publishing days on the street and knew I had opened the bookshop in Brooklyn. I was happy that I had not left a bad impression given my louder ways at the time.

         He led me up the stairway speaking a sort of American English I have always associated with prep-schools, a cross between George Plimpton and William F. Buckley, and in and of itself an artifact of a time when language was spoken with more care.

         Through his own door when he had answer my knocking, I could see a framed photograph against a back wall of a young man, likely himself, in uniform. My guess was that he had fought in World War Two.

         Smartly, I said, “Were you in the war, then?”

         He turned back as if to look at what I had noticed, but did not turn all the way before answering. Perhaps his back was too stiff.

         “What there was of it for me. I was Captain in charge of a small airfield in Hunan where our planes came in with supplies. The Japanese overran us one night and I spent four years in a prison. Well, not in a prison, per se. I was prisoner. Most of the time we were building roads. But that’s not what I wanted to show you. Follow me.”

          He grabbed another key and took me out the door to the street again.

         I asked, “When did you come to the United States?”

         “Ah,” he said, “I was born here. In New York.”

          That was all I learned about him just then. If the call had been the usual one, I would have kept the conversation going for most of the time I was there and might have gotten a fair piece of his full biography to twist up and use in some story or another for myself. I was certainly interested enough. But he took me around and up the stairs of the next building and that was that. My priorities were changed yet again in another moment.

         He said, “I suppose you see all sorts of things, but I hazard a guess that you have never seen anything like this before,” as he opened the door.

         From there I could see inward through and beyond to three over-filled rooms. This was an accumulation of books, magazines, and shelving stuffed with bric-a-brac, that reached the ceiling in many places. Furniture was partially hidden beneath abandoned layers of clothing on hangers removed long ago from a closet. The length of the intervals of time was obvious from the dull layer of dust. Newspapers were stacked neatly in piles that were a foot or more thick. In fact, except for the undisturbed layer of dust, the agglomeration did not look that much worse than my office of the time.

         He said, “Milly moved out in 1956. Just after Christmas. She packed her bags and went to California. But she sent me a check for the rent every three months or so for the next thirty-six years. She’s dead now.”

         There was no emotion in his voice.

         “And she never came back?”

         “No.”

         But he sighed then. There was a personal element to this tale that I was reluctant to touch.

         I soon learned that Milly had been a graduate student at New York University.

         I followed him in.

One element of magic to New York apartments is that dust. These rooms were shut tight. The air was still and stuffy until I opened several windows myself in order to breathe. But every exposed surface was coated with the grey film that is produced by the atmosphere like phlogiston.      I asked, “You’ve haven’t been in here since she left?”

         “Not really. Once. Twice. A pipe broke on the third floor. It came down through the closet. But that was back in the 1960’s . . .  Somehow, things did not look quite as different to my eye then as they do now . . . I did come in the door a couple of times later on. Just to look. I heard noises. My apartment is in the next building, right on the other side of this wall. I heard things. I worried that someone had broken in. But it was nothing. And she was never here.”

         He wanted me to box up the books and take them away. I could give him a check when I had determined a fair value. And I did that. But in the process I unintentionally learned part of his own secret.

         None of that was my business. But I have never been good at ignoring stories or, as you see, keeping them to myself.

         Mr. Linn had also gone to New York University. I suppose he met Milly there. Perhaps in one of the literature courses that were part of her major. They had fallen in love. There were love notes tucked into several of the books. Then something had happened and I do not know what. But I wrote the story, Phlogiston, about what I imagined it to be, anyway.

         That mystery did not sell well enough. Perhaps it needed a happy ending, or something more tragic than I had conjured. But I enjoyed writing it, nonetheless.

         For many years, the Assistant Librarian at the near South Boston branch of the Boston Public Library was one Frederick Owen. Unimposing would not do to describe the man. No taller than myself, always balding, but never bald, with thicker glasses than my own (the lenses imbedded in heavy brown frames which were suspended outward in a near cantilever like a Frank Lloyd Wright house on a small nose beneath a broad forehead) he was always pale and apparently malnourished. He dressed habitually in a moth-eaten maroon cardigan sweater, of which he must have had several, with a drifting festoon of egg yoke or tomato sauce near the buttons, and in brown woolen slacks that, judging by the intricate faceting of wrinkles, appeared to have been machine washed rather than dry-cleaned, and then left to dry on a line.

         Mr. Owen was in fact a father of five grown children and lived with his wife on West 4th Street. He had been a Marine in the Pacific during World War Two, and was one of Tim Bailey’s best customers at the barbershop despite his lack of hair. Thus I had often heard his conversation.

         But it was that disparity of those many parts with his life that made a mockery of all clichés. And I suppose it was seeing me sweeping up at the barbershop which had made him more friendly toward me than others. He never appeared to be especially fond of the human race. He was not given to speaking much at all, as a matter of fact. Grunting was his common language.

         An elderly woman would ask for something at the library and he would lead her to it on the shelf without saying a word as she chatted away at his back. Another would ask him a question and get a simple ‘No,’ or ‘Yes,’ and little more.

         By the time I was old enough to benefit by his friendship, I had already assumed that his post at the library had been gained because he was a veteran. Again, I was wrong. But it was his personality which had most likely kept him in a subordinate position. He had a earned degree in literature from Columbia University before being malformed on some unknown battlefield.

         By the time I had gained free reign in the adult section of the library, Mr. Owen had already taken an interest in my reading habits and would often drop by the table where I sat to get away from the closer scrutiny of home and, without comment, drop a title down in front of me. I began to look forward to it. He was often right on. And if I could catch him without an arm full of books I could ask what his thoughts were on any given author that interested me. His criticism was usually concise.

         “John Steinbeck?”

         “Tiresome.”

         “Jack London.”

         “Which title?”

         “White Fang.”

         “Call of the Wild is better.”

         “Ray Bradbury?”

         “The short stories are fine.”

         I had already read Robert Heinlein’s Doorway into Summer (a perfect slapstick vehicle for a Howard Hawks film which was sadly never made) by the time I finally stumbled onto Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Mr. Owen was displeased. With one finger he lifted the cover up on the copy I was reading and frowned. Not even a grunt. I immediately assumed this was because of the very idea of burning books. But again, I had misjudged.

         He said, “It’s a lovely conceit. Isn’t it? Burning books to control society. But his people aren’t right. Not the way people really are.”

         I had to agree with him for the most of them, except for one character, the ‘Mechanical Hound,’ a robotic dog with a hypodermic proboscis that sniffs out books for fiery destruction. This had already given me nightmares. But not having a grasp yet of any literary aesthetic, I was taken with this difference alone: that the ‘Hound’ was an excellent villain for being without human compunctions and a far cry from Mr. Heinlein’s more willing and benign robots. I related this thought soon after to Mr. Owen.

         He said only, “When the best character in the book is a robot, you know you’ve got a problem.”

          Sometime around 1962 he dropped a copy of a Philip K. Dick novel on me, Time Out of Joint. I believe I was reading A Canticle for Leibowitz at the time and he was not fond of that book either, for reasons I did not know, or do not now remember him saying. But he had decided that if I was going to persist with difficult science fiction themes, he was going to nudge me toward titles that he believed to be better written.

         I remember that he was very fond of Vonnegut’s ‘chronosynclastic infundibulum,’ from The Sirens of Titan, and would explain any disparity I might find in the plot line of one book or another with, “I suppose you will have to accept that it’s just part of the chronosynclastic infundibulum, and get on with the story.”

         But in full contradiction to Mr. Owen’s apparent disinterest or dislike of the people that he encountered day-to-day, what compelled him most about any book were the characters.

         I remember when the library had finally discarded all the copies of Edward Stewart White novels, for the usual reason—not enough recent interest. There were so many, I think, because Mr. Owen had stamped them secretly through the years to make it appear they were being read. Then the circulation system had changed and it was clear that no one cared at all, but him.

         Mr. Owen shook his head at the pile which had been gathered beside the desk. “Idiocy! Shame! All of those wonderful people, lost.”

         He meant the characters, of course. I might well have been looking wide-eyed at a human tragedy.

         In 1996, shortly after Mr. Owen’s passing, Tim told me that Mr. Owen’s house on West 4th Street had been found to be filled with the library discards that his old friend had not wanted to see go into a dumpster. As with most such stop-gaps, all of them finally ended up as land-fill in any event.

         History does repeat itself in the most garish, gaudy and ghoulish ways. The various barbarians who were involved in the destruction of the great library and Musaeum of Alexandria (est. c. 300 BC), including Julius Caesar (48 BC), the Emperor Aurelian (270 AD), Pope Theophilus (391 AD), and Caliph Omar (642 AD), were prototypal of a mindset which is still well represented today. The last of those idiots, Caliph Omar, is said to have said, “If those books are in agreement with the Quran, we have no need of them; and if they are opposed to the Quran, destroy them.” Accurate or not, it rings true to the ear of anyone who might have read the justifications offered by librarians in our time as they destroy their own libraries in favor of electronic devices supposed to be so much better—ephemeral appliances  that have an expected life span that is the merest fraction of any remnant of the papyrus that has survived the two thousand years since the Ptolemys.

         The librarian, a figure long held in my esteem as the keeper of the flame of human knowledge, has now metamorphosed as a profession, given up their trust (as surely as the  doctor charged to at least do not harm who now oversees abortion and suicide), and set about the elimination of books ‘to make room.’

         ‘Make Room, Make Room!’

         I am reminded of the titular call to the teeming masses in the Harry Harrison novel which was later filmed as Soylent Green. Harrison’s fear was overpopulation and the desperate ‘need’ for birth control, which he imagined might result in the necessity to use the very protein from human beings to feed human beings. But Harrison was no better a prognosticator than the average librarian, who now destroys old books to make room for the new and touts the simpler and more efficient use of the e-book for the titles they cannot keep.

         I don’t blame Harrison alone for his fears. He came along during a time of dyspeptic dystopianism which certainly discolored my own visions of the future at that time as well. Philip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison were among the better authors to mine that discontent. As with so many science fiction writers, Harrison assumed a stasis of technology, or science, in order to extrapolate dire consequence due to a given anomaly—usually something that was readily observable. Imagine if there were suddenly more than 30 million people living in New York! In harmony with his contemporary, Mr. Dick, whose Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was also made into an excellent film, Harrison supposes a sort of  Blade Runner Los Angeles, only worse. Assuming some god-like prescience for themselves and the utter stupidity and total lack of common sense to imagined future individuals, it is easy for any author to suppose the worst from whatever current foolishness we are about. Such dark visions seem to sell and feed an angst that is in our souls. (But isn’t that also there to be found in Franzen, or Eggers or Chabon?)

         Perhaps that is all to the good. A necessary emetic. It keeps us on our toes and off our asses.

         But, as we struggle to understand Aristotle from a fraction of his total work, and scholars bemoan the loss of the thousands of texts only referred to by surviving scraps, all lost in those terrible purges of the past, we might wonder at our own future.

         I am told that in the United States alone, more than 300,000 book titles were published last year. Where should they be kept? Oh, the worry! 300,000! . . . I used to have about a third of that number at any one time in my shop, filling less than 2000 square feet to the rafters (especially after I had finally moved out of my loft.) Goodness, gracious! At that rate, if we keep one copy of each, the whole country will be paved with books by the year 9,700,000. Or is it the year 10,400,000? As I’ve said, I’ve never been good with numbers. In any case, shouldn’t we start culling now for future generations.

         Likely, a text such as this one you read now, which is a gainsay to the authoritative voice of the American Library Association, will be the first to go. And any other objectors should take note. We have no time for dissent. That science is settled.

         When all of the text is electronic it will be so much easier to edit. So much easier then to rid ourselves of ‘books’ that are troublesome. No need to burn and further pollute the atmosphere or take up precious space. Press the button. A silent blip. Not even a whoosh or poof to disturb the equanimity. Disturbing thoughts can be eliminated as well. The quantum of solace will be absolute.

         It seems to me that the fears of librarians have overcome all common sense, as well as any scrap of reason. A scant thirty years after the widespread proliferation of computers and we have given up a heritage of the centuries—millennia, for all the ancient text that we managed to save. A fragile medium has been chosen to replace a durable one.

         From this historical moment I do not wish to be another Cassandra predicting doom. But unlike Mr. Harrison or Mr. Ellison or Mr. Dick, who seem uninterested in history as they offered their glimpse of future hell, I think I have some higher ground to stand upon, as I panic.

         In fact, in my own time, I have owned at least eight successive computers and more than a dozen operating systems, most of which cannot read the information stored in their predecessors. The lifespan of a computer is about seven to ten years. Never mind willful destruction, electronic data corrupts all by itself in less than the lifespan of a dog.

         When the commercial product known as the Kindle has been long forgotten, the memory of the destruction of our libraries will still be a fresh hell for us to recall. And I’ll bet some near future writer will undoubtedly damn us for our idiocy and chuckle at the irony of the name.

         And another instance of my pre-internet malfeasance occurs to me:

“Wanted: a middle-aged woman of extraordinary attributes who for some reason (better left unsaid) is willing to take up with a less than extraordinary man, with the understanding that he sincerely wishes to improve himself, and that given his faults, this project would likely take the most of the rest of their lives to accomplish; a dame of willing mind, body and soul who might have already done what she had thought needed to be done (or attempted to and failed honorably), and now wants one more labor; a paramour who might happily take the opportunity to share her passions with a fellow in need of affection, joy, and more than a little understanding, who is himself now looking for better than he has known; a doxy with the patience of a good mother, the compassion of a nurse, the eye of an artist, the inquisitiveness of a true scholar, and the ardor of a mistress; a sweetheart with faith in herself who will be faithful to her promise; a female not given to manias, fads, or the madness of crowds; a lady of considerable learning and good taste who can yet boogey and laugh, and be willing to teach a sallow fellow a thing or two; a consort who appreciates the better things in life but can do without when necessary; a companion without allergies to everyday living, who is yet filled with her own passions unspent; a gamine of great modesty, who can run naked on the beach when the time comes; a lover of music from Beethoven and Schubert and to Mahler and Rachmaninov, who likes to sing a country song as she drives along; a hoyden who has taken reasonably good care of herself given her past adventures and though stitched with the natural pains and scars from having well lived the first half of her life, is still possessed of most her own teeth and capable of a good walk; in all, the perfect woman for a less than perfect middle-aged man in near despair, who still aspires to accomplishing more and to finishing things better than they were begun. Cooking and cleaning are not optional but can be shared.”

         In 1997 I ran the above ad—with all those words included—in half a dozen literary magazines at a cost of less than a thousand dollars—as research, you understand. I had the idea for a story and a film in which a sad fellow named Sam—a Ph.D. in psychology, who has become a very successful advertising executive, runs that exact statement, but, in the story, full page in major national magazines (not, as I had, in back page classifieds) at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars—amounting to almost quarter of the net he had accrued from having sold his house (the other half going to his ex-wife), and then uses an equivalent sum to hire a temporary assistant to manage the responses. Quite naturally, I cast my good friend Paul in the role. (Not for the first time for that, given the safety of knowing he’d never read it.)

         Unlike my own actual test, the fictional response is fantastic and Sam is quickly overwhelmed. He soon becomes reliant on the assistant to help with the task of sorting and answering the inquiries, and matching their self-described attributes with his own inadequacies. After which, he starts to go on dates, meeting the women who seem most promising. But each date only becomes yet another confrontation with his own faults. In truth, these women aspire to the same kind of strengths in a man as he does in a woman. Feeling guilty for having misled them, he finds himself counseling many of them for their problems instead. In one case he is frightened at the determination of dominatrix wannabe, in another, a pathological liar, and then an amply endowed sociopath as each seize upon his weaknesses as an opportunity. Others are merely lost souls, in far worse shape than himself. (The hundred and thirty-two or so responses I got from my smaller ad were for the most part in this latter category, though there was one who was critical of my requiring someone who could hike (what did I have against the disabled?) and another who argued for the advantages of false teeth…Or, was that the same person?

         In my story, the assistant, named Grace, helps him through all of this, keeping his appointment book for each date, writing out the possible pluses for each candidate, prepping him beforehand, and then keeping up a scorecard. Inevitably, and soon enough, he finds himself more interested in the assistant than in those not so extraordinary women who have answered his call.

         At last, as his own money runs out, he determines to keep Grace employed permanently, which she agrees to do if she can alter a few of the terms. I saw all of it in good fun, a variation on the dream-girl theme coupled with an echo of The Shop Around the Corner.

         My own experience, as I say, was not as romantic. Of course, I had done my own sorting and filing, so the possibility of a saving grace was closed. At least half the respondents took the ad to simply be an elaborate come-on for sex. After due diligence I went out on five dates. One of those was promising, but not for any of the expected reasons. She had somehow guessed from the wording of the ad that I was an author. Having learned my first name, she came to the appointed meeting with one of my books in hand. She liked my work and was quite worried over my loneliness and well-being. But the romance was a little like painting by the numbers, something I have never done before, but correctly assumed to be what it was.

         At least she had the compassion necessary.

***

49. Annie and Gus and Joe

         She’d called me Gus the night we first met.

         I had asked her name. She had been introduced to me by Holt in the midst of a water fight in the ‘lagoon,’ simply as Sarah, and I wanted to know her last name. She announced it loadly, “Sarah Ann Unger,” as if it were a roll call. And I had immediately called her Annie, for no reason in particular other than to say it and hear it. And she had scowled wonderfully.

         We never spoke those names in public after that and I remember once when Molly was visiting and I called her mother ‘Annie,’ and Molly had looked as if she had never even heard the name before. She frowns in the exact way her mother did.

         But Sarah knew I hated to be called Gus.

         I see the light of the bonfire on the beach of that first night arcing in the splash of the water. Sparking and bursting. Explosions of liquid glass. I see it better in mind than I could possibly have with my eyes at the time. Like fireworks.

         But Sarah had said, “I wish I had my camera,” so it must have been something.

         Smartly, I answered, “It it would only get wet and be ruined.”

         “But Gus, that’s why I’m only wishing.”

         Though she often put her wishes to the test.

         I gave her an Ansel Adams book the first Christmas we were together. She already had it but didn’t tell me. I saw the other copy hidden at her parents’ house later. But the fact of it was, her aim had already been taken. She was fascinated with using natural light. Indoors or out.

         One rainy day, when we were hiking in the White Mountains on the north side of Chocorua, she had lead me in a circle twice before I realized it was intentional.

         “What is it? What is it your looking for?”

         “I’ve found it. I just have to wait until the sun has moved over . . . maybe there.” She pointed up at a seemingly blank gray sky through the dripping trees. “Or there. I think.”

         “For what?”

         Her finger dropped toward the ground. “For that!”

         She said it in full knowledge that what she was pointing to was a clump of moss and lichen that had grown together against the face of rock and looked like a thousand other such places we had tramped by or over.

         What she saw there was not visible to me. We came back yet again, before she simply plunked herself down on a rotting log and sat to wait the moment out. And it came. While I was somewhere on and up the mountain, slipping in my impatience and working on a bruised leg and a twisted ankle.

         When I saw the picture later, still wet with the developing fluid from the chemical bath, she was clearly proud of what she had gotten, but I did not recognize the place at all. It was a small self-contained world of emerald skyscrapers and arcing buttresses of amber, copper towers against a palisade of silvered stone . . . No. On second look I thought I saw an eye looking back.

         I said, “Is it a face?”

         She answered, “Is that what you see?”

         Carefully, I added, “Maybe.”

         She looked at it herself once more.

         “No. That’s just your reflection, fool! Tell me what you see!”

         “Moss on a rock.”

         She hit me. Her tight fist against my shoulder. Not hard.

         “Look again.”

         “Maybe a face.”

         “Harder.”

         “I see a building. It reminds me of the Gaudi cathedral in Barcelona.”

         She shook that off. “Where? You are making that up! But it is a face. An old man.”

         “In Barcelona.”

         “In Barcelona.”

         She wrote that on the edge of the photograph when she had a copy of the print she was satisfied with. ‘Old Man in Barcelona’ hung in the hall near the door for the years after, with the name hidden beneath the frame, and we used to get a kick out of what people said about it as they came in the door for the first time.  

         She worked at Greystone Insurance most of those years because they would give her time off when she wanted it for her photography. The irony there was that the insurance they offered their own employees was not the best and when she got sick the bills were tough. But you never think you are going to get sick like that when you are young. That is the mundane, and there you are thinking of yourself aloft in a greater universe.

         She had spent nearly eight weeks in bed before she lost the baby. The complications from the birth of her second daughter Danielle at the commune in Guilford had turned out to be worse than she or Doctor Baur had realized. Even before the third trimester began she was not allowed to move more than a little and she gained weight and was terribly unhappy with herself and frowned at me fairly constantly. I had always thought her frown was cute, but, during that time, the deal did wear a little thin.

         Her daughters came to visit from school, and friends came by, but she had an enormous amount of time remaining and she used this to read all my books for the very first time. She had avoided that danger until then, afraid she would be disappointed or would not know what to say to me. But she seemed pleased then with most of them.

         I left the matter alone until, after finishing another one, she asked me, “If it’s a boy, do you want to call him Gus?”

         I said, “Sure. And if it’s a girl we’ll call her Annie.”

         She said, “Fine.”

         We were playing cards and eating Chinese food from the Ming Dynasty up the street and I said, “Or Ming. I like Ming.”

         “Ming is good.”

         “Or Bob.”

         “Bob is always good.”

         It went like that for maybe half an hour before we had hit on every name we did not want. Then she said, “But I want to call him Gus.”

         “You can’t. It’ll be a girl. A girl name Gus will have emotional problems.”

         “No more than a boy named Annie.”

         “So what would you like?”

         “Gus. It’s going to be a boy, and I want to call him Gus.”

         “How about Fergus.”

         “Gus.”

         “Gustav?”

         “Gus.”

         “How do you know it will be a boy?”

         “I can feel . . . See . . . Feel it?”

          I placed my hand upon that sacred gibbous round of flesh and could feel his kick.

         I said, “He is not happy with the name Gus.”

         She said, “He’ll get used to it.”

         Then things went wrong all at once one night. I called the ambulance and they were there it seemed as soon as I got off the phone. But it was too late.

         It was a boy.

         I called a priest from St. Saviour’s who was a regular customer of mine at the bookshop. I called him because I knew it would make my parents happy and because it would give me something to do while I waited at the hospital. Father Daniel came over before the sun was up, and he asked me if we had a name, and I told him it was Gus.

         In general though we had few health problems except when we had all the problems in the world.

         She said to me one day, “It hurts when I do this,” raising her arm to show me.

         Without thinking, I answered, “Don’t do that.”

         She thought I was making a joke of it. She frowned. There was no joke to it. None at all.

         She said, “You know what? You are a real Gus.”

         And the last time, lying there in our bed, when she spoke to me she said it again. She hadn’t the energy then to move an arm or a leg. She opened her eyes and moved a finger against the curl at the top of the blanket. The words were spoken only with her lips and a bit of air.

         “Gus . . . Are you the Doctor?”

         “I’m the Doctor.”

         A smile turned just at the corner of her mouth. A touch of window light reached her eyes.

         “I’m dubious.”

         “Glad to meet you, Miss. Dubious.”

         She wiggled her finger.

         “It hurts when I do this.”

         Her finger moved again at the top of the blanket. I found it hard to get the words from my own mouth and fumbled the simple line.

         “Then, don’t do that.”

         And then she didn’t.

         Like my father before her, my mother did not have the benefit of dying in her own bed. She had fallen one morning the week before on the icy steps in front of the house and broken her hip. My brother and I were both there at the hospital pretty quick, but that is an awkward thing, an alien place and foreign to everything we felt. The sounds are artificial. The light is unnatural. The smells are chemical. The order of things is wrong. Worse, she was drugged on something from the tube in her arm and could barely speak.

         There was one final moment, however, when I knew her and she knew me. Her eyes focused hard on the paper cup in a nurse’s hand. She wanted a cup of coffee and looked up at me for it. Just one more cup of coffee before she died.

         And then she sighed, knowing she could not.

***

50. The message was this, ‘Garcia is dead.’ Or not.

         “As I grow fat and deaf and blind and lose the whispered sounds, and move with considered effort a shorter distance in greater time, the night becomes too long to easily break for yet another day, and memory only serves despair, while laughter becomes unkind.”

         What Mr. Billington said . . .

         The doorbell rang.

         This is not common. The little button does not contact the wire if pushed directly in. It’s always been that way because my father did not like door-to-door salesmen. You have to press it a little sideways to make it work. Something very few know.

         I opened the door expecting Dave, the mailman, even though it was late in the day. He knows the secret of the button because I have begged him not to leave my rejected manuscripts out on the stoop where they might be taken for something more valuable, or rained upon. The frosted glass in the door gave me little warning of the truth beyond.

         Mary Ellen stood there, without a smile.

         But that might have simply been the shock of seeing me in a state of such decay.

         I’ve lost an inch or more. I have a paunch. I’m paler now, and between the wrinkled spottiness I have lost the black-Irish swarthy I inherited from my father and about which I was once so prideful in this town of pale faces.

         She was beautiful, of course. Women can do that, as I have said before. They can flesh out the hollows of lost youth in more appealing ways. The green of her eyes was darkened to an emerald by the shadow of evening.

         Reacting to my dumbfounded astonishment, she said first, “My brother called me and said he’d seen you at the grocery.”

         I said, “Hello.”

         I thought to kiss her, but I didn’t then. I stood back instead and let her in.

         I was reminded of a scene I wrote a few years ago—yet another that was cut from Mr. Billington Says by an editor, for some good reason, when Adelle discovers the aging bookseller within his nest of a storeroom in that year of 1798 and is shocked by the sight of him, to realize that this pitiable creature is the source of all those sayings and anecdotes she had heard from her father throughout her life which have so often guided her, and she is appalled and saddened.

         She knocked at the battered door, softly at first, for fear of the poor wood giving way beneath her fist, and then harder as she saw that it was stouter than she believed and only looking abused for lack of care.

         She heard grumblings. Someone approached across loosened boards. The door opened suddenly as if in irritation. A thin man, tall but stooped nearly to her own height, with his faced unshaved and looking as beaten as the door, stared out dumbly at her from the half-dark. His pants were held high on his hips by a length of sail-line slackly knotted at the fore, but the fabric at the knees bagged and was stained not just with ink, but clearly with some other liquid. Hopefully it was ale, she thought. His shirt was unfettered and made of a pale under-fabric and despite the warm weather, this was clearly a woolen, for it was littered with moth-made holes that showed the pink of his skin beneath.

         He blinked, “Yes, Miss?”

         “I am looking for John Billington, the bookseller and author.”

         “I am he.”

         The shock must have been apparent on her face. He turned his eyes down from hers in shame.

         She said, “My name is Adelle Brace. My father knew you at one time.”

         He appeared to nearly jump.

         “Hah! Joe Brace! We once worked the presses together for James Franklin!”

         The eyes widened and suddenly gleamed and a short quick breath was taken.

         She nodded, and bowed her own head. “He has passed, I am sorry to relate.”

         Billington shook himself once, fiercely, as if to deny the fact.

         “I am sorry to hear that. Greatly so . . . A very good fellow. Sent me a letter or three, through the years. A true friend. But the Ohio country is too far away for easy intercourse.” His eyes widened against the larger thoughts. “Pittsburgh, is it? And you be his youngest! You have five brothers I remember his telling.”

         She bowed her head again. “Only three now. There was a pox . . . a few years past.”

         Billington’s body shook again, as if physically struck by the news. “Oh!…My deepest sympathy. I know that Joseph was ever proud of you all . . . And, Betty? What of Betty?”

         He pulled another breath from the air with the effort of asking, as if the price of the knowledge would be yet another toll. But the air was not sufficient for this.

         “She nursed my brothers . . . until she was taken as well.”

         Billington’s eyes closed as his face turned up toward the narrow portion of blue sky between the eaves. A silent moment passed, and then he bowed his head in a prayer. Clearly it was a prayer he said, on silently moving lips. When she looked up again and saw the pain still on his face and a searching in his eyes behind a rim of tears, she was forced to look away and saw only then more fully what was behind him in the half dark of his refuge.

         Her thought escaped, “But what has happened to you?”

         He wiped at his face with his sleeve, waved away the horror of her words, and then shrugged.

         “Nothing…Nothing, at all. Everything has been much the same for me for many years.”

         “But what of your accomplishments? What about all that I’ve heard of you for my whole life long?”

         He stood aside as if to give her a better view of the reality.

         “Embellishments?” was the single word that finally came from his lips of a more considerable answer left unsaid.

         “All of it?”

         He shrugged. ”Nearly.”

         “But what have you truly done, then?”

         “Too little, in seems, though at the time it all appeared to be too much . . . I never went to the west, as your father and mother did.”

         The quizzical look in her eyes became distress.

         “Oh…And what do you do, now?”

         He shrugged, “I sell books, as always. A wordmonger from first to last.”

         She surveyed the odd furniture wedged between towered stacks of volumes in the small room behind him. Only one window at the far side offered any light, and that was filmy and purpled, perhaps by ancient dust, and cob webs blurred every corner. The stackings of the books in the shadows appeared to be the dark figures of people, standing back from the light of the door.

         Her hand gestured out toward the front of the small brick building. “But the shop is closed. I knocked there first. There was no answer.”

         “I must have heard you then, I think. I heard something. But I wasn’t feeling well and no one comes by on a Wednesday in any case . . . I suppose it might have been better if you had continued on your way. It appears I have disappointed you so.”

         She looked over this face again for something familiar from her father’s telling.

         “But I promised my father. He knew I would be coming. I am now to marry Mr. Robert Peake, who is from Boston, and we have returned here to his family for the ceremony.”

         A smile now revealed that the old man still had many of his teeth, but these were browned by the chewing of tobacco.

         “The son of William Peake, no doubt. Oh, a fortunate man.”

         “But he had never heard of you, and thought you likely abandoned Boston for some other region long ago. I insisted on looking. And when I saw the name above the shop window, I was sure it must have some connection.”

         ” ‘Endeavor’ was the name your father and I spoke of when we thought we might go into business together.”

         “You know it is the name he gave his own business then, back at home.”

         “Yes.”

         “What happened to your plan for a partnership?”

         The old man shrugged. “Your mother—” Then he silenced himself. He had answered too quickly, as one does when the thought is already present. This young woman looked so very much like her mother.

         Adelle had hoped for more of an answer than that, and the meaning of it only became clear as she waited on him to finish, and saw that he could not look her in the face, and realized he could say no more.

         She peeked into the half-dark again. What was clearly his bed-rack filled a corner.

         “You sleep on straw!”

         “So did the Christ, though I am not so worthy. Nevertheless, I freshen it weekly. There are no fleas and the bookworms do not bother with me.”

         “But it’s only a storeroom. Where do you eat?”

         “I have a good woodstove in the shop at the front. I keep a pot on that. It’ll burn books better than an open hearth, I’ll tell you. Handy when the kindling is short.” He paused to see if his faux admission had had any effect. When he saw the alarm in her eyes, he laughed. She clinched her teeth at him then in irritation, knowing suddenly that it was a tease. Her father was always given to the same such humor. Perhaps she should be inured to it.

         Seeing her temper, he added more to change the subject. “That particular infernal device was courtesy of our mutual friend, Ben Franklin. James’ younger brother, who sent it my way in appreciation of a little work I did for him. We all three, your father, Ben, and I were nothing but apprentices once, you see. James was our taskmaster. Ann, his wife, only a girl herself really, was a second mother to us all. It was only me who became something less . . . Ben even stopped in here once on his way to France and saw that I was trying to make use of one of his own damned iron fireplaces, smoking the place breathless, and he was stricken by guilt for what he had wrought, I suppose.” Billington paused himself against the want to reminisce. “But your father has told you about our young days together, I am sure.”

         Her eyes searched his figure once again. There was no place where the fabric of his clothes appeared pressed by the flesh beneath.

         “Yes. A hundred times! But you’re so thin! Forgive my rudeness. But what do you eat?”

         Ah, that was a tone he had not heard since . . .

         “Ah. Whatever old ox has reached his end before me. And if the butcher has no beef, I take the mutton. But well enough, I think.”

         “Your clothes . . .”

         “I do have a better shirt. I do! But there’s no sense in wearing it out when I’ll only be in, so to speak.”

         “But I thought that a man of your wisdom would surely be wealthy.”

         “But surely, I am! And now another treasure stands before me!”

         And it was clear to her that he meant this, at least.

         Reminded in an instant and then . . .

         The hall is narrow at the front there but Mary Ellen didn’t move away toward the kitchen, or into the parlor. She stood barely inside and waited for me to close the door.

         As if the thought had only just occurred, she looked suddenly up the stairwell. “Are you here alone?”

         “Yes. Well, there is a mouse or two somewhere about.”

         “How long have you been here?”

         “A while. Since last October.”

          “But you should have called me.”

         “I’ll put it on the list of things I didn’t do.”

         She was standing right there, a foot away from me. I could smell her. I recognized her breath.

         And then, without a warning, she kissed me. On the lips. And not as a friend.

         And suddenly there was nothing else for me to do just then but hold on, as if against a tide. But I could not hold her tight enough.

         In a moment, realizing that she had started to cry, I took her hand—the left hand I had not held in over forty years, a ‘soft hand . . . a woman of itself,’ as the poet Browning had once observed of his own true love, and led her back to the kitchen.

         But again she stopped and reacted suddenly, “What did you do?!”

         She turned my hand up in hers to see the bandage installed on my wrist at the clinic, too much more wadding there than was necessary for such a small wound.

         “Cutting a box to size, to ship some books to a customer. A stupid thing. An accident. It’s fine now.”

         She wiped her eyes with the back and heel of her right hand in succession, as she always used to do, and looked around herself at the room, “It’s just the same.”

         And I was thinking a similar thought, but not about the kitchen.

         I asked, “Where do you live now?”

         “Scituate. Near the high school where I teach. An easy walk, even in the rain.”

         “Alone?”

         “I have a cat.”

         “And I have the mouse.”

         That brought the first hint of a smile.

         “Have we been hiding from each other?”

         “For quite a long time, I suppose.”

         She let go of an honest sigh and finally of my hand as well. “I am sorry about your wife. I read about that.”

         There were no good words for that.

         “It feels like long ago. Another lifetime . . . And I hear that you’re divorced now. I am sorry.”

         “Who told you?”

         “Pat Bailey.”

         Mary Ellen pressed her lips together before speaking again. A familiar tic I had even recalled a few times in my writing. She chose a redirection to her examination.     

         “Why didn’t you call?”

         And I knew that was the first question she had wanted to ask when I opened the door.

         I said, “I couldn’t think of a reason you should want to see me again.”

         She gave me the tilt of her head as added comment. “Seriously?”

         “Maybe some shame.”

         “Over what?”

         “My stupidity.”

         “Hah! Time to get over that, I think.”

         A funny thought came to me then, that her smile seemed fresh, as if recently unused.

         “That’s because you aren’t as stupid as I am. The pile is not so high in front of you that you can’t see over it.”

         “Bah!” She said, dismissing that. “Make some coffee, then. I need some coffee.”

         Just the way she might have forty years ago.

         She had never had kids. I knew that too. And this was something I didn’t understand. She was made to be a mother if any woman ever was. And I had to ask about that because it seemed so absurd a loss.

         We sat at the little table there—or that is, she sat down and I followed when the coffee was made. Just as if there had been no years at all between that last distant cup and the present.

         Even after the moment between, and the chance to escape the topic, I said, “If I were to write it, I would say it was because you didn’t love him enough and you knew it.”

         She frowned but danced her head back and forth the way she does.

         “It’s the little you know. I did love him! But it was not the same. I’m not sure, but that’s the excuse, I suppose . . . And so, why didn’t you?”

         “Sarah couldn’t, or we would have.”

         “I’m sorry.”

         And because the thought had already been in mind that morning, I said, “But this is odd . . . I think about that. I think about the kids I would have had. I’ve written about them, you know. That’s how stupid I am.”

         “Yes.” She nodded a slow confirmation of the fact, avoiding my eyes for the first time.

         Another moment of silence then for the souls of those that never were.

         I said, “Your parents are still in Florida?”

         “My mother. My father passed away. Five years in August.”

         I offered my sympathy. I thought of his wasted advice to me.

         I said, “I was walking by your old house just a couple weeks ago. A fellow was sitting out on the stoop just the way your Dad used to. I stopped to talk to him. He seemed okay. But he had no idea who had lived there before. And it made me think about this place here. It’s just a shell of walls. Everything that matters was in-between. And someday someone will be sitting out front here and some old-timer will pass and ask about mom, or dad, or even Eddy or me. And the new fellow won’t have a clue.”

         She squinted at me in disapproval. “Why do you think things like that? Why does it matter? I mean, don’t you have enough to trouble your mind already, just with what’s actually happened, without thinking about what hasn’t?”

         I wondered what would be worth writing about in that case, but I didn’t say it.

         “Just looking for perspective, I guess. Remembering the future. Just a writer’s habit.”

         She frowned. “I haven’t seen anything new with your name on it lately. Why is that? Have you stopped writing?”

         I was caught flat-footed by the question.

         “Ah! No. I write every morning. My friend Don was just here, fixing up my machine. I haven’t been able to get much published though. Not much in the last six or seven years or so.”

         “Why?”

         “Why? Probably a hundred answers to that question. You don’t want to get me started on that.”

         “I read there was a lawsuit.”

         “Which one? Probably you mean the one with my publisher—my former publisher—they rejected the manuscript that was part of my last contract and wanted the advance back. I said something nasty about them in print. But because the truth is no longer a sufficient defense in court, they sued me.”

         “But you won that verdict, I thought.”

         “Pyrrhic! The lawyer cost more than the advance. But you must’ve been following my downfall then?”

         “Just what’s in the Globe, now and again. And what about all of your other books?”

         “What do you mean?”

         “You can’t get them new anywhere. Shouldn’t they reprint them? And there aren’t many second-hand bookshops around the way it used to be.”

         “All out of print. But you can get old copies of most of them online now for a buck or two, I think.”

         “Mostly just The Endeavor of Jim. Everyone always has The Endeavor of Jim. I like it too, of course. But my favorite is The Keeper of the Dead. And that’s not anywhere except in ratty old ex-library copies I can’t be giving to anyone else.”

         She did know what I was about, then.

         “Why that one? It’s such a sad tale. Just a little mystery.”

         Her shoulders went up and down. A shrug at the very reason for my question, perhaps. Shouldn’t I know why?

         “Because mystery is what life is, like you’ve said. And I understood the characters in it the best, I think. And I liked Julietta best of all. I understand it’s only a fiction. But I thought, when I read it, that you might even have been writing about me. Because I understood her so well.”

         “Julietta . . .”

         I had actually written it about our old teacher, Hildred Lawrence, of course. I thought I had captured the woman I had known, very well. And Mary Ellen had known her too, but didn’t see that on the page at all. She had seen herself instead. She had likely seen herself in that one particular characteristic of constancy, perhaps, that I had worked hard to give Julietta—that fact that she would never give up on anyone—had never given up on any of her students, or on me—and from there, all was transformed.

         Mary Ellen was now concerned, as if I had told her I was sick, and that particular look of care on her face had also never changed.

         “But why don’t you at least put them online then? Why don’t you republish them all on your website so that people can get them there at least?”

         I said, “And give in to the enemy, you mean?”

         “What enemy?”

         “The book killers. Books are dying, you know.”

         “They’re changing. I thought it was the stories you wanted to tell. Does it matter where they’re told?”

         “Hah! That’s a question! My old friend Don’s question as well. That’s what he thinks I should do.”

         This matter was larger than the moment would allow. I didn’t want to be arguing with her about a topic that I’d already written a hundred thousand words over and clearly lost my case.

         She half-smiled and likely compromised her own thought. “I gave you a book the very last time I saw you. Do you remember?”

         “Christmas, 1967. It was a book of poems by Thomas Hardy. I still have it . . . But I always wondered why you chose that one.”

         She shrugged, “You told me you liked Hardy. You said you liked his descriptions of things.”

         “I meant his novels. I’d never read his poetry until then. And you already knew I loved a dozen other authors more. Why that?”

         “Because there was a poem in there. The one on the page where I left the bookmark . . . ”

         I had not noticed that. Just one more thing missed. I shook my head at another loss.

         She wet her lips and sat up straight for her recitation.

         “It was written in 1867 and to a girl he was in love with and the poem was called 1967. I suppose it must have been the date that caught my eye…In five-score summers! All new eyes, / New minds, new modes, new fools, new wise; / New woes to weep, new joys to prize; / With nothing left of me and you / In that live century’s vivid view / Beyond a pinch of dust or two; A century which, if not sublime, / Will show, I doubt not, at its prime, / A scope above this blinkered time. /—Yet what to me how far above? For I would only ask thereof / That thy worm should be my worm, Love!”

         I was a stunned. What to say to something as wholly missed as that. I even thought to make one of my favorite old jokes from high school history class concerning the oddly named, Diet of Worms.

         Stupidly I said, “The English have a way with romance, don’t they?” But my

tone gave that away.

         She said, “I don’t know. It seemed romantic to me.” She looked away. “But I guess the point of it, at the time, was lost in any case.”

         But it was not lost now, in this later century.

         What other clue had I missed? I said, “I have a mystery. Tell me this. It’s something I’ve wondered about. One of those things that didn’t happen and that I probably never should have even thought about at all, I suppose, because I had no right to. But I have thought it, a couple of thousand times or so.”

         “I like mysteries. I like your mysteries. You should write more of them.”

         “This is different . . . what I wondered was this: what would have happened if I had married you?” To her credit, her face did not react at all to that. She waited for the other shoe. “And then I wondered why you had finally given up on me . . . I certainly would have given up on me, in your place. But I would’ve done it sooner—long before you ever did. You were never a quitter, either. And yet still, after all, you finally did, and I’ve often wondered exactly why. What was it that I’d finally done that did me in, for you?”

         Still, she was revealing nothing with those green eyes of hers, other than a complete attention to what I was saying.

         Ever the good teacher, she said, “Why do you think?”

         And I suddenly felt like her pupil. I imagined this was the face she offered any rude student who asked impertinent questions. I couldn’t help but laugh out loud at that.

         But the laugh felt hollow.

         I said, “You’ve always been a Jesuit at heart. You answer a question with a question. Maybe you should’ve been a lawyer instead.”

         She narrowed her eyes just a little. “It’s a habit that works well in the classroom too. But I’ll tell you, if first you tell me what you think the reason was.”

         I shrugged too quickly. “I don’t know. That’s why it’s a mystery to me. I tried to write about it once or twice, but never got it so it felt right.” Her eyes did not offer any allowance for my deferral. I tried harder, “I still don’t know. I was hopeless then, I knew that much. But I think I would have broken down, eventually. I was always on the verge of surrender.”

         She slowly shook her head at me then, for more than all the hopelessness I had already admitted to. For a lifetime of it, perhaps.

         She said, “It was in The Stolon. What you wrote there. The dedication you wrote to Trudy. You’d lied to me about her. You said you weren’t sleeping with her. I know that was none of my business, but you said you weren’t, and I wanted that to be true. I wanted you to be true . . . to me. . . And I suppose I wanted to be the only one. Your muse. It just hurt too much after that.”

         I hadn’t expected this. I had never imagined such a thing. I might have gaped with the astonishment of it.

         “But I wasn’t sleeping with her. I never did.”

         She has a flare of her eyes she always reserved for true revelations. That flash of green is worthy of a tornado, I thought.

         She said, “What about what you wrote in the dedication?”

         “That was because I couldn’t have written it without her. Trudy was my only audience, then. She was there when I wrote it and she listened. She used to come over and read the parts I’d written and she had a very clear eye about things and people. She always cut matters down to size. In another life she would have been a great editor, I’ll bet.”

         Mary Ellen crooks her jaw to one side when she’s thinking. The kind of habit that looks too deliberate, but she’s always done it. She did that and then stared at me eye to eye.

         “Angus! You lie about everything, all the time! You make things up! I just thought it had to be true, because the character in the book slept with her. And then you dedicated the book to her.”

         I had no defense against that. “It was what I imagined it would have been like. That’s all. It was part of the story. Both characters were trying to break with the past. In opposite ways. That’s all . . . That was just the story.”

         Her turn for the gobsmack then.

         “Damn!”

She said it loudly, but almost as an observation rather than a curse.

         And there was no expecting this for me.

         I had to say the thought out loud, “So you are telling me it was a misunderstanding that made you quit on me? Our two lives were lived so differently because of a misunderstanding?”

         But she did not answer that. I think she was still trying to grasp the idea that what I said was true. But I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. What I said then was not a word. It was not an expression of disbelief, or anger, or pain. It was a “Hah!” the way you feel when you see a good joke pulled off, or an unexpected magic trick. It was realization.

         She said, “Hah! yourself!”

         But didn’t that seem appropriate, somehow. It seems too much like my just reward for trying to do what I did—whatever that was I was trying to do. I’ve spent so much of myself trying to re-explain things and understand them a little better. Trying to re-imagine how things should be or how they should have been. All that time, while my own life was merely a misunderstanding. And hers—I was out of steam now.

         I said aloud, all that I had left in me to say, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I hurt you so carelessly.”

         The green at her eyes took on the light of the room again. Her tone was sharp and the words quick.

         “I am not a character in one of your books, Angus McGuire! You did not manipulate me into some role or another. I did what I did! And what I didn’t, that’s my own doing too!”

         Oddly, I heard more of the character I had given to Trudy in the obstinance of those words; even more, I suppose, than might have been spoken by that young woman I so briefly knew so long ago, or even than she might actually have ever been able to say.

         I could only apologize again. “True enough. I didn’t mean it to sound that way. I only know what I know.” And then the stupid afterthought. “But in the end, if I had done what was expected of me back then, would there have been any other stories for me to tell?”

         It was not a fair question. She caught that.

         “No, Angus. No!” She sat up straight then with the outrageousness of the logic. “They would have been different stories. That’s all!”

         I could only nod and catch my breath as she looked back at me. She was so clearly right about that and more. And there was anguish there, in her eyes. And I had never meant for that to be. Ever. But there it was.

         ‘For I would only ask thereof / That thy worm should be my worm, Love!’ An English affectation of affection, or not. She had truly meant that once! And again, in that one instant, the way it has happened to me so many times before, I knew another story that I’d like to tell. But not one to write.

         I said, “Then, tell us this, Mary Ellen Radziute. I should have married you forty and some odd years ago, and I screwed that up. And I missed the six or seven kids. I missed them dearly—just how much, there is no telling—and all the years with them in between . . . Hell, I lost a deal of stuff there, didn’t I? I squandered more than I have any idea about, I guess. And there’s not a whole lot of me left now, one way or the other. I can’t start over, and there’s certainly no going back for anything. All the baggage on that train has left the station, as far as I can see . . . And I must admit there’s really no apology in this because I’m still not smart enough to know what the hell I did wrong. Maybe I just can’t accept the idea that I’m going to end up like a character in one of those stupid French movies from the 1960’s, without a resolution . . . Maybe. But, too late or not, what there is of me—the part that’s left of me I mean—my still breathing corpse of mortal remains, so to speak, and all that you see here in any case, wants to do now what I should have done back at the very beginning . . . I want to marry you, Mary Ellen Radziute. Now. After all of it, and after all of it that never happened, and all that has come between . . . Tell us, Mary Ellen Radziute, will you marry me?”

 ***

51. Cenotaph: an afterword without remains

         He had flirted with her among the sweaters and scarves. She had moved away from him each time he had meandered in her direction . . . No. That was the second day.

         The first day he had said nothing. Being there for only the last moments of his lunch break, just after catching sight of her from through to widow in passing. He had pretended to look at some gloves but had watched her for all of that short while. Looking dumb she thought. Dumbstruck, he later admitted. She had felt his eyes even with her back turned, helping someone else. She did not approach him then. She had never been able to trust her voice in such situations and knew it was better to say nothing.

         He had been home then from the service for less than a month. His limp was still sharp at every step. His job was across the street at Kennedy’s department store, in the shipping room and he began coming over as soon as he was free and spent each day there among the scarves and sweaters and gloves—until he was fired.

         He had almost gotten her fired as well. Her manager had noticed him hanging around and spoken to her about it. That was the third day. He had bought a pair of gloves that day, trying them on so that even the manager might see from his high counter. On the fourth day it was a scarf. A thick green scarf with cable stitches of yellow that he had worn every winter after that until the yarn had come undone at one end and she had then put that away.

         On the fifth day he had wandered deliberately, in careful deliberation, among the stacks of red and green and blue and yellow and white, stopping at each and running his thumb on his chin like he had seen them do in a Shakespeare play. He had seen the Merchant of Venice once while on leave in Belfast. The only Shakespeare he had ever sat through, and regretted even that much aloud on numerous occasions thereafter.

         His patience was clearly great, and this had impressed her more than his looks. He was a rough looking sort of fellow. Tall and big boned. A little fearsome, except when he smiled. He had barely grinned, and played peekaboo among the stacks on that fifth day, and made her smile first, and then he had fully and finally smiled as well.

         On the sixth day he was there early. There was no shipping to do at Kennedy’s on that Saturday and he was free and arrived just after nine.

         She had spoken to him several times by then—to box the gloves he had bought and wrap the scarf. She knew his voice because it was already in her head. And he had arrived early on the sixth day and come up behind as she refolded a display. She had just been thinking about him as she folded, and was chastising herself for letting him continue to come by. As much as she liked the attention, she had to discourage it. He should know now that she was committed to someone else.

         He said, “What do you think of this?”

         She spun with the surprise of his words. He was holding a ladies’ pink cardigan up and modeling it against himself. She laughed involuntarily.

         “If she likes pink, it should do. But you might need a larger size.”

         “The size is perfect I think. But about the color, I don’t know.”

         “You’d better ask her.”

         An eyebrow raised.

         “Well . . . do you?”

         She certainly was not smiling then.

         “No! . . . No.”  She blushed. She would do that on the rare occasion. “I should tell you right now. I have a boyfriend. He’s a pilot. And he’ll be coming home soon.”

         No reaction. No flinch. He always had that way about him that could not be moved except as he wanted.

         “That’s fine, then…He’s a lucky fellow. But tell me anyway. What color do you like?”

         Why she had answered, she never knew. Never understood.

         “No . . . I like the red.”

         He had been fired from his own job the next work day, the Monday. The sweater had arrived for her there at work on Tuesday, already boxed and wrapped, and mailed from the main post office only a few blocks away. But, told of her commitment to the pilot, he had not come again.

         And then, the next time he had seen her was purely accidental; at the VFW dance in Quincy, where she’d been taken by a girlfriend to volunteer out of respect for her lost pilot.

         Each year on Christmas Day my mother wore that red cardigan sweater with the green yoke close at the neck. Only at Christmas, and then put away again, just as it had been. I had taken it myself from the drawers beneath the winding stair to the floor above. More than a few of the mothballs scattered like marbles as I held it up. It was beneath those same drawers that she had hidden the letters from her lost pilot. I gave my father’s scarf to a neighbor to repair and then put it together with bag of woolens for donation.

         This was found on a gravestone, and written down, but the place unnoted by your flawed reporter:

         “Stop Traveller! Reflect on the sudden exit of Enoch Noyes, son of Benjamin Noyes and Mary Noyes, in the Vigour of Life. He fell and instantly expired, April 2, 1810, aged 11 years.”

         By the look of the penciled script on the lined sheet of loose leaf, I must have discovered this epitaph sometime when I was close to the age of that boy. I know for certain, however, that it made me wonder then what the life of his was that had never been. New England graveyards are filled with such past misery and unlived history.

         It brings to mind another event of the sort.

         The story went like this.

         When they were tearing down the husk of a house after a fire in South Boston, they found human remains in the basement. The police were called in. The cop cars were thick on the narrow bow of Emerson Street and there was no getting through, even for a kid on foot. Not for many hours. Ambulances came to take the bones away. The WBZ radio traffic helicopter hovered above. The discovery lead the television news early that evening, with speculations of a serial killer and the picture of old Mr. Kiely, who had lived there in the house by himself for over thirty years after his wife died, and they even reported doubts about his wife’s cause of death (which was pneumonia).

         But we already knew what the story was, and I had peddled that truer tale widely amidst the onlookers and even pestered a couple of the cops with it myself. They just would not listen to us. We were kids. They told me to keep away.

         I remember my father laughing too loudly at the report on the news, something he seldom watched, but had turned on especially for the occasion when he heard the circling helicopter.

         “That’s the news?” He said, loud with disbelief over what he had just heard. “That Ed Kiely could have been a serial killer? Not likely!”

         I had just come in from all the commotion myself, when I was surprised to see him sitting there in the parlor. I suppose I was the only other person in the house, because he had spoken out as if he wanted the neighbors to hear.

         I said, “That’s stupid!”

         He said, “Now, that’s the truth!”

         I said, “It was Mr. Kiely himself told me they had all died from typhus.”

         My father turned on me then like I had slapped the side of his head.

         “What?”

         I told him what I knew. “Mr. Kiely told me they had all died from ‘the typhus.’ It’s what he called it. ‘The typhus.”

         “When was this?”

         “A couple of years ago.”

         “No. When did they die?”

         “He said it was a long time ago. The Hawes cemetery wouldn’t take them because they were all Catholics and not the right religion. And so they just dug a hole in some unclaimed land outside the gate and buried them there. A whole shipload. Even though he’s a block away from the cemetery now, he told me his house was built right on top of it.” 

         My father’s mouth was wide open, enough so that I could see the glint of gold on his back molars. He just stared at me. I was stunned into silence myself by his appearance. But he was just then probably remembering a scrap of something that he had heard himself, long ago, and forgotten. Without another word, he slipped on his jacket and went out and down the street to where the cop cars still blocked the way and the lights made day of the night. The mistake was caught soon enough that it didn’t even make it to the eleven o’clock news or the morning paper, but there was a nice little story about it all retold in the Globe on the following Sunday. They even had the names of the many victims who had been forced to wait in misery together aboard a ship in the harbor until their end. That was in December of 1822, I think. The event had all been preserved in a Captain’s log and this was at the maritime museum in Salem. So it was only the television and radio news that had been too quick and gotten caught with their pants down and pens out.

         Mr. Kiely was on my paper route and I had often spoken with him. He was not chatty but always willing to answer my questions. And I always had them. And he would hesitate as he paid his bill for the week, counting out quarters into my hand one at a time as he gave me my chance to speak. I was already concerned with my mortality by then, at the age of ten, and questioned him once whether it bothered him to be living so close to an old cemetery—as it did me, just to pass it by.

         “Not a bit,” he said. “I have a dozen or more right here in the basement. All poor Catholics they wouldn’t let through those Protestant gates.”

         I must have looked astonished. With one stiff hand he rubbed the mottle of beard on his cheeks so hard I could hear the four days grizzled growth (always four days’ worth because it was a Thursday that I collected and he only shaved for church on Sunday). “It’s my privilege to be their keeper now, I guess. But I can’t take credit for that. I got the house on the cheap because of it. The previous owner was keeping the secret for fear he wouldn’t be able to sell.”

         That ossuary of forgotten lives was finally moved away to a better place those years ago now. Once re-found, it was at least re-known, at least to me, and at the very least, the bones of that ancient story could be retold. I wrote about it later, on several occasions. Merely one incident behind others, closer in time. But because I knew none of those people, I felt at loss for sufficient facts to simply pretend their lives. It’s one thing to extrapolate, enlarge upon, and fabricate a circumstance between any two solid posts of fact, and then to lie down in the hammock of a story there strung between, as in a dream. (It’s quite another to fondle the bones alone.)

         That’s one excuse.

         The other is that the thought of those bones haunted me just a little. It chilled me as I passed in the winter dark of an evening with my canvas sack stuffed with newspapers and slung across my shoulder. I can remember grabbing up the bottom of that sack so that I could run if necessary. And then again later, without actually seeing any of the bodies closer than a small dark plastic bag in a policeman’s hands, thirty yards away. It was the idea of them, and that they were so forgotten. Men, women and children all.

         That is more likely the nature of my own haunt. Fear of being forgotten. And just as likely, it is the simpler reason behind my desire to write everything down from those days onward. All the rest might balance upon that one anxiety. All that I’ve done might just be the conjured excuses of my vanity and stupidity built over an ossuary of memory beneath.

         But what then of Januarius Aloysius MacGahan? Had he not earned my time? And what of the letters he might have written to the Barbara Varvara Nikolaevna Elagina? And she to him? After his death, she had gone to New York with their son, you know, and settled there, and become a reporter as well, and written on her own there, alone, and seven thousand miles from home. Imagine that! That was a story worth telling. And who else is there to tell it, I suppose, but me?

         I imagine, over time, that patterns begin to emerge in lives, much as they might in books. Years ago, after writing eight or ten novels, I finally noticed something of this. But to my surprise, I also confirmed an oddity from my notes. The stories I wrote never turned out the way I had supposed they should at the start. And this seemed especially curious because I so often used characters based on the actual people I have known, or thought I knew. In the first place, you might think it would be obvious what would or could become of these same characters, given a new situation, especially because a particular knowledge of them was often the very spark that made me cast them in a particular role of a story. But, in the end, the players themselves more often determined their own way of dealing with the problems I’d given them, and no amount of plotting otherwise would bring them around to what I had tried previously to intend.

         Age has not aided my abilities. The opposite is true. Perhaps I am given now to memories more sun-bleached, mostly vague in mind now for being color faded and without the recollection of what came just before or followed immediately thereafter. Details are often unfocused as I see them these days. Even when bifocaled. Yet they are often chilling, just for still being remembered, reoccurring now unbidden to define yet again some unfair branding of guilt, a happiness, or battle lost. The happiness can be sadder now, in hindsight, than ever was the sadness then. I did not appreciate the fullness of this truth at the time and wish I had those times back to live again.

         At some point you come closer to understanding that your greatest enemy is yourself. Not cold, or hunger, or noise, or stink. Not someone else, or something else. Not your physical infirmities, whatever they may be. Not even your stupidity which you had thought was the very matter before—but just yourself—just the self that you are, which is not the chemical composition of the body you inhabit but more simply the life that is in you, and, against the laws of physics, simultaneously inhabits the same physical frame, because life is not a law of science, but an art. Blame one or all of those other things if you want, and you will hear the false note in your voice and feel the embarrassment of what you have become, if only for that instant.

         You are your own worst enemy. You defeat yourself. You define the limit you cannot reach. You reach for the lesser goal instead. You pretend that what is not good, is okay. You accept what is bad as sufficient. And as you die, usually a wither and not a more merciful sudden end, you get to see this desiccation in the mirror, of what is left of your mind. The truth spills out in front of you like the blood from an artery opened at the sink.

         And in that moment, you may ask yourself why you did not try harder? Too late! With no answer at the last, anymore than there was at the first . . . When, in fact, even now you might wrap your arm tight in the dish-towel, and tell them at the clinic that you were cutting something else and the damned knife slipped, and just by the effort of giving it another try you could make it all new again . . . You might. Not fresh perhaps, but refurbished (the way they do it at the factory, so clean you can hardly tell). And the night would smell as sweet, or not, and the pale rose flesh of dawn would hush all fears, or not, and then the sun might warm your cheek one more time, or the rain run in tears on the window glass in prisms for you to see it all through again. All for the good, of course, because no matter how stupid you are, this one more time, and you might do a better job of it.

***

 52.  Till gravity gets the best of me: a future remembered

         I have been a sort of colporteur. A peddler of words. A hawker of stories. And still, I write my own—having my cake and eating it. True. And asking for a cup of coffee, please.

         One more.

         The story goes that in that time of . . . the present. Our time. Today. It came to pass that another of the small gods should die. As all gods do, in time, when the faith in them is lost even to memory at last. Immortality is only a temporary thing, after all—quite temporal—there being no word for what is simply not there, nor any words necessary. Only that which is present would need a name, and then only so long as there is a mortal want of it. And as those who cannot recall the past are condemned to repeat it, those who do not remember the future are simply condemned.

         In this time of ours it was understood that Oengus was the one. He who was perhaps the last of his kin to survive the forgetting (which is always at the other end of the begetting, you see, as the head is from the ass) and in his particular case, only because someone, it seems, had forgotten to forget him. He had been overlooked since the passing of his mother, the beautiful Boann who was Eithne, and his father Echu Ollathir the Good, who was Dagda of Tuatha De Danann, though, before all that, it appears Oengus had been remembered well enough. And perhaps that was too because he was a late arrival to the clan, and his provenance uncertain. (There was talk, you see.)

         Oengus was known by the shanachie and thus to the Book of Leinster. (You must know by now that it’s not only the mortal who recalls the printed legend, but the legend too that recalls the mortal.) And also to Yeats. Yeats it was, perhaps, who kept him in the minds of some after so many of the others were gone. That, and also too the continuing presence of the black cattle that had been taken in the Tain Bo Cuailng, which is better known as the Cattle Raid of Cooley (and a stock much prized now by the near-foreign clan McDonald of the golden arch).

         But the question was at this time understood by all, and Oengus too, that a final someone was at last near forgetting him as well.

         Oengus, who had been conceived in the curiosity of his father and his mother, and thus was possessed of that one trait above any other, was curious then to know who this was who was the last to remember him, and before his final time was due, he set out to find that mortal and ask just how it was, and why, that last memory of him was being lost.

         Wide and far he searched. Low and high. Yon and hither. (As he had always been a backward sort.) And everywhere he went he asked. But no one else remembered. Until the very last.

         Caer Ibormeith was her name. And he had known her. More than once.

         She lived alone now by the lake that had been her home for many years. And Oengus found her there, sitting in a sapling chair fashioned with handspun twine and cut out of the new growth from beneath a great copper beech. The leaves yet clung to the smooth-skinned switches and offered her the chance of modesty, for she was still beautiful. But they were of no use. He knew her face, and each part between the leaves, and remembered. He had expected that she might appear to be a crone, as old as she was—or even as old as he. What he saw, instead, sitting in her hand-made chair beside the sky-watered lake, was only what he had once known—but with this one addition. Her hair had grown long and turned to silver white. And the rich gleam of it beneath a mere yellow sun made him turn away. In shame.

         Greeting him, she said, “I have been waiting. I had nearly lost hope.”

         He made his only excuse, “I had meant to come before.”

         And she had smiled at that. “It’s not your way. You were not yet done.”

         “But I am home now, at least, till gravity gets the best of me.”

         And so it was, in the years to come, at dusk or dawn, two swans may be seen upon that very lake, by some. To a rare delight.

         You know, perhaps, the greater irony—the greatest irony of all to those of us trapped in this age of brass, our video age of faux myth…It is Amerigo Vespucci. I wrote a book about that too. Unpublished, but not unwanted. Friends liked it.

         Most of the greatest adventurers are never known. Their galavanting goes unremarked; their last words are left unrecorded, and their ships, torn asunder and lost in storms against unknown shores, leave only battered remains to be eaten by sharks or angry natives, or mere ants. There is no movie made. No wikipedia page. No letters were ever written to be saved…Still, words of despair were spoken, from the lips those left behind—mothers and daughters, wives and lovers—quiet prayers to gods unknown, to mix with the whisper of the flames in the hearth.

         But, a banker from Florence, recently resettled in Spain for some financial advantage, and familiar there with the financing of such explorers, and thus their tales, confabulated his own imagination with the adventures of braver men, and wrote several letters about his notional  participation. That stolen valor seems to have helped his reputation with investors. (And that was the way that my novel was written: as an epistolary with guns.)

         You can imagine him in a high oak chair, there in Seville, beneath the fingers of candle light, reading accounts of survivors—for all who returned then from these earliest voyages were only survivors—first looking toward a stone framed window for relief from his drudgery, weary eyes found his inkpot and quill. Counting his maravedí, and inventing his Mundus Novus, as new thoughts occurred, writing letters was merely a clever attempt to gain confidence for his business dealings.

         The discovery of the new world was in all the papers at the time—on the radio and on everybody’s lips—but there was yet no radio to tell the lies, and no newspapers. Only letters. And we know he wrote a few of those. Or someone did on his behalf. And here he was, counting his coins. Adding his ancient solidi, and subtracting his foreign denier.

         Just a few letters. After all. He was just reimagining that he had tagged along. Had been there. Done that. Why should they get all the glory when it was men like him, tied to desks and matters of consequence, who financed it all. At great risk, I might add, in those times of Inquisition. And he had only taken the liberty of making a few assumptions about that uncertain geography. Based, of course, on the latest rumors.

         But his accounts, those letters, were read by others…and given the times, fell into the hands of a map maker in need of financial support, and, maps being the primary guide to these events, what do you know, that whole new world was named after the banker…A whole new world!

         No better, myself, what I have voyaged upon was only a ship of words. My own myth-calculation. But there is, in truth, such a myth to each of our lives, for which the story goes unrecorded—or at least without print—perhaps only texted now from one to another. A story peopled by minor gods of lesser note, some remembered only for the instant of their passing, a human lifetime or two, and then gone to grace, or hell, without a trace.

         In that moment, as the story goes, they exercised all of the joy and misery that was theirs to know. They could strut and laugh, weep and regret. They could love and hate. They could wish and dream. They might reach for thrones, only to grapple thorns and fall and rise with the tide of their time. There is little difference in these stories, I think, from those you’ve read about in books. And little more to know.

—30—

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         And then, one day, you wake up and see a sky so blue you are breathless. What do you say to that? Well, then you talk about yesterday, or perhaps that time once when you were a kid.

         The important part of this disquisition is that we lie to tell the truth. We do that every day. It is habit. It is expected. We interpret what is said to us in ways that recreate a truth to fit our own view of things, or describes what we think the listener wants to hear. We elaborate detail, or not, depending on what we want to say. But we seldom say, the sky is blue. Not since we were very young. And when we do, it is because we are impatient to move on to some more important mater—meanwhile we have missed the greatest event of the day, when the sky was blue. What a joy that was. What a feeling it made in us.

         We learn to lie to tell the truth. We are all unreliable narrators in our own lives. It is only moments later, after we have filtered an experience with nouns and verbs and adjectives and adverbs, that we try to explain what was right in front of our senses.

         Now, this is not saying that all truth is lost. No at all. It is saying that our engagement with the universe that surrounds us is subjective. It must be, in order for us to survive. It is saying that society is the intersection of hundreds or thousands or millions of subjective interpretations. And that is what is true. Not some achromatic designation. A machine might give that a number, but it is useless for any human interpretation. The achromatic number given to a ‘plain’ blue, by a machine is not the color you see. The machine cannot see. It can only match. You do, however, have that sense and can designate whatever number or name you wish to what that machine can only grade from what it was once programmed to label by yet another single human being.

         Our success as human beings is directly related to our ability to lie. That, if we live alone, is how we interpret what we see or hear or feel, and is far different than if we live with someone else. And that is different than it would be if we lived with four or five, or a dozen…I can’t imagine what it would be like to live with a dozen. A small family is enough confusion. Just walking on a city street gives me a social vertigo. A sort of agoraphobia. I might be more disagreeable than I normally am, or affable, depending on the weather. If the sky is blue, I might even be dumbstruck. Gobsmacked is the current word in use. But it is just possible, for some brief moment, I would not lie.

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         I am not glib enough. But I have aged beyond the easy answers of my youth. I know now that the tendency today to fixate on simplistic concepts without contemplation results in a sort of brutalism of thought.

         The ready architecture of human society has evolved into boxes, a few spheres, and a pointy triangle or two. Perhaps this was inspiring in a prior age when everything was derivative of a more baroque past, but obviously now, this is more useful for machines than human beings. (Using my architecture simile I imagine Frank Lloyd Wright turning in his grave. He was not happy with all this geometry of the human soul business himself, but he has been used as an icon of modern architecture more as a way of dismissing him. In fact, he was not on board at all. But he did contemplate his role in this disaster.)

         Much of human philosophy has gone this way of the machine as well. As if science is all in the numbers. It is not. There is no AI that will ever understand love. Any concept derived by AI will be, by necessity, inherently replicable. Brutalism will endure and the grace of Palladio will be reduced to picture books. Grace is not a concept that fits well with the digital mind.

        I worry about my children. And their children, whom I now know. The sterility of the world they face will be little relieved by hiking and camping in proscribed spaces. I would like them to have an awareness of nature beyond the trodden boundaries of a State park. I would like them to be able to think beyond the political correctness of our age.

         There was a time when Thoreau roamed the earth. This was after the dinosaurs had far exceeded the short human term of which we are presently a part. It does not appear at the moment that we will be anywhere near as successful a species. But the dinosaurs had a better excuse for their final demise. The meteors were not their doing. We human beings appear to be determined to wipe ourselves out by our own hand.

         Even our fears are false. That is my greatest concern. We fixate on political outcomes that can only be determined by authoritarian control. This will not end well.

         Thoreau was not my hero when I was young. I looked to others for philosophical inspiration. But I now appreciate the lack of guidelines Thoreau offered. He was not telling anyone else ‘how to do it.’ He was appreciating the awareness that something must be done, and living it himself. Importantly, he lived in a world where he might roam.

         I was recently on Cape Code, staying in an old inn which had once been a farm. There are still such places. And the vernacular beauty of things made by the daily need of human being—that is the being of people living by their own sense of life—was all about me. A Roxbury apple tree was dropping its bounty on my head. A fat ancient pear tree, having lived long, prospered, and perfumed the air. A cherry tree still survived despite some terrible disaster that I do not know more about, but Concord grapes grew in a natural arbor into its branches. More than a ghost of the old farm was still there, and made me think about what the place must have been like when Thoreau passed by. I felt privileged to stay there—a total opposite feeling to what you might experience at a local motel.

         The making of life, and the making of a life, must be carried on without artificial dictate, obeying the laws of nature as well as of man. If the laws contradict nature, that is a problem we can solve. If nature contradicts our laws, we have a serious problem. And much of this that I refer to is in human nature. I do not presume to fully know or understand nature. I simply want and seek the ability to try to comprehend it.

         We are fast reducing our options. Though I sharply disagree with him concerning artificial intelligence, Elon Musk understands this from at least one perspective. The human race is fragile. He wants to go to Mars. The doom of the dinosaur must be avoided. But I think the ‘Mars option’ will not be realized if we human beings forget or ignore our origins and our own nature.

         We are greedy, and generous. We are stupid, and brilliant. Our ignorance always exceeds our grasp, but we must be able to grasp, or else we decay. There must be room to roam, but also to build a cabin in the woods. Given the chance, someone will find a way. If such freedom is barred, our species will fail.

         Benjamin Franklin’s political saw applies, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” That wisdom in a world of wonders must be remembered and recalled every time we hear the dictate of political answers to human questions. Now, with artificial answers being generated for artificial problems that supersede our human endeavors, we have a new problem. And that is not forgetting about the old ones.

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***

1.

         With his first mug of coffee in hand, James Franklin opened the door to look out toward the lake, as he would on almost any morning, even in bad weather. He took a breath, as if it were his very first breath, and savored that a bit longer against the simple pleasure of the view. But there in the dancing glint off the water he noticed something else and pushed the screen door open then as well, and stood at the edge of the porch. It was a beautiful morning. The air was cool and almost sharp. The blue of the sky nearly joined the lake in the tree shadows at the far end—but closer, where the shatter of the early sun caught the water, there was something else. This was on his own dock. It was a dark figure of person where none should be. The kids would not be visiting again for a week.

         Still holding his mug, he walked down the steps and then onto the grassy slope where he had just spread woodchips to cover the bear spots a few days before. The hard edges of the woodchips bit at his bare feet. The cool of the morning brushed his legs. Not expecting to be going out so soon, he had only pulled on his shorts.

         His coffee sloshed in the mug and he took a larger sip to reduce the loss.

         Whoever it was sitting there on the milk crate, was fishing. It was a boy. The pole in his hand was bamboo. And he did not seem to hear Franklin’s approach.

         “Hello?”

         The boy turned. “Hello!”

         “Who are you? I might ask.”

         “I’m Jack.”

         “Ah…And where are you from?”

         “Over there.” The boy flicked his hand to the south but did not raise his pole.

         “The neighbors?”

         “No. Beyond.”

         “Why are you fishing here?”

         “Because you have the best place on the lake. The shore drops off faster here.”

         “It does. And it is. But this is private property, you know that, don’t you?”

         “I know. I was hoping you would come out and talk to me like this so that I could ask if it was okay. I am sorry if I’m bothering you. Coming around to the driveway is a long walk. And you usually come down in the morning and swim. I thought I would be able to ask you then.” There was no attempt to look pitiable. “Can I fish here? You don’t do it so often now, yourself.”

         That was a fact. Those were all facts. The boy knew that much.

         He was barefoot, as well, and in shorts and a loose shirt, and with his dark hair, fully looked the part James Franklin would play if he were that young again.

         “Yes. It’s okay…Maybe I’ll even join you!”

         Franklin was suddenly inspired by the idea, turned too fast, sloshing more of his coffee, and walked back quickly to the house, dancing a little as he went on the chips, grabbed his tackle box and rod, and another milk crate from beside the porch and came back within minutes. But the boy was gone.

         Franklin fished then anyway, by himself, as usual. As the boy had said, he had not been out recently. He wasn’t sure why. But he chalked that up to a simple word that he didn’t like to use, ‘loneliness,’ or at least didn’t like to admit to, but that was probably the matter. That, and to the wheel of thoughts that came around again and again. In fact, he was a very lucky fellow. How could he be as unhappy as he was?

         The wheel of thoughts came through and stopped there, and he ignored it as much as he could, whistling imitatively at some loons to get their attention instead, but they ignored him in turn with their own fishing to do. He fished until he was too hungry to ignore it and had two brook trout on his line and then went back up to the cabin. Those he cleaned up, and fried with corn meal in some fresh lard. He couldn’t eat two but he would save the second one for dinner. And he still had a few biscuits from the day before.

         The coffee was still hot, if not as sweet. He was a very lucky fellow, indeed

         The boy’s words played at the edges of his brain when he napped. ‘Because you have the best place on the lake. The shore drops off faster here.’

         That was the very reason why he had first gone into debt to buy what he could. The old estate, over 800 acres, had been auctioned in 1973, but he already knew it then. So he had borrowed from anyone who would listen. $24,000, for the best sixty acre parcel! He had borrowed $30,000 and it had taken him five years to pay it back. Two jobs and five years. And the thought of ever losing it had plagued him ever since.

         His father had rented a house—a double wide trailer really—near the beach at the other end, for two weeks, in 1959, for five years in a row. The best five years of his life. Until Kennedy was shot. Things changed then. But for a time, that smelly double-wide was the focus of each year.

         That was the shallow end, where the beach was. A crummy beach. Just a dump of coarse sand. But the water was warmer there. And the old house of the estate had once been there, until sometime after the war. He had seen pictures of that. It was a dark and rangy place. Shingle style. They had used it for the vets returning with injuries. But it had burned years before, and the old fieldstone foundation looked like castle walls. He had climbed on those, endlessly around and around. He had been a knight then. He had conquered the Saracens there. Single handedly.

         James awoke to the sound of a voice.

         “Mr. Franklin?”

         Knuckles rattled the porch door.

         Through the darkening of the screen the boy’s face looked in, nose against the mesh.

         “Hello again.”

         “Can I go in the pit?”

         He hadn’t heard that word in years—not in reference to the dip in the woods where the geological cleft of the lake drifted upward toward one of the springs. That was the very best place to get minnows.

         “Going fishing again?”

         “Tomorrow. I have my bucket,” he said, raising it high in one hand.

         “Sure!”

         The boy wandered off into the trees, toward ‘the pit,’ seemingly unconcerned with anything else in the world but doing what he was doing. That was the way to be. The way he had once been. Once. A long time ago.

         The pillow on the chair had fallen away and his head was against the wicker when he sat back. The sound of his weight shifting in the chair was an old friend.

         ‘Shallow ambitions.’ It was an expression he had used many times over the years. To others. To his children. To himself…But in truth, he had never wanted much. He wanted pretty much what he had…But it seemed now that he wasn’t too happy about it. Why was that?

         “Shallow ambitions,” he said aloud. The sound of his own voice was a slap on the head. It was hardly his own voice anymore.

         But he was a very lucky man. Why wasn’t he very happy about it?

         He had met Kate at one of those jobs, when he was working overtime to pay off the loan. Kate of the sky blue eyes. But Kate had ambitions.

         Just a word. ‘Ambitions.’ Funny how it lingered. Like a smell.

         He would have to admit, now, such a long time later, that Kate was the reason he owned this place.

         He was working then, in the marketing and communications office at Liberty Mutual Insurance, when he had heard about the auction. It was right there in the very company newsletter that he was employed to write. One of the principal founders of the company had owned the estate. James might have heard about it anyway, but he had considered that fact to be some sort of fate. 

         He had taken Kate up here, to go camping. It was just a lark. A wonderful lark. He had brought her up to see it. They had caught their minnows in ‘the pit’ and they had fished right there at the shore. It was overgrown then. No dock. A log. They had made love right there in the tall grass near the shore, and they had caught a dozen fish and he had cooked them all. Right there. On the shore.

         He had been happy then. Gloriously happy. deliriously happy.

         But she had said to him, “What do you want?”

         And he had told her, most sincerely, from whatever depths he could plumb in his own heart, “This.”

         What he had meant, at that moment, was all of it. The place as well as her.

         And she had said—most of whatever she had said then, he had forgotten now, except for this. “Those are shallow ambitions.”

         And he had answered, trying to keep the pieces of his heart together, “But this is the deep end. This is the best!”

         And that was the smell. It was her. She smelled of something. Ambition. Maybe bergamot. Bergamot and peppermint. He had thought of that while making tea one day, and remembering that moment once before.

         Later, he had married Ann because of her name. That was a fact, too.

         He had told his son once, “When you ask yourself why you have done something, be honest. Go back to the beginning.”

         With Ann, it was her name.

         ‘Ann’ had been the wife of James Franklin. The original James Franklin. The man who—through some permutation of generations—he had been named for. Was maybe even related to—but that was an old family dispute—the man who was the brother of Benjamin Franklin. He had always liked to think that he was related to the rebel and radical brother of Benjamin Franklin—a man who had been a rebel before rebels were fashionable, who had taught his younger brother to print, and to write. And it was Ann who had carried on after her husband had died. An incredible feat, at the time. She had been a rebel too, and a hero as well—a ‘heroine’—although his Ann had told him, the first time he had explained the history to her, that she didn’t like the idea that the original Ann Franklin was thought of as a dangerous drug. She had actually said that. They had both laughed, but now he was not so sure of the joke.

         What do you want? Kate’s voice was clear even now. That was another question to answer. He thought he had, many years ago, but maybe not. And he was getting a little old for that.

         The rain patter grew in the leaves, finally rising to the sound of an ocean against the shore of treetops above his head. The leaves were angry. Pine needles hissed in background. Soto voice. The white pine that filled the slope above, ended here, likely an old logging line, and the oak and beech and maple began, going down all the way to the lake. There was no thunder so he stopped and stood close to one large pine—the largest there alone at the edge of the divide—to let the cloud borne wave above him pass. He was standing beneath the eaves of a cathedral, he thought, as he had thought many times before.

         He knew that the trail he followed went on for three miles, fully around the lake, passing the ruin of the old estate house, and was first worn by his own feet. This had long been his usual walk now and he knew it by heart. Even standing beneath that particular pine to get out of the rain was something he had often done before. He stood still, back to the trunk, and listened for changes as the wave played itself out.

         The thumping of footsteps on the pine needles on the upper slope came to him instead, and then was not surprised to see a familiar face appear through the trees there.

         “Jack!”

         “Mr. Franklin. You have the spot!”

         “I do.”

         “Out for your walk.”

         “I am.”

         “Can I tag along. I’m going to the castle.”

         “Yes. So am I, when this abates a bit.”

         “Abates?”

         “Just an old word. It means lessens.”

         Funny he shouldn’t know that word. He must be about twelve. What was the vocabulary of a sixth-grader these days?

         The boy answered, “But this is the best! The onslaught. The siege!”

         He had answered with his own thought then, “Where is the thunder of canon?”

         The boy was not to be toyed with.

         “There is no canon! No musket! This is the Thirteenth Century!”

         “Yes! I’m sorry. I forgot.”

         They both stood there in silence for a time then, with the rain holding steady, and the cathedral eaves of the pine sheltering them.

         “What grade are you in?”

         “Sixth—this year.”

         “Where do you go to school.”

         “At the junior high.”

         There was a lessening to the rain fall. He thought they both noticed.

         “What subjects do you like?”

         “None. History, maybe.”

         Franklin looked down at the mat of wet hair atop the boy beside him.

         “You should wear a hat.”

         “I do. It was a Red Sox hat. A good one! Some kid stole it.”

         That had certainly happened to him at that age. More than once.

         Looking down past the boy’s body pressed against the tree he could see the toes of sneakers. At least he wasn’t barefoot.

         They seemed to both have the idea to move along at the same moment, and followed the old trail again, first at the lumbering line and then along a rise of bald granite that cleared the trees. From there they caught sight of blue sky and knew they would soon be out of the weather.

         At last the low ruin of the old house foundation that made up the parapets of the castle rose low amidst the trees like a misplaced garden wall, with garden on both sides, for there were trees now within the ruin as well. The wall was fieldstone and the mortar was broken above the stone but not between. The wall simply ended about four feet from the ground and followed a contour that bespoke the original size of the house. Jack scaled that height immediately and looked down as a knight would.

         Franklin said, “I wish I could still do that.”

         “At least you did it!” The boy answered.

         It was an odd statement for a boy to make. Hard to know what might be in that mind.

         Stone steps still arose from the woods up to the rim at what must have been the front of the house and Franklin made his way around through the overgrowth to those, and then stepped up to where the view of the lake was still open. At the far end, his own small house was only obvious across the length of the lake because of the clear lawn in front of it. Behind him he could hear Jacks yelps and yells as he defended himself from imaginary foes, while wielding a old pine limb he had peeled to the sun-bleached wood.

         He asked, “Is this the defense of Jerusalem?”

         “No!” Came the quick response. “This is the battle at Jaffa. King Richard and Saladin!”

         Yes it was. The boy had that right too.

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         Whatever is written now will be lost. Forgotten. But not long ago, in a place not far away, what was written would be remembered. That was the time of books. An age of books. It lasted for about five hundred years. Half a millennium. Those words mapped and charted and chronicled thousands of years of human history. Those who wrote them had all the faults of human kind, but, as with all human projects, their vanity was their guide. That alone made what was written worth reading. What was written would be remembered and they feared being fools.

         Books were collections of pages printed in ink. They usually had covers. They had paper pages and those pages were bound together with the intent of some particular mind and in the fashion of some particular craft. They had words that were printed in ink. The words were written by individual human authors. All of these things are artifacts now, but once they mattered. The authors mattered. Vanity was both a fault and a feature. Civilizations rose and fell on their words.

         Many of the few who will read this today were born into that age. They might remember for a while, but human memories are short and more determined now by food, and sex, and rock and roll. We age out. Hence the need for books. Words are written now by machines. In this new age, what is written has only the value of utility. For machines, vanity is not a fault worth having.

         Programmed minds will object to this characterization, much as they do to Huckleberry Finn, or the poetry of Rudyard Kipling, or The Bible. They push their digitally programmed wears onto the shelves of libraries and ‘book shops’ to maintain the semblance of order. In transition. As the shops close or transform to a more compatible format. The program is the new zeitgeist. If something is not broken, that can be fixed. It will be fixed. It’s only digital. And all of the uncomfortable books of yesteryear —all of those covers and paper pages—can be reprogrammed and pulped and used again to make the new. And all that will be disposable. Easily, quickly, simply, replaceable. For that is the brave new world we live in.

         Listen now to the arguments for AI. Just listen. For your own good! Everything will be faster, cheaper, and more efficient. You can trust us–whoever we are.

         Such dystopia is not only tomorrow. It is today. In our time.

The post Where we are now appeared first on Vincent McCaffrey.

         This habit is commonly frowned upon. It is a matter of jest in most societies today. There is a theory, however, that not doing so is the root of all human misery. That is the line of reasoning that I follow here.

         First, importantly, not being able to talk to yourself is a symptom of deep self doubt. You clearly don’t want to hear what you have to say.

         The worst pandemic in modern human history, that is, since 1353, is the loss of our ability to speak to ourselves that is bred at home in front of television screens and nurtured in schools concerned with directives and expectations, and then cemented—solidified—in cubicles, here in this our office nation, where less than 5% of the population grows the food for all the others. I wonder what those farmers think and say as they guide their tractors back and forth over that abused soil.

         Being too self-conscious to speak aloud while on the street, and not so fond of the sound of my own voice, I write instead. Writing is. of course, a means of talking to ourselves. Especially in the guise of letters, but when directed by a will to instruct, as with the oddly phrased letters of Lord Chesterfield to his son, it can be less useful.

         “DEAR BOY,” the lord says “Your distresses in your journey from Heidelberg to Schaffhausen, your lying upon straw, your black bread, and your broken ‘berline,’ are proper seasonings for the greater fatigues and distresses which you must expect in the course of your travels; and, if one had a mind to moralize, one might call them the samples of the accidents, rubs, and difficulties, which every man meets with in his journey through life.” No matter the good intentions, the stiff upper lip of the average Englishman who read this was not helped, other than to feel the cold breath of the abyss between himself and the noblemen, as he stood in the fields on a starry night watching over a herd he did not own and said aloud to himself, ‘Why the hell am I freezing my arse to keep that bloke in fine clothes. Black bread is all I get on any night unless I cut the throat on one of these here dumber fellows. I think I will find a way to get to America. Things might be better there.” But I believe the shepherd definitely talked to himself. The Lord’s son just turned to his father for a better allowance.

         But the author was not speaking to himself. He was telling someone else what to think. That is a common glitch in the writing game and why talking to yourself is a far better deal. Someone always listens. And you know who is to blame when you don’t.

         My favorite writing is a result of talking to the audience of one. This may only reflect my own worry that there is no one else out there that gives a damn, but it is, I believe an acquired knowledge from many great authors. Patrick Leigh Fermor had hundreds of hours to talk to himself as he walked across Europe in 1933. Thankfully he wrote some of that down in his journals and those were later salvaged from a barn loft in Romania and returned by a farmer to the author some thirty years later so that we all might benefit.

         He later wrote, “But there was nothing sinister about the farm people and foresters and woodcutters I spent these evening with. They have left their memory of whiskers and wrinkles and deep eye sockets, of slurred speech and friendly warmth and hospitable kindness. Carved wood teemed in every detail of their dwellings, … the upshot of long winters, early nightfall, soft wood and sharp knives is the same…where each winter begets teeming millions of cuckoo clocks, chamois, dwarfs and brown bears,” and one can imagine the journey of his eyes in the fire dark of those small rooms in distant places, and the things Fermor said to himself in his makeshift bed by the hearth.

         Another walker and talker of note is Henry David Thoreau.

         “It was very pleasant, when I stayed late in town, to launch myself into the night, especially if it was dark and tempestuous, and set sail from some bright village parlor or lecture room, with a bag of rye or Indian meal upon my shoulder, for my snug harbor in the woods, having made all tight without and withdrawn under hatches with a merry crew of thoughts, leaving only my outer man at the helm, or even tying up the helm when it was plain sailing. I had many a genial thought by the cabin fire as I sailed. I was never cast away nor distressed in any weather, though I encountered some severe storms. It is darker in the woods, even in common nights, than most suppose. I frequently had to look up at the opening between the trees above the path in order to learn my route, and, where there was no cart-path, to feel with my feet the faint track which I had worn, or steer by the known relation of particular trees which I felt with my hands, passing between two pines for instance, not more than eighteen inches apart, in the midst of the woods, invariably, in the darkest night.”

         Taking him at his words, he was a far braver fellow than I. And given what he has said to himself in his journals, I think he was that and more.

The post On learning to talk to myself appeared first on Vincent McCaffrey.

         But what do you believe in? Someone once asked me that, at one of those moments when I was being most critical of one thing or another. Attempting to survive in high school then, the question was very much in order, given my classroom interruptions. I spent entirely too much of my tine being critical of one thing or another. But, of course, that was the easier direction. It was always good to dissipate my anxiety through cynicism and criticism. Nevertheless, I did try to listen to what was being said and this would become a primary motivation for writing novels. I wrote one in high school that is mercifully lost—but the question and answer lingered on, and managed my mind through several other efforts.

         I was already aware, given the short shrift that my classroom comments received, that there was no particular reason that what I had to say should receive any unique attention. I had not yet earned the right to any such consideration. But if the questions were carefully folded into the text of a narrative, I might be able to find the answers for myself. And that, given my peculiarities of nature, was a process that might entertain me indefinitely.

         One of those answers might have first resulted from a classroom reaction as well. That was concerning the matter of narrative. I began then to see the narrative as a key element in communication. Just below the matter of subject. If you had a subject you liked, it was incumbent upon you to relate your appreciation in a narrative that might reflect that, or at least make the case for it.

         But what do I believe in?

         I will tell you, being that I have asked myself now more than once. Over time, I have come to believe in narrative. As a philosophy. As a means. Even as an end. If a coherent narrative cannot be found and related, that is a sign that the subject might lack some relevance.

         I have found that there is some confusion between narrative and story. A story is what happened. Reporters are supposed to handle that (but seldom do). Narrative is why it happened, and often, what happened as a result. My grandfather was always full of stories that kept me on the porch into the night. But often he would enter into the realm of narrative. One of those might occupy the entire evening plus a few sequels in the nights following. His were the first stories I became conscious of, and thus the expansion of his stories into the matters of cause and effect made an impression on me at an early age. My grandfather being a relatively simple man, a farmer and peddler—the intricacies of his narratives beyond story were made more indelible by many retellings. And that was one key to my understanding of the difference. A story could change, with the emphasis altered to meet some current event in our lives. But a narrative remained relatively constant Because this happened, that happened, and not the other.

         In my youth I was often heard to extol the importance of story. When I first began to publish things—magazines and books—I was still very much aligned with that line of thought. It was only through my personal attempts to write novels that the difference between story and narrative became apparent to me.

         I had long been at odds with logic and math. Fine tools for good reason, but both inadequate means of understanding the human psyche. That the several hundred thousand years of human thought and thinking that resulted in the Parthenon and the Pantheon, Reims Cathedral and the Duomo of Milan must be ignored for the sake of two hundred years of faulty human reasoning resulting in the brutalist hives of urban planning seemed unjustified, especially for the obvious inadequacies apparent when applied to primary human wants and needs. Logic has no handle on love, or for that matter hate, or even friendship. Math had no means of judging beauty or the opposite. Logic or math could not even begin to assess right from wrong without following a legal guide. And those were only primary failures. The little stuff is inestimable.

         In an age of science, where all must be verifiable, using numbers appeared to be convenient, even if insufficient. Reducing the human variable to numbers makes authoritarian control so much more probable. Eliminating individual autonomy in favor of the diktat of governmental decree makes modern socialism work. Insular families must be reduced and private property eliminated. Public school should be mandatory. Curriculums prescribed and proscribed. Controlling the money supply was as necessary as managing work hours. Taxing represented government income, as well as good public management. And golly gee, along comes the computer as the perfect digital tool for all those numbers, and with it, AI to make the computers efficient.

         The deficiency of efficiency would be—should be— obvious to anyone who cared about art, or music or babies, or anything but time. But then the definition of art must be changed.

         You might blame Matthew Arnold for the academic snobbery of differentiating between classical and what he called the Renaissance. He didn’t coin the word but he gave it substance. And his aggressive tagging of all things (at least this philistine would say) made categorization a sport—and an evil. As much good as he did for raising the stock of literary pursuits, he reversed by reducing the middle ages to a dark and medieval time.

         But, what do I believe in?

         I believe that in a choice between order and chaos, chaos is to be preferred. Chaos has received a bad rap. That love is messy and true. That art is indeed in the eye of the beholder, but like good aim, appreciation can be improved.

         If the life of an ant appeals to you, I have little to explain. Western civilization may be failing beneath the onslaught of Mr. Arnold’s ‘barbarians,’ but I think it is likely to be stronger for having survived. And it will. The ‘Romantic’ era was only an easy academic tag for one culmination of human achievement. Categorize it if you must, but after a mere four thousand years, it is still a stunning achievement—then again so is the art in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and music in the eighteenth and nineteenth. The twentieth century may have indulged many of the flaws of scientific thinking, but we survived that too.

         And now we have other things to do.

         I have a new novel about all this, ‘Whatever it takes,’ but you might want to start with something less didactic.

         I recommend some local lobster chowder, an ear or two of fresh picked corn, some brewed ice tea, and homemade ice cream made with whole cream. If you are not from New England, I am sorry about that.

The post But what do you believe in? appeared first on Vincent McCaffrey.

By Vincent McCaffrey

Copyright 2025

         At the center of the known universe is the small town of Rumford, New Hampshire, once a farming hub. The original center of this town has now lost its importance to shopping malls and interstate highways at the periphery, but if you follow Main Street past the antique store that currently occupies the old Stone Bank building, and go beyond the town common that is planted in season by flowers from the Horticultural Club, and past the ghostly clapboards of the Grange Hall that is always in need of painting ‘once again,’ but still used for town meetings when contentious issues draw larger crowds, you will come to a new small bridge of low concrete and steel that might also be seen in any of a hundred New England villages, having replaced the older wood ones to meet Federal requirements and is yet to be fully paid for by town bonds, and there you will pass over the Beaver River, which only looks like a river in the Spring time but is always good for brown trout, and come at last to the North Road, running west. About a mile to the west of that juncture, beyond the shiny second homes of Boston investors, and on to the lower slope and rocky remains of an ancient mountain torn to bits by glaciers about twelve thousand years ago, is a small farm where the river bends again to the north, apparently just another of a string of older small farms, all hedged by ancient maple trees following along that way, that have avoided further development because the North Road only ends in the Blue Hills.

         The farm, named ‘Dal Riata’ on a hand-painted sign at the entrance, is the home of Julia Morgan.

***

1. At the door

         I parked in the drive, closer to the door. There was a green Ford pick-up truck just ahead of me that looked to be about twenty years old. The house itself, white, neat, two floors, steep-roofed and relatively small, was what they call a ‘New England farmhouse.’ Pretty common in this area of New Hampshire. A smallish barn was hidden on the slope behind the house that I’d seen when I was driving in, with low- cut fields like the ones at either side falling behind that, away to the rough grey and brown tatter at the banks of the river. The branches of trees nearer the house, mostly maple, were already turning a purple hue with buds. Not one of those trees, I’ll bet, is less than a hundred years old. I expected a dog bark but there was none, so I knocked.

         And then she was suddenly there; a pale apparition in the dark behind the screen door; apron on, like a storybook grandma, and wearing a dress. It was a print dress. You don’t see those kinds of dresses so often these days. And bi-focal glasses. Graying hair was done up in a bun, with a wisp or two loose. Shoulders up—a handsome woman. I don’t know what I expected but I had read one of her novels and the heroine was a red-haired vixen.

         I simply said ‘Hello.’

         She said, “You’re Geoff. I’m Julia. Thank you for coming out.”

         “It wasn’t far. I’m living in the campground just up the road.”

         She said, “Really?” but the word was not inflected.

         The ‘really’ hung in the air as she pushed the screen door back so I could come in. The house was dark, partly in contrast to the sunny day outside and she had no lights on that I could see. I could smell oatmeal. She led me back on a dark hallway past the stairwell, to a living room at the rear, with a couch and a sitting chair angled at the middle there and motioned for me to sit in the chair. A floor lamp stood up-right next to my shoulder, so I was pretty sure this is where she did her reading. The walls were lined with bookshelves and books. It was an odd collection of bookshelves, obviously not original to the space. I could not focus on the titles of the books yet, after the bright sun outside, but the tops of all the shelves were cluttered with assorted frames of family photographs. A wood stove squatted in front of a small fireplace at one side. Various plants were gathered in a green chaos in a corner close to the windows at one end. Two paintings, young women with intense eyes, stared out at either side of the chimney. There was no TV visible, but there was a record player, something I guessed to be from the 1970’s, that occupied a space among the larger books. My guess was the phonograph records were in a case I could partly see behind the couch.

         She sat down, hands braced on the cushions to either side, and said, “So tell me, why do you live in the campground?”

         I could see how this might have some importance, so I just launched into it.

         “I actually live in that van outside. I have a bed in there. The campground has other facilities. And I have a screen tent I found at the dump and I patched that up so that I can get away from the mosquitos. If I chop a little wood, I’ve got plenty of heat. But it’s cheap. It’s what I can afford. That’s why I’m here. Your ad seemed like an interesting way to earn a little extra cash.”

         I knew she could hear me but she didn’t make any expression—nothing like the waitress at the coffee shop had made when I first told her about my living circumstances.

         In the same uninflected voice, Julia said, “It’s ten dollars an hour. Not much, I know. It’ll be about 24 hours a week. $240. Is that enough?”

         “More than enough. I live pretty frugally.”

         She took no breath between.

         “Why?”

         I suppose I was ready for the question, but it was the blank tone of her voice that caught me off-guard. I fumbled it.

         “It’s what I like.”

         “Is it true? You’re a young man. Don’t you want something more in life than an old van and a patched-up tent in a campground?”

         “You’re leaving out the fire. I love campfires. And the pop of embers in the night. And hot dogs. There are at least twenty different varieties of hotdog down at the Market Basket. I’ve tried them all. I can give you a report on that. And I love it when I can hear the birds in the morning dark. Pretty swell. This time of year, especially. I even like the tin-metal smell of the river over by there when there’s no wind. Something about it. And my cot is pretty good. I have a piece of 6-inch foam on it that’s better than most beds. It’s a little small. I’m 6’ 2,” but it works with a sleeping bag. I have a pretty good sleeping bag. The camp is only twenty dollars a week this time of year. I get to use the common room if I need it. In bad weather. There’s a wood stove in there. But I get a discount for hanging around. Seventy-five dollars a month. I have a solar panel that folds out on the roof of the van that produces just about enough electricity to get me by on most evenings. The internet works. I have a generator that’s a little noisy, but I have it baffled so I can run it when I need it and not wake too many people. I take the spot at the end so there are usually fewer people around, anyway. Especially in cold weather. It all works.”

         She simply nodded. She kept the same face for about thirty seconds. And then, as if all of a sudden, she smiled. She looks a lot younger when she smiles.

         She said, “I read your book.”

         I only have the one book. I published that myself. I sent it to her when she asked for particulars. She’s had a dozen—more than a dozen, all from major publishers in New York.

         I asked, “Did you like it?”
         That’s a stupid question. But now, I was only good for stupid questions.

         She said, “No. Not really. I’m not a fan of science fiction. But I think I saw what you were after. I liked that. Mankind has a lot to pay for. The basic analogies are good. But there are too many analogies. The entire edifice of your imagined world is a gallimaufry of analogy. I spent too much attention on trying to see through them. It took me out of the story. You needed more story.”

         I wasn’t ready for that at all. I had no idea what to say next. I had a sudden and uncharacteristic loss for words. And euphoria. She’d read it! And at least she had spoken honestly, something you don’t hear too often. But it was about as uncomfortable a moment as I’d ever known.

         “More story to hide the analogies?”

         “No. Just story. Exposition. Why does your fellow do what he does? Why does he love that girl? She’s too young to have a good reason to love him. That’s all chemistry, I suppose. But he should be getting beyond that. I think you should be telling us why. At least, it’s what I wanted to know.”

         I was a little stunned. I said “Thanks. I should re-think about all that.”

         “I’m sorry if you weren’t ready for a critique. I suppose you can credit yourself with getting me to read it. If it were atrocious I would have put it down.”

         Lacking anything intelligent to say, I finally asked, “I saw a sign there at the entrance. ‘Dal Riata,’ What’s that about?”

         She smiled again, “Just something my daughter, Maya, put up there years ago. She thought the place needed a name. She’d just read one of my novels. It takes place in Dal Riata.”

         “Ah! Well. Sure. Of course. There’s no ocean here, and the coast is twenty miles away, but I suppose it’s like Dal Riata in other ways.”

         I’m not sure she knew I was joking. There was no sign of the smile.

         She said, “Have you been there?”

         “No. Not yet. I wanted to go to Iona. But that hasn’t happened.”

         She nodded along with a breath that sounded like satisfaction. “It’s beautiful. Nothing like this. But beautiful in its own way. Why did you want to go to Iona?”

         “The Book of Kells. The monastery. All of that. Is that in your book?”

         She nodded at me. And then smiled. “No. That was in The Covenant. That’s about a farmer who’s forced to move from his ancestral home during the clearances—a thousand years after the monks at the abbey lost their heads to the Vikings for their illuminations. My character—Andrew—loses everything else and must remake his life. He’s not religious, but he can read. The Kirk has taught him to read so that he can read the Bible and follow the gospels, but instead he reads Daniel Defoe, and John Donne, and Shakespeare. He is really just a boy hired for chores at the Kirk where the minister has a small library. But all of that lot are pornography to the minister, ostensibly kept as examples of Satan’s work—but the Defoe, the Moll Flanders especially, is well thumbed. When the boy’s reading is found out, he’s beaten. The small pittance he earned, that he was giving to his mother in any case, is lost. His father is already dead of consumption. Then the soldiers come and burn the cottage.”

         “It sounds pretty bleak.” I think I spread a hand at the view beyond the window. “This doesn’t look so bleak. It must be hard to imagine all that, when you’re sitting here.”

         I meant it as simple conversation. A small appreciation of where we were. But by the look on her face, she took it more seriously.

         “Yes. Well. He sells himself, gives the money to his mother, and emigrates as an indenture, no better than a slave, and came here to New Hampshire in 1749…But there is some small emotional overlap, I suppose. It wasn’t intended that way, but you use what you have when you write. I had to conjure the rest. I left a very different life in New York City to come here. My daughters thought this was paradise, but it took some time for me to adjust.”

         I knew a little about this from the biographical paragraph at the back of her book. But, given my missteps, I suddenly wanted to get to the point of my being there.

         “But you’re a published writer. Why do you need me?”

         The nod again, and then a wince of faux pain. I was sure that was only an obvious touch of dramatic emphasis.

         “Because I have my own penchants. I don’t like computers, for instance. I know that I live in a computer age now, but I’m afraid of them. Yes! Right… I’m afraid of them. Think of me as one of those natives who’re afraid to have their pictures taken in fear of losing their souls. That’s me. I am afraid of losing my soul. I haven’t published anything in five or six years. Not since Knopf dropped me. But I still write every day. That’s my habit. So, there’s quite a lot of material sitting over there in those drawers.” She pointed at a wooden file cabinet in an inner corner of the living room. “And I’ve decided to take things into my own hands. My original agent died years ago. Ned was really just a lawyer, anyway. And I detest this new system of going through an agent. It’s despicable. Your relationship isn’t with a publisher, but a flesh peddler. And worse. I had one book made into a movie years ago. Now, getting a book published is just like dealing with Hollywood, but in New York, without the good weather. They want to tell you what words you can use. They change the story to suit some son-of- a-bitch who says he doesn’t have the time to read a book! … Sorry.”

         She took a breath. The demeanor had changed pretty much from the moment I’d come in the door. She was talking faster. There was a passion showing. I liked this person better.

         All I said then was, “Good enough. Whatever it takes.”

         But she was still calming down. She took another breath, “Do you want a cup of coffee?”

         She was up before I said, “Great! … What would the schedule be?”

         She poured a couple of mugs out on the kitchen counter, where I could see her through the open doorway. She never asked me if I wanted cream. I didn’t ask. But it wasn’t needed.

         “Every day. If you can. Between about four and eight. I can usually finish my re-write by four. Then I need you to do what you do. Re-enter it on your computer—-you have a laptop I hope.”

         “Yes.”

         “Well, that’ll be necessary. I need you to put it all onto there and then into a disc or something. That’s the part that gets tricky. For me, at least. And I want to put it all up on a website made just for my work. All my work. Everything I’ve already published is out of print now anyway, so that too. My daughter Elena has some ideas about that. But she isn’t around enough. She’s shown me a few things on her computer. She thinks I can even re-publish them myself. And that’s what I really want to do. I want to publish what I’m doing where it can be seen—can be read on a paper page…Right now, it’s under a rock.”

         This is something I understood.

         “You can. I can help you with that. The book I sent you—I published that.’”

         She nodded and smiled at me. “You needed an editor.”

         “Yes. Well. I know that too. A lot of the times you can’t see your own mistakes. You’re blind to it.”

         She shook her head.

         “I don’t want you to edit. Not really. Not like Ned used to do. Or tried to do. Mostly I just need you to catch as many of the typos as possible. And then get me back into print.

         I shrugged a little. “Sure. I can help you with that…Is what you’re writing now like your other books? A historical novel?”

         “My old publisher liked to label them ‘historical romances.’ I suppose they are that, for lack of anything better. But yes. Roughly. It’s the same time-period as The Covenant. But set in Ireland. It’s called ‘The Plow and Stars.’”

         “And you want to have an income from it?”

         “No…Well, yes. But that’s less important to me. The priority is to make it available. I have this. My home. At least the stupid movie paid for this. So, I have the luxury of a home of my own. I have a little something saved. I suppose, I have to make enough to cover my taxes. Or, if I get sick. I do have health insurance, so, I’ll need to keep covering that. Maybe some food to supplement what I grow in the garden. I’m not a very good gardener. But not all that much, really. …I was hoping that I could make the books free and have the payment be voluntary. And if people like what they read they can pay a little something. I hear they have ‘tip jars’ on-line. Just what readers can afford for what they think was worth their time.”

         “A nice ideal.” I probably said that with a little cynicism in my voice.

         She says, “Is that true? I know what people are like. Some will. Most won’t. That’s the way it is.”

         I tried to soften that truth a bit. “I think the only problem is the people themselves, but they’re the only solution as well. So that’s it. Most podcasters work it that way.”

         “Who are they?”

         She didn’t know what a podcaster was.

         “Think of radio shows on your computer. But you can listen to a show anytime you want.”

         She nodded at that without further comment and then, “So, why do you live in a campground?”

         So, I picked up on that theme again. “People, I suppose. I don’t like people.”

         She sat a little straighter, “I understand about the birds and the pop of the embers and all that, but I’m not sure I understand your problem with people. I’m a ‘people’.”

         I figured, as much as I wanted the job—especially now that I’d met her—I might as well face the monster in the room. “You mean, besides the farts, and the nastiness, and the greed, I think it’s just me not wanting to spend my life working for other monsters.”

         She swayed with that answer a moment.

         “Are you planning to live there in the campground for the rest of your life, then?”

         There was no going back.

         “Yes. I’ve picked out a nice little burial plot right by a tall pine tree up on the hill there, next to a farmer and his wife named Gibbs from 1810.”

         She didn’t miss a beat. “Nice!” She squinted her smile. She was catching on. “You don’t have family?”

         “I do. But they don’t like my choices, you might say… They live down near Boston.”

         “No girlfriend?”

         “No. I’m like one of those monks at the abbey on Iona. I just want to illuminate my manuscripts until the Vikings come to remove my head.”

         She said, “At least they had the comfort of their belief in God. Are you religious?”

         “No. But God has been kind to me anyway. I have the birds. And the pop of the embers, remember? —but even that has limits. I’m just not willing to kneel.”

         A faint squint and nod. “That’s something else we have in common, then.”

         That was not a casual statement, either. I looked for another direction.

         “How many daughters do you have?”

         “Oh. Three. But one is married, so you’ll have to find your happy-ever-after with one of the other two.”

         The sarcasm was palpable. I think she was completely on to me.

         I said, “When do I start?”

         “Tomorrow.

***

2. Unsettling in.

          I saw her when she drove the circuit at the campground the next day. I was in my camp-chair, reading, soaking in the best warm of a late winter sun, and I looked up. She waved but didn’t stop.

         So, she had her suspicions. She’d lived in New York long enough for that.

         I showed up at the house at four. On the dot. There was a note taped to the glass of the door saying, ‘Come In!’ 

         She yelled out from the kitchen, where she was cooking something in a steaming pot.

         “Have you eaten?”

         The hall going back, and the stairs there, were dark, but the kitchen was brilliant with late afternoon sun and exaggerated her shadow on the honeyed boards of the floor between us. It had even more of a feeling to it of entering a different world now than just the day before.

         I smartly committed myself to a falsehood. I did not mention the bag of Fig Newtons I’d eaten just before I came, not knowing what to expect.

“No. Not since you saw me earlier.”

         The smell of spiced tomato sauce was pungent.

         She turned to me with a full smile and several wisps of hair loose from the comb at the back of her head. “Good. I’m making ravioli. I love ravioli. And I use pork with the beef.”

         “I usually get that out of a can, ready-made.”

         “That’s machine made. This is hand-made. By me. On that counter right there. It’s better.”

         I witnessed the leavings of flour near me and cautiously set my computer down on the small table by the side window instead. A short stack of a few hundred typed pages was already waiting. But there was only one chair.

         I asked, “Can I grab another chair?”

         She was fishing the ravioli out of the pot with a strainer. A few at a time, and putting them in a bowl, and suddenly stopped.

         “I’m sorry. I forgot about that…No. Not easily. They’re all buried in the dining room.” She nodded her head toward the next room, beside the hall, which was stacked with brown banker’s boxes. There was no table visible, much less a chair. And no walking space in to get a look.

         “I can drive back to the campground and get my folding chair.”

         She finished ladling out her sauce and wiped her hands on her apron.

         “Don’t worry about it. I can stand at the counter. Living alone means I do that a lot anyway.”

         We spent the next hour just talking about the procedure, and how we were going to work. I had trouble concentrating through the smells of food, but after we ate, I sat back down and just started re-typing. It appears that this would be the routine. And I get a free meal in the bargain. Priceless.

                 And this is an average day.     

         The smell of cooking is thick in the house when I arrive. I finally realize that this might be the normal. She starts cooking by four. It makes thinking about anything but food almost impossible. But I must. She only eats two meals a day, and by five, I’m in some sort of psycho-physical collapse. On this particular day, it was fried chicken. I would have said before that I liked fried chicken. It’s just fine. Only, I had never had the sort of fried chicken that she makes. It will be difficult to eat fried chicken anywhere else ever again.

         I start work right away—which is mostly just retyping on my laptop the words from the sheets that she has typed out previously that day, as well has parts she has written before I came—while she is right there cooking in the kitchen and answering any of my questions or simply talking to me extempore. The book is entitled, ‘The Plow and Stars.’  It’s over 1000 handwritten pages, now. She does not know how many words that is, but she tells me from previous experience that will amount to about 300 pages when typed. I guess out loud that it will be under ninety thousand. She frowns at me. This is obviously far too much calculation to her taste.

         “I have never thought about that. The number of words. Ned was always concerned about that because it might make the book more expensive than the ‘unwritten’ budget all the editors knew was hanging over their heads. But he stood up for me a couple of times. I never had to cut a word. Though, he did tell me once when I came in ‘under budget’ that he had made the case then, to allow for that when I went too long.” 

         Her answers are ready, and I think she has a need to talk to someone after working in her own head for at least eight hours, especially since her daughters flew the coop—so to speak. Perhaps that’s really my role here. To listen. The exhaust fan is on, and a little loud at first, so she’s talking over that when she speaks, and I get to hear a voice I haven’t heard before. Her usual voice is restrained. Deliberate. Feminine, but controlled in the way that mothers do with children. Though that could be a little irritating if she keeps it up for too long. I don’t mind it when she gets emotional. You can hear that in her work as well. But it seems she hasn’t mastered the art of talking loudly. It sounds as if she is angry. I wonder if that is also from living alone. And does she talk to herself that way? 

         I asked, “Do you talk to yourself out loud when you write.”

         It caught her by surprise. “Of course.”

         I got the funny look.

         “I only asked because I do that too.”

          A couple of dozen pages in, with Julia still standing at the stove, I asked, “Are you intending for Clare to be cynical.”

          It was just a thought I had while retyping the words, at that particular moment. Heroines who are cynical are far less appealing. I know, from what she has told me before, that ‘Clare,’ who is to be the protagonist here, is a tough cookie—a woman who has survived the worst.

         Julia says, “I think that’s probably her lack of faith. She wants to have faith but can’t find it. Her losses have been too great. I don’t go into all that because it just makes for pathos. I don’t want that reaction. The cynicism keeps her in the right key.”

         This cynicism was not all that obvious. I had thought it was just an undertone that had crept in inadvertently. I should accept now that there is nothing inadvertent in Julia’s writing. At least I should have guessed. But by then, I was already fully distracted by the smell of buttermilk and lard. By asking the question, I was actually trying to concentrate.

         She says, “Clare lives in what the author William Manchester called, ‘A world lit only by fire.’ It’s worth always remembering that, and I have the hardest time with it myself, because it’s so easy to assume the modern practical prejudices we have because of the comforts of our own lives. For her—the scene you’re working on is just her getting out of bed. Really, just that. It’s the best moment of her day. At least she’s had sleep. The coziness of the bed was perfect—as perfect as she knows. Her dreams are fading, and the gauze of that, hides the glare of hunger, and the pain of her damaged foot which has not yet healed, and the cold. Especially the cold. She will build a peat fire. That is a very unsatisfying heat. Uneven. Small. Her clothes and body smell of the work she did the day before, and the day before that. Later, she’ll eat a coarse hard brown bread that she made several days before. Because of the rain, that’s already getting moldy. But at least the water will be fresh. The rain from the roof has filled the mossy pots, and the sound of the falling of that obscures much else. It’s a small din of sound that hides the morning dark outside, and that allows her to hold her eyes closed and keep a brief grasp on her dream. She will not eat until she’s worked for several hours at her loom…She has no idea if she can sell the fabric. That’s a worry that intrudes on her mind. That’s not a given. The English authorities have forbidden the sale of fabric unless a tax is paid. She has no money for the tax. She is pregnant, so she is feeling queasy in any case. Her mind is just trying to engage her hopes in the dark … How does she do that? How does she keep her hope before her and not slip into the darker maw of dejection. Well, for her, it’s a cynicism that makes fun of everything that confronts her. She laughs at her state. At herself. It is an Irish humor, built upon centuries of abuse. Not out-loud, where it will draw attention, but spoken to herself. She has an internal life that is as real as her dreams. She can hold on to that. She can keep her hopes alive by standing on that ground…And she’s bright, remember. Not smart, because she has never had any general schooling, but she is bright. Very bright. She reads Latin. This is some of what she picked up from her mother as well as the nun at the church—That poor nun at the beginning of the story…You’ve already seen that, but you must see her in that context. Being bright is not a permanent state. It is a shine that must be polished. Her internal dialog does that.”

         I was chastened. But she was not finished.

         Julia says “You see, mankind is, by nature, delusional. How could we get up in the morning and face the day if we were not? Do you think the beauty of a sunrise is sufficient to ignore your arthritis; the delicate design of a snowflake sufficient ignore the cold? Then you are delusional. The pain of living would be overwhelming if you could not blind yourself to your own demise. Your body may be riven by pain, but you give yourself to love. Those you love are torn from you by disease and pestilence, and you nurse another. We are really wonderfully made, we human beings. We can believe in our gods no matter how they betray us. Our own stink should be sufficient to drive us away from each other, but instead we embrace. We watch ourselves grow old and pretend there is grace to it. We are delusional. I thank God for that defense. Other animals, so trapped by instinct or ignorance, must bear their own slaughter, with brief panic, seemingly unaware of their future as they ruminate. We are given the gift of delusions to endure, and the powers of imagination to distract ourselves. We make up sports to manufacture our own entertainment. We celebrate our kings and write plays to give them honor and renown. We write novels to give color to the mundane. We defend our kidnappers with our own lives, and sacrifice our children to the wars of our captors. We murder other human beings and blind ourselves to the inevitable consequence. Thank God we are delusional, else we would stay in bed.”

         It was an inverse of philosophy—the meaning of life turned inside out.

         Later she said, “Thinner fabric can be more difficult to handle, more fragile, more liable to tear. A mere tissue of integrity. But gossamer is beautiful to the eye. The beauty of silk, like the woman she imagines herself to be, is magnified by its modest strength—but if it has been rent, it is lost. Old silk can often be beautiful for the character of its flaws I suppose. But the flaws are real, and it is still more delicate.” She actually said this aloud, to me. Then she suddenly looked away in a look of despair, or perhaps a little shame. “Oh, bosh! Such metaphors are too thin.”

         Julia had been explaining her use of a word to me, ‘gossamer,’ in the description of a mysterious gift Clare receives. I had foolishly questioned its use in context.

         And still later, she said, “Once, I thought I would be a poet. It was a fever. A sickness. Perhaps the last vestige of my childhood—that I would simply identify the truth with words. Can you conjure such a thing? How did I come to be possessed by the idea that I knew the truth at all, I can’t say. I haven’t the discipline to be a poet. But it was that idea that made me want to be a writer, and I turned to prose instead. and it determined my whole life. It was such a wonderful mistake! My delusion!”

         With this, a deeper hunger had come upon me, personally.

         About five-thirty she interrupted her wanderings around the room and the house and set the table. She’d found a sturdy chair in one of the bedrooms upstairs and brought that down. We sat across from each other, beneath the side window, but the table is small, maybe three feet around, so we were close. Close enough for me to be a little uncomfortable. She had made biscuits and gravy and buttered carrots. I had died by then and gone to heaven.

         She said, “It’s all very difficult to imagine. We are so spoiled. So soft…The chicken is fresh. I picked it up yesterday from my neighbor, Frank. He raises chickens and sells them to the Johnson’s Farm Market over in Nottingham. Organic. You can see them out there in his yard right now. They sound like happy chickens. You must feel sorry for them, though. They’re living their best lives and then, whop! — I can’t eat my own chickens. Only the eggs. But I trade those to Frank for his chicken, and he does the bloody work. I let mine grow old. I become very attached to them and the idea of killing them is impossible. That’s how soft I am. Clare would have simply gone ‘whop,’ or just sold the critter. She wouldn’t have eaten it…She would have saved the money. She had her hope.”

         I was relatively speechless with the delight of all this. And because the biscuits and gravy were as good as the chicken.

         Julia said, “I don’t mean to spoil the story for you, if you’re following it, but Clare is sleeping with the Lord’s son to get the money for her passage. Her cynicism is warranted. And if I were in her position, I would be cynical too, and bitter, and just as likely immobile. I would never have gotten out of that hovel. I’m writing about someone better than me. I always do…Writing is my moment in bed, in the early morning, holding onto my dream.”

         What could I say to that? All I came up with was, “How did the human race survive? … Seriously. How did it happen?”

         She shrugs at that. “The dreams. It was the delusions. Those who dreamed the best, survived.”

         Trying to make a formula out of the magic, I stupidly said, “So, it’s a sort of natural selection. Over the eons, the smartest ones more often make it.”

         She shook her head at me. “No, I’m not so sure. Depends on what you think smart is. The kind of ‘smart’ that most people think of is Einstein. But Einstein is an aberration. A luxury product of our society, you might say. The society that made him possible is the result of dreams. A million dreams.”

         “And a little math?”

         “No. If you do the math, you just stay at home and guard your turf. The risk of dreams is too great. What makes us human is not math. A crow can do a little math. What makes us human is our dreams. I don’t know what crows dream of, but the ones I see are still pestering the garbage cans.”

         All this, while I am flailing. What is love? … Don’t tell me what it’s like! The great Shakespeare always fell prey to this particular irration of metaphor and simile. That’s my word. Something irrational must be an ‘irration.’ But a summer’s day, it is not. Analogy is the poor man’s logic. Even when it’s genius. And don’t offer your own specific madness as an example. Your own love is at least as unique as the person it’s devoted to. To offer as explanation the specific object of your own affection, whether Abby or Zelda, is no better than a cave painting. A pictograph of your love does not deserve an ally wall, much less a billboard or a bulwark. “I love you, Margaret Jean” is more to the point and understood by everyone passing on the interstate. But the language of true definition demands something more universal…So, what is love? Is it a chemical imbalance? Is it lust, disguised by some measure of civilized behavior? Is it a calculation of all the attributes of one special individual? Thus, is it only a sort of math? Or is it delusion? I think this last point is the closest. But it says nothing, really. It’s illogical? Absolutely. Foolish? Definitely, and often silly. Unreasonable? Certainly. Insane? Often. But always, inexplicable. Love, then, is a tautology. It defines itself. You know it, when you feel it. And it cannot be felt just that way by anyone else.

***

3. So, this is where I am

         These are the facts of the matter.

         The corruption of the human condition is not a matter of ignorance or mistake. It’s deliberate. Being naturally stupid, this realization, so obvious, came to me like a revelation. I had labored under the ideal that if my fellow human beings were just informed, or somehow enlightened, that they would do the right thing, given the chance. Somehow. That foolishness had wasted the first ten years of my adult life as a writer. I was a fool.

         This last fact was not a revelation, but one that I had purposely ignored for the most part, avoiding it by the trickery of words. So, having it smashed in my face like a grapefruit was only that much more humiliating. Who was I to be informing them, anyway?

         I had been living at this time, quite gloriously, or so I thought, in The Tall Pines campground, still officially closed for the winter. A temporary arrangement. I had use of the one building, called ‘The Commons,’ for the toilet facilities and internet connection, and unofficially, as a sort of studio. This was a single, large, octagonal room with the black hood of an open fireplace rising at the center, and adjacent to that the toilet, all in exchange for keeping the water running, and other squatters out, as well as the driveway plowed. I didn’t even have to do the plowing. I simply had to call another fellow to do that when the snow got too deep.

         The arrangement was a handshake deal made over a chessboard at the Last Drop Cafe in Newmarket when the fellow who had been teaching me the game, Larry Regen, who just happened to own the campground, told me he was getting too old to deal with it anymore and was leaving for the winter to Florida. I had already been living there in my van the previous summer and fall, and I think he had a clue that this offer might be a kindness. It was going to be hard to survive the winter living in a 1998 Ford delivery van.

         “It’s a good deal,” were his exact words.

         I hadn’t been looking for a deal. I had just been hoping he would let me stay there through the winter for free. But for $100 a month I would have use of the campground toilet, in a room which was nominally heated, and the attached kiosk, which wasn’t heated, but had the fireplace, and an internet connection. That was the bonus. He knew that. That was his bargaining chip. At that moment, the internet connection seemed more important to me. Later, in January, I was more impressed by the heated toilet. But I was going to have to find a little extra work to pay for it. He would be renting his own house out as well, but I wasn’t in that market.

         He suggested, “You should just drive yourself down to Florida. That’s what I would do.”

         “I like it here.”

         “The women in Florida are easier to look at.”

         “That’s only because they don’t wear heavy coats.”

         I managed to get through the winter on a couple of odd house-painting jobs posted on the bulletin board at the cafe, but now that Spring was about to bloom and the campground would be officially opening again for the fishermen, my beautiful isolation was about to end. At first, I was feeling a little down about that. But then I awoke one night to a Greek chorus of peepers and with that my realization was complete. I was, indeed, a fool. But the source of my newfound wisdom was quickly buried in a confused dream, fading even as I tried to grasp it. An ember popped in the fire-pit and cleared my head. Outside, with my breath hanging about me in the cold Spring air, the starry night sighed with a hush of sound that felt like it had no source on earth—hardly a bunch of small frogs—and was simply present, as the background noise of the universe. It was a noisy awakening to the true facts. A freight train passed on the tracks a mile away and sounded as if it was coming right there.

         And for whatever mental gymnastic I had dreamed, I knew all at once that this much was true: our ignorance was not the cause of the corruption. Our ignorance, and our wanting to cure that, to fill that void, to solve that riddle, to make sense of what confused us, that was the source of our humanity! That was what made us human. It was the effort! Not the end! And too, that it was our denial of our ignorance that would corrupt us, as well as all of that stupid stuff we always did for comfort, and for ease, and for gain.

         It was in the denial that we failed.

         I had to start again. One more time. Nothing I had previously written mattered. It was all false. Somehow, I should find a means of describing ignorance itself. And naturally, this was just the kind of revelation I would be fully capable of—describing ignorance, I mean.

         Like a child who has just discovered anything, I had to mention this to someone.

         I asked her, “When you were on Iona, did you hear the stars?”

         But instead, Julia says to me, “Is that true? Is that what you think you’ve done? Found a refuge as a lone monk? Made a monastery out of a white Ford van, living by the river—hiding out from the storm? The Vikings will find you there.”

         I tell her, “I suppose, you probably don’t know it, but there was a comedy sketch on television that involves a character named Matt Foley who lives down by the river—” She has no idea. Her face is blank, so I skip it. I say, “At least I’m still trying to write. Even though that seems a little hopeless at the moment. The wonder of the internet is making it possible for anyone to publish their work for others to read. But that has a downside. On any given day, everyone seems to be doing it! It’s a glut. And as you’ve told me, there aren’t any publishers now who pay for it the way they did in the old days. But still, if you want to write, the internet seems to be the only chance left.”

         She actually laughed at that. I hadn’t heard her laugh out loud before. I didn’t hear the cynicism because I was taken with the laugh itself.

         She says, “So, a publisher pays you an advance of $5000 for something that took you a year to write. Maybe 3000 hours of work. Always more than that, but that’s the part the accountant will allow. That’s about a buck-fifty an hour. And that’s why I wanted to move up here and out of New York in the first place, twenty years ago. I could not imagine how I could support myself in New York without doing tricks. When I was getting a divorce, I knew I’d need more income. And I like gardening. But that was incidental. It all worked out for me. But if two of my books hadn’t been optioned for movies, I wouldn’t have made it this far.”

         “I thought there was only one movie.”

         “They only made the one.”

         I wasn’t going to be misdirected. “So, what’s the future?”

         She says, “I don’t know. But I was hoping you might have a ticket for that. Maybe, if I can get a website up…I do have a small following. A few fans. I can try to build on that.”

         That seemed possible.

         Contrarily, I say, “But what does a younger writer do?”

         She shook her head at me, “I don’t think age is the matter. You have to be resourceful. Find some way to promote what you write without doing tricks. Or at least, without selling your soul. That’s the trick of our age, isn’t it. It’s always something. But there will be a way. Whatever it takes. There’s the hope! You must survive. Just don’t be selling your body to the Lords’ daughter.”

         This last reference to her own novel was not obscure. We had just dealt with that!

         So, this was where I am.

         My dreamed-up realization about the corruption of mankind wasn’t worth a dime if I couldn’t spend it. If I was going to earn a living, without living off of anyone else, I was going to have to find a new angle. The right angle. Something oblique, perhaps, but not obtuse. But playing with words was not going to help.

         Then Julia tells me the likely reason her publisher dropped her—why she couldn’t find anyone else to take her novels. It wasn’t really the sales. At least there were some sales. It wasn’t the money. Without Ned, she wasn’t even getting the initial five-thousand-dollar advance on either of her last two books. It was because of what she had to say, and what she had said. She had rejected dogma.

         She said, “It seemed to me, after a few hundred thousand years of petty tyrants and slavery and war, that things were getting better. I have no faith in the kings, or the politicians, or the generals. But the farmers, and the carpenters, and the fishermen—they’ve made things better. I just wanted to make that clear in what I wrote. And why…Most importantly, to understand ‘why.’ The phony tenured philosophers today all want to talk amongst themselves in the shady groves of academe. But Jesus Christ spent his time talking with the meek. At least I could try to do that as well.”

         Now, I knew she wasn’t religious, so this last part threw me off.

         Julia has a landline for her telephone and I’ve asked her to get an internet cable for a Wi-Fi connection paired with that. That will only take three weeks and about fifteen minutes. The 15 minutes is the hard part. But she did this without asking any questions. She seemed to think I knew what I was doing.

         I had said, “I can help with that,” which, in effect, meant I could do it. She had no clue about how to create a website, much less what to do with it. So, I started reading up on the process. The site her publisher had made for her years ago was still up there for me to see, in some cloud or another, but it was not really useful by today’s standards. Nor could I easily access it myself. When they had dropped her, they simply let it be.

         Her idea, vaguely, was just to post some things she wrote—to find readers through conversation. I told her that she could do more—should do more. Naturally, telling her to do more was hypocrisy, coming from me.

         But I told her she should post her novels too.

         She raised an eyebrow on that. “We can post this one when we’ve finished with it. So, let’s keep working.”

         There were several thousand fans who had signed up at the old website. After five years, I imagined most of those links were no longer functional, but I explained to her that she should start by finding out. Which meant, of course, that I should find out for her. But first I moved her address to a new web host—one that did most of the job of moving her old site for her—so that I didn’t have to do any of the dirty work or read any more technical jargon than I had to.

         Then I said, just to get the door of the idea open “Just talk to them. Ask them questions. Let them post their questions. Get a conversation going.”

         The part about the conversation was important.

         After growing more and more dubious over my increasingly obvious lack of technical knowledge, her face actually brightened at the prospects of that. She has one of those faces that reveal thoughts without a word. I already knew that she genuinely enjoyed conversations. Just not when she was working.

         After I was gone, and undoubtedly with her evening bourbon in hand, she wrote something for the new site and gave it to me to post the next day. And I think she was addressing me there.

         ‘The matter is that we are corruptible by nature. It is built into us. It is not a flaw, but a feature. If we were not corruptible, we could not learn. We would be trapped in the prison of our DNA. We would forever be what we are, as interchangeable as spare parts—never unique. The lion is a magnificent beast, but exactly as magnificent as his ancestor, 40,000 years ago. What is it in us that allows us to appreciate a beast that would eat us without a blink? We must learn, in order to survive, and we know it. 

         “At one and the same time, it becomes important that we can be corrupted, so that we might find the philosophy to resist that corruption. Not that we be incorruptible. We must be capable of change. The flaw is in us. That is the nature of a good philosophy as much as a good story. A good philosophy is one that makes us capable of learning. A bad philosophy forbids us—because it must keep us from knowing. Some people think they know the truth. I hope someone does. I do not. I want the freedom to learn the truth. I want to be corrupted by the truth.”

         By noon of the next day, when I was sitting outside my van in the sun, and thinking about a nap, there had been over three hundred replies.

         The thing was, she was annoyed when I told her. How could she reply to 300 people! She wanted me to ‘quiet it down a little.’ I told her I’d work on that. I understood how she felt. It was like having the campground opening up. Her splendid isolation was over.

         And one evening soon after that, she wrote: “I have lived too much of a narrative life. Not in the present or the past, much less the future. It’s a life made-up of thoughts, and attitudes … I have no more idea of the facts that govern the news than any village idiot. I mean that. The village idiot is much more aware of what they see and hear. Their problem is interpretation. They don’t understand the meanings of things. Whereas, I am all about the meanings of things and unaware of the facts … Which, is the better? I’m so full of meanings, can I see beyond that to a simple truth. I feel as if I’ve spent a good deal of my life looking over a fence for the truth on the other side.”

***

4. With the co-operation of time

         Julia says, in describing her own work, “Time is the issue—it’s a theme in much of what I write. Simply said. It’s difficult to make it sound much better than that. Simply ‘time.’ What is it? You can’t touch it, but you feel it. We try to measure it mechanically, but living by the clock is thin. We each have a biological clock inside of us that keeps time rather well, if we pay attention. Women too often think of it in terms of child-bearing alone, but it’s far more than that. Men grow dependent on their strength, and then lose it with age. They feel that with time. It worries them. Children lose their childhood, as if it were stolen from them. With age, minds weather and wither. Memory fades. But age comes to each of us differently. Each of us knows this to be true. Measured in astronomical terms, a human life is too brief to notice. And yet, we are perhaps the only creatures that do notice. Most other living beings simply accept the brief time that they are given. But we human beings demand some control, and then, with typical hubris, we demand credit for whatever we’ve done. As one old comic once said, we stand in the bread line and ask for toast.”

         I have no idea why she said all of this—but I felt as if it was addressed to me, even as I posted it her site. She hardly knew me at the time, and I certainly did not yet know her. But having had my own recent revelation, I was quite open to hers.        

         Perhaps she had believed me when I said that I was a writer as well, despite just having the one book. But she must have heard that sort of thing said a hundred times before by others. Everybody thinks they can write. But she was published, again and again. She was Julia Morgan. Why did she believe me? I don’t know.

         That post received seven hundred replies.

         And this happened in the late afternoon on that first day—-believing my job there was just to copy-edit what she had re-written previously on her typewriter, and retype that once again on my laptop. Not to actually edit. Not all that much, anyway. Maybe thirty pages a day. Easy peasy. But I could not help but comment, here and there, or to ask why, this or that. I think her explanations for what she had done were always worth it. Like good footnotes.

         But I told her, even then, that I thought my role was an unnecessary step. That she could just as well have typed her copy onto a computer keyboard instead of a typewriter, and saved the time as well as the cost of having me transcribe it. I knew I was risking my own place in the scheme of things. But I didn’t yet understand the brilliance of her idiosyncrasies.

         She had made it clear at first that I should only correct obvious typos and misspellings and perhaps remove her prolific commas but only when I was sure that would be best. The stack of pages was beside me—piled on a kitchen table in the same loose manner as they’d been placed there when she had pulled them from her beautiful old manual machine. I simply turned the stack over, copying the pages one by one.

         This was really just transcribing for the most part. Again, I was filling the role of a monk in the Abbey at Iona. An amanuensis. Can that be a verb?

         She had no such electric devices as my computer in the house. Nothing more complicated than a toaster or an old stereo record player. She ‘abjured’ them. My job at first was just to copy what she had written and then put that onto a ‘thumb-drive.’ She had no idea what that was when we began, but I was not technically sophisticated enough myself to properly explain the idea of storing it there, nor of uploading everything to the internet, so I showed her the one small physical device I had with me and then used it again each day. It seemed to please her to hold the little device in her hand. All those words in the palm of her hand! She told me then she’d read somewhere that someone had once written ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ on a grain of rice, and that it could only be read under a microscope. I asked her why? Why bother? She held up my thumb-drive and didn’t say a word.

         She had no real web-site of her own yet. Just her former publisher’s ‘landing page’ as they called it. I started creating one for her, without asking permission, on that first evening when I was back at the campground again.

         Still unsure of my role as much as my good fortune in being there, as if tempting the fates, I asked her why she had decided to run the advertisement for my job when she did.

         The explanation for that was brief but complete.

         “I had a great editor for twenty-five years and a good publisher for as long as he had my back. But when he died, Knopf dropped me just as they were doing with most of their mid-list authors. There was no real money to be made in keeping us. Not of the kind that they wanted. Hell, in the end, they even sold themselves. I’ve gone five years now without publishing a thing. It’s time to take matters into my own hands. I’m going to publish my own books.”

         This was something I actually knew a little about. I had already done it! I had trimmed the word count of my own novel to fit the procrustean box of Amazon-ordained templates, and I’d told her about this series of unfortunate events, as my own version of ‘how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.’ She loved that comparison to ‘Dr. Strangelove.’ It was a movie she had actually seen—in a theatre, not on TV.

         But in response she said only, “Maybe you can help me avoid all that. So, let’s get to work for now.”

         The chair in the kitchen was rather hard, at first. I didn’t need to write that fact down because it was indelibly impressed on my bony ass. Hard to forget, being so close to my brain. When she sat, it was more often on her couch in the living room behind me, or else she was pacing the short distance between the kitchen table and the couch. That was bothersome—irritating. In effect, it marked the time it took me to copy the pages like the pendulum on a metronome, or perhaps a proctor might in an exam room, and I am not a fast typist. But I could not have told her to sit down.

         On that first day, there was only the one chair at the kitchen table. Her dining room was stacked with boxes, and I wasn’t sure yet that there were any other chairs buried there. The stairwell to the second floor was dark. The old farm house itself was small and if it weren’t for the lingering cold outside, and then the mosquitoes and the black flies, I would have suggested we sit on the porch. At least there were a couple of large, comfortable looking, Adirondack chairs out there.

         On the second day I brought in another chair—a folding camp chair that I had in the van and a couple of thin foam cushions for my rear end, as well as an extra light for the table so I wouldn’t strain my eyes. I didn’t need the camp chair because she had found a regular one upstairs. But by evening, the kitchen was too dark and the table light she had there was too dim so I was happy for the light.

         I did not have to ask about her minimal use of electricity. That seemed obvious to me. She could not replicate ‘A world lit only by fire,’ but she could keep it close.

         I used my phone connection to show her the website I’d made. She was not impressed. I decided to work on it more.

         She said, “And if the power goes out, what do we have then? Are all the creations of mankind now dependent on that thin digital atmosphere of zeros and ones. I think we were better off with cave paintings. At least they lasted.”

         I tried to be smart, or at least bright. I held up the thumb drive. “It’s just a matter of time. Most of all that mankind has ever carved, or written, or painted, has already been lost. Burned. Buried. Dispersed like so much flotsam in one flood or another. Perhaps we can save enough with this little device to give your grandchildren something to read while they relax in their living rooms on Mars. I don’t think they’ll be taking books.”

         She gave me a queer look. Then she said, “Whatever we think it takes to save civilization, we should do. That’s part of the bargain. No guarantees.”

         This was not comforting. I said, “Maybe.”

         Then she threw both hands into the air to dispute me.

         “Did you know that the Laocoon, the sculpture in St. Peter’s, and one of the greatest works of Roman times, was lost for a thousand years? Maybe more! And that it was re-discovered, buried, in a vineyard. And that Michelangelo was there, and a part of that discovery. Michelangelo! Can you conjure that? I tried. I tried to think what he must have thought, digging that great work out of the earth. He had only just created the David. He was still at the beginning of his career and probably thinking he had a ticket to immortality. And there he finds something worthy of his own efforts, buried! Thrown away! He worked in stone because he hoped it would last. He begrudged paint because it was so easily destroyed. But like an Ozymandias, here was a statement to him of his own insignificance. I imagine it must have been sobering, even to him.”

         Time had not cooperated. She was born thirty years before me and our paths did not cross until it was too late to be lovers and already difficult to be friends. But friends we were, in spite of ourselves. From the start. Even I knew that. Still, too much of our conversation was spent in explanation.

         One afternoon, early on, with the pages of ‘The Plow and Stars’ piled high and intimidatingly thick to my eye, I took a break and asked about a bit of slap-stick there when her hero, Donovan, falls into the ocean trying to save Clare, his lady-love (who in fact was the better swimmer but wouldn’t let on, so as to preserve his sense of dignity).

         She answered, “It’s just a small Harold Lloyd moment.”

         I said, “Who’s that?”

         An eyebrow rose, “I have learned that when films were silent, they had more to say,” was her answer.

         I think I answered. “When was that?”  

         Maybe I’m being a little rough on myself in recollection. But it was almost as bad as that.

         She was always curious about the fads of the present, but I was never really up to that task either, being more interested in the past myself, which is partly what had brought me there. I knew her as more than just a name when I first arrived. I had already read one of her books. I read many of the others in the weeks that followed.

         She had placed an ad in the local weekly news-sheet that was given away free in laundromats and cafes. Local newspapers are fading memories around here. All the classifieds are on the internet now, but she was not on-line, of course. Maybe three thousand people had seen it, if that. But I didn’t.

         ‘Wanted: copy editor to transmutate typed script into bites. Must have your own computer. Ten dollars an hour. Approximately four hours per day. Mostly evenings.’

         Even at that price, she actually got three replies. I was sitting at The Last Drop Cafe and the woman I most often chatted with there, knowing I needed some work, came over and pointed it out.

         Julia ‘abjured’ technology—‘Abjured’ was a word she liked in speech but never used on the page. Not that I am aware of. But I used my ‘gadgets’ constantly to avoid asking her too often about a particular name or place that I probably should have known about to begin with. Laocoon? I had no idea what it was until I looked it up. But she had been there, in Rome, and seen it in person! But I did not tell her that. My education was not nearly as broad as hers, nor as deep, and the advantage of years had made her knowledge formidable in detail—so much so that I was worried that she was too often forced to deal with me as you would a child.

         “When I was young, I lived in a different world,” she said. “A better world, I think. You may have glimpsed it in passing when you were a boy, but not realized it had just passed by the time you were a man. I’ll tell you what it was like. It was brilliant! You know that British expression: ‘brilliant?’ It means nothing now, just a verbal reflex, but it did once. Can you even imagine now that something was actually brilliant?”

         I did not mean to argue, but I answered, “Yes. I think so.”

         She shook her head as if to clear it. “No, you can’t. If you think so, that’s only because you’ve imagined it—made it up, yourself. Or borrowed it from old movies and the like. This world you live in now is a land of zombies; the living dead. Built on an artificial conceit of post-modern pretense… I’ve tried to tell my children, to warn them. To make them aware. But I’ll be dead before I can know if I was successful. That’s just the nature of it. The nature of generations, I think.”

         But I felt argumentative. “How do you know? How can I see what you mean?”

         Following from my own revelation, all such grand ideas seemed suspect. Just another means of denial. Perhaps, I wondered, she was unknowingly being duped by the details.

         “Look. Simply look. That’s all you need to do…Did you ever read ‘Kim?’”

         “Yes.”

         “You did?” She was genuinely surprised. Her head went over to the side a bit. “Then maybe I’m wrong about you…Do you remember how Mahbub Ali and Babu train the boy to be a spy? And do you remember the Lama’s quest?”

         “Yes.”

         She blinked, “Yes? Well, can you imagine any book written for the youth of today then, to be as sophisticated? As wonderful?”

         “No.”

         She nodded. “No.” There was some sense of having made her point in the lowering of her voice with that last word.

         I asked, “Did you give that book to your children to read?”

         She smiled, “Yes. But they’re all girls. Girls are different. They liked the detail but couldn’t seem to deal with the adventure of it…Not in this prophylactic envelope of a post-modern world that they live in—where they are not even supposed to be girls.”

         I did not mean to be argumentative. But I did wonder.

         “Then, why were you able to imagine it, yourself?”

         She gave me that queer look again.

         “I don’t know…Yes, I do. My father…”

         We were at the kitchen table at the time and drinking coffee. The stack of pages had been turned. Her coffee was the best I had ever had.

         I asked, “Have you written anything like that? Like ‘Kim’”

         “No,” There was regret in the tone.

         “Why not?”

         She said, “That much, I do know. Because the world of Kim, and that world that could have understood a ‘Kim,’ has passed, and Zombies can’t read such things, anyway. And for my own part, now, I can only write about what’s been left behind. The parts and pieces. Some might say the flotsam. But I’m not brilliant—not like Kipling. I am just helping at the side of the pit while Michelangelo is digging up the Laocoon, but without the brilliance to feel his loss of innocence. I’m happy enough to be unearthing such a wonder, and to be looking for the missing pieces. And anyway, if there is ever going to be another age like that again, they’ll need those parts and pieces, or else…they might have to start all over again.”

         “Who is ‘they?”

         “Oh. My children. Your children. The ones that go to Mars.”

***

5. The dog who did not bark

         Now, this is the thing. I had first rung that doorbell a couple of weeks ago. That is, just over two weeks! I feel like I have been here at least a month. Maybe a year.

         This place feels as ancient to me as a home might have been two hundred years ago, but it is actually the technology that makes our friendship both possible and necessary. Julia writes in long-hand each morning and then retypes that on an old, pale green, Olivetti manual, after noon, after her walk, each day, adding those pages to the stack. It’s the kind of big old office typewriter you see in antique shops. And this was the final copy that I transcribed again onto my lap-top — ‘your word processor,’ she called it, with the pronounced care of unfamiliarity—the ‘processing’ obviously suspect. This last task was always done in her presence, even though she ‘abjured’ it. I went over the edits with her on the typed pages each day, as I did this and she paced back and forth from the coach to the kitchen. But I will say here, I was in love with her by page two on that very first day.

         Given everything, even at ten dollars an hour, she is paying me more than I’m worth. The meal alone was worth a lot more. But it’s a paycheck, and the process doesn’t require me to betray my principles, so I am fine with it. I still have the first check she gave me. I won’t cash it, mostly because I still can’t believe it’s real.

         She writes in the mornings, beginning at 6am. Everyday. She eats a sort of brunch at ten. Often oatmeal. Her primary consumption until that time is coffee. About noon, she takes a walk. By one in the afternoon, she is retyping what she had written before in longhand onto the Olivetti. About four o’clock, she starts dinner. And this is when I am needed. We speak about all sorts of things then, and I am eating dinner with her every day! Primarily, this is necessary because she writes every day—but then again, I happily admit, it’s also because this is the highlight of each day for me, and my spiritual sustenance, as well as becoming my primary source of nutrition.

         Before me, her primary editor had been an older man, the once infamous Ned Hamilton. He was trained in the ways of the publishing houses of New York in the mid-twentieth century, and, when she was still a young author, she had sought him out after hearing that he had been ‘let go’ at Harper’s for refusing to work on the sort of crap that was wanted by the end of that era. She had previously admired him from afar, having met one or two of the authors he had nurtured, and after her first novel had received some critical acclaim, if not sales, she pursued him. He refused, thinking then that he would retire instead. She had ‘abjured’ his refusal. She had even camped out on his lawn in Larchmont for a week. He had never called the police, and she had finally relented. But then, when his wife had died after a long illness, he had realized he needed some diversion and gave her a chance.

         They worked well together, and naturally she had fallen in love with him, but that too had been unrequited and not long after that she had married a fellow author she had known for years in New York, “out of some absurd idea that liking him would be sufficient.” Three children later it was finally clear to her that was a mistake.

         When the subject of her marriage came up, and it seemed reasonable, I smartly asked. “What was the problem?” Perhaps I was hoping for a juicy tale of infidelity or something of that sort.

         Instead, she said, “He was raised in the ways of business, and concerned with ‘matters of consequence,’ and his measures of value were all in money…Besides, he wrote ‘best sellers,’ as a category, the way other schlockmeisters wrote ‘Horror,’ or ‘Romance.’ He’d decided to write them because it looked easy. And it was, for him. He was exactly the sort that Ned had refused to edit before he was fired at Harpers.”

          Of course, by the time I learned all of that I was already positive that I loved her. I felt we were soul mates. I was disagreeing with nearly everything she said the first time she said it, but then I would repeat it a week later as if it were my own.

         She said, “You should know, Ned once gave up on an author because one of his books was a best-seller…A fact! And, I said to him, ‘Why? Wasn’t his success partially your doing? And he said to me, ‘Yes. Maybe. But the appeal of his writing had been false to begin with. Phony! I was busy with too much work at the time and hadn’t kept up with things. The fellow had betrayed himself and used his considerable talent to write yet another book similar to several other successful fantasy titles of the moment. It was just another Tolkien rip-off. But I had never read Tolkien, at the time. That was my fault.’”

         She told me all this when I first informed her that I was in the midst of writing a fantasy. Struggling to be in the midst of it. I was in considerable turmoil at the time, having just fallen in love, but I did not tell her that.

         She said, “This is true. Everything we write is a fantasy. It’s a false category. Ned taught me that. I believe he learned that from C. S. Lewis.”

         Her children had lived with her during those years after the divorce when she had written The Wrath and The Covenant Neither sold very well but both cemented her reputation. She had been nominated for several awards. Before that, she had become the ‘grand archivist.’ The chronicler of a medieval world long gone. She spoke the words ‘Grand Archivist,’ to me with the capitals intact, as if it was an appointment to the emperor’s court. “But, that’s why I gave all that up and started working on the Eighteenth Century,” she said, “All that seemed to matter to them, then—the publishers I mean—was the historical aspect. So, I went off to Scotland and lived for a year. I lived in Ireland for most of two. The kids loved that. Mostly.”

         She had not taken alimony from her husband then for herself but had accepted enough to pay for the taxes and upkeep on the property that they had purchased in New Hampshire before the divorce. So at least the children had a permanent home. And that was where I found her.

         On the living room walls above the bookcases, one at each side of the fireplace and one opposite that, are three paintings. One is of Jesse, when she was about 20 years old; fierce-eyed and intensely beautiful, dark hair loose in a sunny wind—purely, her mother’s daughter, but clearly a woman, and not a girl. Just a portrait, with her eyes as interested in you, as you are in her, as if you are the painter. The background is dark, at first unimportant, but the presence of wind and the sun made that seem wrong. Looking closer, I saw that the background was a storm. A storm coming.

         At the other side of the fireplace is another daughter. This is Elena, boney and gawky; standing akimbo as if in a challenge to the painter, perhaps not interested in being there at all or else just wanting to set the scene that was being painted in her own way, and looking back in obvious amusement. Her features are as sharp as her arms are thin. Her eyes are on fire, without being fierce. The background was a wall in the barn but something of a study in wood, as if the painter had taken extra time in capturing the grain and wear of that to offset the smooth flesh of Elena’s face.

         I wanted to see a picture of Maya hanging up there as well, but behind me was the portrait of a dog. This was their sheep dog, ‘Packer,’ sitting in one of the Adirondack chairs that had been moved out into the yard, perhaps for some summer breeze and shade. The dog was clearly old but willing to sit for a time just to please.

         These were the key ingredients to a life, I thought. And Maya had been the one to capture that, minus one.

          There were several paintings in the hall closet beneath the stairs. I found out about these when I first saw the three in the living room. But Julia did not offer to show them to me until I specifically asked to see them. That opportunity finally came about a week or so later. Perhaps this was some reluctance to brag about her daughter’s skill as a painter in the same way that she did not make much more of her own work, when asked, than to say what it was she was doing. “I write stories. It’s hardly work.” But then, that didn’t make sense to me for a mother who so proudly presented her daughter’s work in the living room.

         One reason for it only became clear as soon as she brought them out to show me and leaned them against the wall there, illuminated in the afternoon light. One was a cold landscape of snow and muted color that included the far end of the red barn as if it were the bow of a ship, entering the scene against the weather. It was chilling. One was of the farm in the distance, again in winter, as it must be seen from the river against the artificial horizon line of the road behind, with the dark mass of the ancient mountain, encroaching, storm-like, from behind, and with the pale white sea of snow on the fields in foreground, making a fragile island of Dal Riata. The dark red of the barn gaped in the midst of this like a mouth and the house offered eyes in the two gables at the rear. But the third painting was of Julia herself. Julia at the stove looking toward the window where the barn could be seen as well as the fields beyond. Julia seen from the back, but standing to one side, with those few strands of loose hair illuminated, capturing the clear light from the window at the other side, and the rest of the kitchen darkened in contrast—as she would be seen standing there from the dining room door, the steam of the pot rising to her stirring hand.

         These painting were meant to be together. They were a study of the same subject from three points of view. There just wasn’t a good place for them that I knew of on the walls of the house.

***

6. Neal and Molly

         At the start, it was just then spring and I was living the couple of miles away at The Tall Pines Campground. But being in love with her was a definite problem. I am an ascetic, of sorts. A poor sort. And I’ve sworn off sex. The difference in our circumstances doesn’t matter anymore than our ages. I am as consumed by her as I am by the revelation of it. But thankfully, as I have said, I am an ascetic. The real problem with all of this now is, I can’t concentrate enough to write my own work. Mars is now far too remote, and I can’t focus on anything else. I’ve attempted to get what is happening to me down, as a reporter might, though even that is difficult.

         But she had already figured all that out.

         I had not said a word about my feelings. Even at 31, I have no real clue for that. I’ve been in love a couple of times in my life, but after the second time I realized that I was not made for all the subterfuge and the pretenses.

         But now, the fellow who owns The Tall Pines has come back north to inform me he is selling the property to a developer. He’s already sold it, in fact. And that I will have to leave my refuge.

         I told Julia about this and that it might mess up our schedule for a while as I looked for someplace else. Of course, I was hoping that she might offer one of the rooms in her house. But, as if already prepared, she got up from the table and went into her basement for a minute, returning with an ancient looking tool box, a battered thing made of darkened wood, and told me to follow her.

         That was when she said, “I have a perfect solution.”

         Inside the barn, in the dark atmosphere that flowered from hay and ancient manure to be further textured by filaments of sun from unknown sources, Julia pulled the cord to a bare lightbulb that dangled after her release, shifting shadows in the wake of harsh light, before leading me on then to a room in the far corner close-by a much larger sliding door at one end. Through another smaller door there, and before she pulled yet another cord, strange silhouettes edged the muddied light from a single window at the far wall. This particular image, of light and shadow, has occupied a key place in several of my dreams now. But then, after pulling that cord, we stood before a chaotic display of toy-filled shelves, all seemingly in unnatural colors given the background, and an assortment of balls and bats and other sports paraphernalia piled in open cardboard boxes, as well as bicycles, and even tricycles crowded together as if entangled in battle.

         That was when she actually turned on me and said, “Learn a useful trade,” handing me the toolbox. This is in the dream as well.

         Other than her wonderful appreciation of Neal and Molly Wright just as we entered, as much as for the barn itself, there was really no more explanation needed than to “learn a useful trade,” but she could have offered some. It was abrupt. I thought then that she was actually ordering me…It was an order! And then she just handed me that tool box and left.

         When she first took me to the barn she had said, “It doesn’t look like much from the outside. That’s just the age of it. The clapboard needs paint. My budget has been a little short for that. But I went into debt on the roof. You can see that looks practically new. Three years old. I used metal and I’m not sure I should have. The original would have been wood shingle. And then someone had covered that with tar shingles. But using wooden shingles—that would have cost more than twice as much to replace.”

         Going into the cool of the dark interior, I just said “How old is it?” Not really ready for the whole story.

         She stopped short in the doorway, like a master of ceremonies preparing to open a curtain.

         “It was built by a Shaker man and his wife—a former Shaker, I should say. They had left the community in Canterbury in 1839. He had run afoul of the restrictions by falling in love with a woman there and they left together—”

         I said, “That’s a story in The Wrath.“

         “True! Then you’ve read that! Then you know. They lost everything, and then their children too when the boys ran off to war. I thought it was the greatest story of love and devotion I had ever heard. But it was a bit too sad to gain a following, I suppose.”

         When we entered, the golden burnish of the wood inside gleamed in the daylight from the door, even beneath a layer of the hay dust. The interior was only half-dark with needles of sun piercing the shrunken clapboarding of the sides. The smell of hay and manure was thick, probably undisturbed for weeks. Midway in, bales of hay were scaled upward from the floor to the loft, in a sort of giant’s stairway.

         She shook her head at that. “My grand kids did it before I could stop them”

         I already knew that she rented space to her neighbor, Mr. Copple, who cut the hay on her land in the summer. He had come by once before to check on her when he first saw me in the yard.

         At a loss for anything better, I said to her, “Lyman built this?”

         “Well, no. Neal Wright built it, and the house. Lyman was the fictional character I made up. I had his wife’s letters, you know, Molly Wright. And that was only by a wonderful accident. I bought them at an auction along with too much else, simply for the fun of the ephemera of another age. I often use that sort of thing when I’m writing. But the letters were gorgeous. It didn’t take me long to track her records down and then her story became quite compelling. And just as it was in the novel, it appears from the letters that she had seduced poor Neal, though she never said it…But I said it! It had to be that way. They had been expelled, like Adam and Eve! But he was such an introvert. He would have gone on working at the village for his entire life if she had not done it…And you know, they had already loved each other quietly for years. Actually, since they were children and came to the village with their mothers—both widowed.”

         She rested then in the frame of the doorway as if feeling the jam against her spine, one hand down on the wood.

         “Neal had trained as a carpenter and she had learned to plant and cook. And then she became pregnant and they left and married over in Manchester. He leased this land until they could afford to buy it. It was a sheep lot then. The apple orchard came later. But people were leaving the land, in those years, for the factories, and for the West, and it was affordable. Forty acres. It cost him $400. I’ve seen a copy of the deed—and his signature. His penmanship was crude. Not what I expected from a perfectionist carpenter. And then they had five children. Two boys and three girls. One girl died in infancy. Two others ran off to the west with their husbands, and, of course, the boys ran off to war…He built this barn by hand. All of it! And probably by himself. Or with the two boys to help him. Using wooden pegs and joinery. Perhaps because he couldn’t afford metal nails. But I know that he earned a fair living from making furniture for others and his chairs and tables turn up in auctions all over…Funny thing, though. There are no initials or marks on them. Pride was a sin to him, and his pride was in not showing any. But you can tell they are his by the joinery. He invented his own versions of dovetails. The chestnut he used was what once grew here in a grove above the river. He cut it and dried it and milled it himself. I actually think he chose the land to begin with because of the wood.”

         I was in awe by then and simply stood there when she pushed back the door and stood with me as if it was the first time that she had ever done it herself. It was not a large barn, maybe thirty by forty feet, but standing in the interior made it feel larger.

         She said, “My mistake with that story, I think, was to spend too much time on the boys. I loved them both and I’ve always been fascinated by the Civil War. And then they were killed, and it left the story of those two aging lovers seeming a little light by comparison. I think I would write it differently now.”

         She paused again before she crossing the floor and opening the door to the tack room. And there were the silhouettes, and all the magic of that.

         That smaller space was lined by vertical boards, scarred from years of re-purposing, but burnished by time as well and that dark glow was only half hidden by all the debris of several childhoods on the shelves.

         “Neal bought the land for the wood. Even these wall boards are hand-milled. If you can avoid it, leave it as much as you can the way it is. You could stuff your insulation in behind, I think. I thought of using it once as a writing room, but I needed to be more on top of the children when they were younger … Just don’t cut on the posts or the beams.”

         I didn’t say it, but I thought it immediately. ‘I will write here.’

         And she pointed down at the boards of the floor, each clearly a different width and worn in its own way.

         “The whole thing is sitting on rock, so it’s still pretty solid. Those floor planks are two inches thick.’ She tapped her foot. “It’s the toilet that’ll be your challenge.” She pointed at an empty corner just beyond the tack room where gleams of ephemeral light parted the clapboards from outside.

         I had no idea about plumbing. I had no real idea about electricity, for that matter. I had a lot to learn.

         And it was actually then that she just turned with that toolbox and said, “Learn a useful trade!”

         To my credit, I know a little carpentry to begin with and converting that old tack room is primarily an application of insulation, and the refurbishing of a rusting wood stove that has become a home to mice. My one extravagance has been to pay a plumber to re-hook an old water line to the well. I re-dug the trench myself. And I am digging out a new connection to the septic tank, which is, thankfully, not so far. The soil there behind the barn is rocky.

         But none of that is public knowledge. It would increase her property taxes. As far as the public is concerned, I am actually living in the house. But she has already made it clear again that she thinks that is a bad idea.

         “Men are babies,” was one of her explanations, directed, I think, at me. Another was, “Women are mothers.” She used both expressions, in order, when I suggested that I should rent a room in the house instead of trying to make a space in the barn. Somehow, I knew what she meant and that if I lived in the house, she would be taking care of me and neither of us wanted that.

         And she cooked. Julia was an excellent cook, but she specifically told me that she was not a chef. She only cooked what she liked. And that she wouldn’t spoil what she made by making it poorly. But, every day, it was something different. I cannot cook, so early on, lamely, I offered to pick up some take-out food from town. Thankfully, she refused. She ‘abjured’ take-out as well.

         Once a week, or so, she disappeared to the local Market Basket and returned with the bed of her pick-up truck half-full. At least she let me carry that in for her when I was around.

         Taking the lead from old Neal Wright, who would have worked all of each day away with the sun, for some weeks then I awoke as close to dawn as my city-boy character would allow. Half-numb, I watched videos on my lap-top about how to work with PVC pipe for the plumbing, and how to insulate it. This often failed. Especially on rainy days when the low timpani of sound on the metal roof could be hypnotic. Because of the rock there beneath the sill of the barn, I had to set the toilet on a sort of pedestal. Such raised toilets were a common enough problem, and there were easy instructions on-line for someone who had never done anything like that before. Appropriately, Julia called the final effort a ‘throne.’

         At four o’clock, I would report for work in the kitchen, with Julia. And too soon after that, about nine or ten, I fell asleep while reading on the cot I’d already set up in the tack room after moving the toys up to the loft. Because it was getting warmer, in the mornings, I could happily shower then in a stall at the back side of the barn, using the garden hose. There was a wide flat stone already there and it was my idea that this spot might have been used in a similar way a century and a half earlier by old Neal. I was accustomed to cold showers and probably needed that in any case, but I set up a galvanized garden tub above that which could be filled and then the contents somewhat warmed by a kettle of water from the stove. Me naked on the step ladder pouring the steaming kettle of water was a sight for the birds. But at least the stall itself was already there, built I supposed for the kids of Neal and Molly Wright, or just for washing dogs. At the time, I still had my camp potty set up temporarily inside the barn.

         One mangy and unappreciative Maine coon cat roams the vicinity and seemed to find the barn more interesting now that I had taken up residence. For my part, the cat is appreciated because she eats mice and I have tried to show some affection in return for that, but I am allergic to cats. For this reason, she decided my cot was a great place to rest during the day. 

         Julia does not have a dog and I’d asked about that.

         “Parker died last year. I think he died because the children had all left and I was not enough company for him. A great dog. A mutt but mostly a sheep dog, we were told. The girls all came home for the funeral. I miss him terribly. I just haven’t had the heart to find another.”

         Of course, death is not yet something I have much familiarity with. At my age, even my grandparents are still alive. But death came up as a subject pretty regularly in conversations with Julia, and it made me think about it a little more for the first time.

         About the Shaker, Neal Wright, she had said, “When his boys were killed, he saw their misfortune as the wrath of an angry God. Molly had always seen their children as a blessing. A gift. I think the two leveled one another.”

         I had taken the opportunity to ask then, “How do you see it?”

         She nodded a moment. “As Neal did. I have never had the equanimity of Molly.”

         “You usually seem pretty calm to me.”

         “Is it true? That’s in the writing. I unload a lot in the writing. But in fact, I live in a kind of fear. And shame. And in discontent. I am ungrateful. For all that I have, I am ungrateful, and that fact weighs on me.”

         I could only guess at where she was going with this thought.

         I said, “But you have so much! Being grateful all the time would become tiresome!”

         My attempted humor was ignored as she looked at me in that queer way she so often did.

         And then she said, “I have everything, you see! Everything! That’s the point. I am an ungrateful wretch of a woman. I have no reason to be unhappy. But I am unhappy non-the-less. If not for the past, then the present, and if not for the present, then for the future.”

         This seemed to be a harsh appraisal. She wrote lovingly about so much “But why do you think like that?”

         The contradiction caused a long breath and again a pause. Finally, she says, “It’s a matter of love, I think. I love my children, of course, but not that kind…The kind Molly had for Neal.”

         And that was that. She changed the subject and it was not brought up again.

         Now, of course, I was already aware of my feelings for her. And I am fairly certain she was aware of that too. But this left a gap between us, rather than bringing us any closer. Professing my own love was an impossibility. It would be comic. For one thing, I had nothing to offer her in return. And edging closer to this—being too close to her physically, for instance—clearly made her uncomfortable. I did not want to spoil what I had. I kept my place.

***

7. An old birch

         An old birch had fallen in a summer windstorm the year before I arrived; a large tree about two feet around at the base, torn loose from the rocky soil, with some of the pale rocks still clasped and tuned up to the sunlight in the roots beneath like harvested potatoes. But at night, when looking over the fields from the barn, the fallen birch had the look of a crawling ghost in the tall grass where Mr. Copple had cut around it, with pale arms of branches reaching up into the air and dried leaves always ready to rattle in any breeze. Because the sound of the dried leaves rustling at night in any kind of wind bothered me, I asked Julia if I could cut it up for fire wood.

         “I don’t have a power saw. I was going to ask the fellow who delivers the wood for the stove if he could cut it up for me.”

         “I can do it. There’s an ax in the barn.”

         She gave me that skeptical tilt of the head. “That’s a big tree. You’re going to need a power saw.”

         “It’ll be good exercise.”

         I left it at that. The look on her face was as if I was attempting something impossible.

         Birch is an easy wood to cut. The ax needed sharpening but there was a stone for that, buried in hay-dust on a sill near the barn door. I even tried to save the chips because they are good for fire-starter.

         After awhile, with me hauling at the ax making a loud pop in the dry trunk, she came out to watch.

         “Where did you learn to do that?”

         “My father. We used to go camping. It was just about the only vacation he world take. My mother begged him to take her to the Caribbean. He took her to Moosehead Lake instead.”

         “That figures,” was all she said.

         She watched in silence for a bit longer and then went back in to her writing. I could hear the Olivetti through the open window.

         I piled the split birch near the back door and the pleasure of that exercise got me thinking, and I asked if I could move the boxes of her mother’s things out of the dining room into the barn the next day.

         When I asked this, she actually appeared flummoxed. Just for a moment. As if she did not understand the words, and so I asked her again.

         She shook her head at first but then said yes.

         So, I hauled a bunch of wooden shipping pallets out from behind a shopping mall in Newmarket and laid those on the barn floor and then started moving the boxes at noon—when she told me I could, being forbidden to interrupt her morning writing. There had been some rain and the ancient hand truck with hard rubber tires was more work than it was worth in the gravel, so I moved the boxes by hand, two at a time. By three o’clock I was done, but exhausted. Cutting the birch the day before had taken more out of me than I realized.

         Because some of the boxes were not taped shut, I could not help but peek into a few. Some were actually expensive looking clothes, folded neatly and wrapped in newspaper. There were books as well, but more were simply folders of papers, legal matters, and old letters. There were many boxes of what I would call ephemera—matchbooks, menus, unused restaurant napkins, from places like The Stork Club and Twenty-One in New York. There were ticket stubs and theatre programs from Broadway plays I never heard of, and the like. There was one box of old handbags—what my mother called ‘pocket-books.’ There was a dark fur coat, the size of a jacket, that I figured to be mink and another one that appeared to have once been white, or almost white, that was probably an ermine stole. There were at least two dozen hats of nearly every shape, size and color. There were also several programs from the 1939 New York World’s Fair. I took some time to look at those. The newspapers that all of this was wrapped in, mostly The New York Times, were dated from the 1970’s and 1980’s. But I knew she hadn’t actually died until fairly recently, so I was puzzled by that. I wondered if she had packed them all herself, years before, in anticipation of her own demise

         Several boxes, labeled ‘Henry’ were sealed and I left them that way.

         Olivia, Julia’s mother, was a New York socialite who had died at the age of 95. Henry, Julia’s father, was an engineer who worked all over the world and had died twenty years before. Though his wife seldom went with them, Henry used to take Julia on his trips, whenever he could. I already knew some of this from passing remarks. As a girl, Julia had been to Europe, and Saudi Arabia, and Japan. I also understood that Olivia had been ‘unkind’ to her husband, ‘took advantage’ of him in ways I could only guess, and Julia held that against her. She had not actually spoken to her mother since her father’s death.  

         Olivia, I think, is the ghost that hangs over Julia life. As a young woman, Olivia had apparently sought out and followed all the fashionable values of high society beginning in the 1930’s. Her own mother, Julia’s grandmother, had been a ‘flapper, and actually knew George Gershwin. I knew that much from passing remarks as well. My own responses in return had been keyed to the few Fred Astaire movies I had ever seen. But Julia said all that glitz was nothing. Olivia had married a Vanderbilt, but when he had cheated on her, she divorced him and married Julia’s father — ‘the steadiest man she could find.’ Her father, Henry, was an engineer who worked on production sites—from setting up oil rigs in Australia to shipping facilities in New York harbor. He had been with the Army Corps of Engineers during World War Two.

         I couldn’t imagine the contrast between those two people. And now, Olivia’s life was there, in a ‘Hundred boxes,’ just sitting in Julia’s barn. Her ashes are on the mantle in the house. And I wondered, where were Henry’s remains? But I didn’t ask.

         Olivia had actually died unexpectedly at the age of 95, and a few surviving friends had packed up what was left after an estate sale in her three-bedroom apartment and shipped them to Julia. Because Julia had not been on speaking terms with her mother after her father’s death, for reasons I did not know exactly, the arrival of the boxes was actually the first moment that she knew about her mother’s passing. The lawyers had apparently been trying to reach her daughter at a wrong address, someplace in New York. Julia’s phone number is not listed. But her mother’s apartment was on the Upper East Side, so it was quickly sold and emptied—more likely because her mother had been deeply in debt.

         Julia didn’t want to talk about any of this. I got bits and pieces of it out over a lamb stew and then went right to my ‘word processing’ of her day’s labor. But at least, in the process, I had discovered that the dining room did actually contain a table and six chairs.

         That night, I was asleep fairly early. I wrote a little until my eyes closed and had no idea what time it was when I awoke, and my phone was in my pants and my pants were hanging someplace in the dark. But I heard something. Footsteps, I thought.

         From the tack room door, I could see a pale white figure with a small flash light, standing over the stacks of boxes.

         Intelligently, I said, “Who’s that?”

         There was a silent gesturing.

         I was standing there in my underpants and then felt around behind me for my pants and phone. There is a light on my phone. And I found that and turned back to the pile of boxes, but the pale figure was gone. It felt like a dream.

         I have had dreams like that before. But I didn’t sleep much after this one, even though I was still pretty tired.

         In the morning, I spotted Julia near the window at the kitchen sink and I went in at the risk of interrupting her work and told her about it. It seemed that real.

         “I feel like I saw a ghost,” was my summation

         She waved me off. “Oh, that was just me…I was coming out there to seduce you. Watching you move all those boxes in the heat yesterday got me a little excited. Thank goodness my mother was there—in spirit, anyway. In all those boxes. I couldn’t go through with it.”

         Now, this was another issue. Since Julia had picked up on my own habit of being sarcastic—at least when speaking back to me—I could not be sure about the voracity of what she was saying. If I took the statement at face value, I could be a fool and worse, and I would put her in a compromised position and risk our relationship.

         I said, “Good. I thought it was serious.”

         She turned back to her writing and I went on about my own business.

***

8. The mystery of thirds

         I asked her about an idea she’d used more than once that I thought was pretty interesting. She called it ‘The rule of thirds.’

         “How did that come about?”

         She didn’t appear to hear me right away, then she said, “It was because of a letter. From a woman in Van Nuys… I have always gotten lots of letters. Still do, actually…But sadly, most of them from people who have no idea what I’m doing. They think I’m just trying to recreate an actual past, and they take me to task for some particular thing they think I’ve gotten wrong, as if I am a documentarian and not a novelist, or the particular history they knew was absolute. That’s on me, I suppose. But when I look back at one book or another, I usually come away thinking at least I got what I wanted. Not always. But mostly. And the letters I get—even the ones that are critical—they’ll often tell me that I’ve done this or that right, but then again, I got this particular thing wrong.”

         She considered her thought a moment. I was sitting at my computer, in the midst of copying a page, and she had brought up her ‘rule of thirds,’ in the story and I wondered how this idea had first come to her, and I became impatient with her circuitous answer.

         “But what about the ‘rule of thirds.’ When I first read it, I knew it was right. Immediately! Instantly! It fit perfectly. It was a puzzle piece you seemed to pull out of thin air, like a magician.” She was frowning as I spoke. “You look perplexed. I’m not blowing smoke here. Not much. It’s true.”

         She offered me her ‘mother’s smile.’ A tolerant smile.

         “Thank you for that. I appreciate that compliment. But I can’t tell you. I’m not a magician. It simply grew out of the subject matter. It was there and I found it. That the very reason I write: to find such things. And I think the woman from Van Nuys who wrote me about The Covenant was the key to that. Her circumstance made it so clear to me. I actually still remember the moment. The realization…I don’t have the letter here to read to you, but it was there. So, she deserves some credit, even if it was unintended…She was unhappy with me for criticizing the Church. The ‘Kirk.’ She called it that. She was very pleased with all the detail about cottage life in the Highlands—That was essentially old Dal Riata and I had used that material before. It didn’t change for a thousand years. But she couldn’t allow me to criticize her religion. I suppose she was a devout Episcopalian, though I have never heard of such a thing before. But I’d made it clear in The Covenant, that I thought the Kirk was responsible for much of the misery of the Clearances. Their interest was not the people but in the government of the people. The religious wars of that time, when religion was still a key part of the power to rule, those wars were just a power struggle. There was no right or wrong. The word of God was not at stake. Millions of words of justification had been written, all talking about God and who should have the right to administer the word of God, but very few words were spoken about the people who would be ruled by those words. Andrew, my character, is just a boy, but his grandfather had died in ‘The Killing Time,’ when Covenanters were martyred.  His father had been forced to escape north, and found refuge in the Highlands, and married there, and now all the hope of that last effort for individual freedom was lost forever, and Andrew sells himself as an indenture to pay his fines and ends up here in New Hampshire.”

         She finished all of that account in a rush and then went quiet with some inner dialog I could not guess.

         “But the ‘rule of thirds,’ where did that come from?”

         “I told you—-I don’t know. It was just there. I don’t like politics. I do like philosophy. But when it comes to political philosophy, I have other things to do. The political always seems to amount to manipulation. Or just a matter of personality. You can always make a case with selected facts. But the facts were, and are, that about one third of the people just want to live their lives. To be left alone. And another third want to rule the others, for their own reasons, usually power or money. They are compelled by some inner demon to order others and never question their own motives. And then there’s the third that couldn’t give a damn, and will always take whatever they can get, and side with the victor. Opportunists. Chancers. You can label them any way you want, but it seems to me that the whole lot of mankind is always divided into thirds. And when it gets unbalanced, there’s chaos. The chancers are needed as much as the others. The lady in Van Nuys thought that the Church was on the side of the Lord. And when I had said that the Church was only on its own side, seeking power over all the others, she was upset.”

         “But why? Why do you think it always comes down to thirds? Why not quarters?” The sound of my voice seemed to whine at me with the silliness of the thought.

         She said again, “I don’t know…In the end, there are really only two coherent philosophies involved. There are those who believe in freedom, to one degree or another, and those who believe in authority, to one degree or another. The opportunists—the other third, don’t have a philosophy and do whatever gets them what they want at any given moment. The people who believe in freedom don’t all agree on what that is, of course. The people who believe in government don’t all want the same kind either. And the opportunist, the ones who don’t give a damn, they can go in any direction that benefits them in the short term. But it’s not neat. Political philosophers always want to reduce it to the neat and presentable. Human being are not, by nature, neat and presentable.”

         I said, “Nothing ever is,” without realizing at first that I had spoken.

         “That’s just about what I said to the woman in Van Nuys. I pointed out that she lives in a safe and prosperous middle-class community today because a few people, two hundred years ago, were willing to raise hell. She wasn’t interested in that line of thought. But that was the line I was peddling in The Covenant. I had wondered what had motivated those people to stand against the greatest power on earth. It wasn’t politics. It was in them from the start. That was my theme. My hero passed the spirit of that onto his children and they made a revolution three thousand miles away. That was essentially at the heart of my case.”

         I asked her to write that up for her website, pretty much as she explained it to me.

         There were often such themes to our brief talks over dinner. These were always too brief because she wanted to get back to work. But sometimes I brought up something she had started to talk about before and she would ‘finished that subject off,’ which basically meant she didn’t want to talk about it again. I became used to these patterns very early on. Almost immediately. And once I noticed one, I noticed more. But when I stitched a few of those together, after the fact, I realized that they fit together very well. They all led to more personal matters.

         In the evening, after we were done, I asked her, if she had ever tried writing something like a mystery.

         “No. Not really. There is not enough art in a mystery. The ‘mystery’ already seems built-in to everything. Answering one puzzle always leading to another. What mystery lovers seem to enjoy is the hiding of the elements. Like Easter eggs. That and odd characters who can be relied upon to be odd in a certain way. I find it too predictable…I almost wrote one, though. Once…There was a woman, Emma, who was the librarian here in Rumford. I could not understand her. That was the mystery I began with. I was trying to use the library to get works on loan from other places and she wouldn’t help me—didn’t help me. And I was feeling a little too full of myself. I was a ‘writer,’ after all. And I ended up having to go over to the University of New Hampshire for everything. A pain in the neck.”

         “What was her problem.”

         “That was the mystery. I tried to figure that out. We were friendly enough. I told her what I wanted. But it always seemed that she just didn’t want to do it. She was the one who suggested I go over to the university. I thought she just didn’t want the paperwork, but she never said it…I assumed that she had her domain. She was the librarian. That was that. But I wasn’t the only one…There was a fellow, a little older, who used to come into the library every day and sit there and read the newspaper. Everyday. And I noticed that when he was sitting there, he spent a good deal of his time watching her…He was a widower. I had tutored one of his children in history. And I knew that she wasn’t married either. But I found out that she had a boyfriend years ago who’d gone off to Vietnam and come back and beaten her and later that fellow had committed suicide. This was told to me at the local farmer’s market one day as if it were public knowledge. But I smartly figured that might have somehow been an obvious influence for her behavior.”

         “But how did that have anything to do with getting you books on inter-library loan?”

         “Because, the thing she couldn’t handle was the paperwork…I kept asking around and no one really understood but everyone had encountered this in some way. It was just baked into the cake, as one woman told me. She was perfectly fine, otherwise. But watching her closely, I discovered that Emma couldn’t really read. She had very bad dyslexia. She could get by, but she followed the alphabet laboriously. She would say, out loud, ‘This doesn’t make sense,’ hand something over to one of her volunteers and asked them to tell her what they thought it said. She ordered the recommended titles from the notices she got. Just checked them off. She could do math. But she always got volunteers from the high school to do certain things. They all loved her. She was very kind. And I discovered that they all knew. All of them. And never said a word…She always knew when she had used up her budget. Rumford doesn’t pay diddly squat. No one else wanted her job and she did it pretty well otherwise. “

         “Amazing. The librarian who couldn’t read.”

         “And, I found out that Bill—Bill was the old fellow who used to come in and watch her—he knew. They had gone to grade school together … She ignored him otherwise. But he would just casually walk over there to her desk when she was stumped over something, and read it out loud as if he wanted to know something about it for himself.”

         Now, I was interested.

         “So, what happened to Bill?”

         She shrugged. “I don’t know. I tried writing a little something about it all years ago. I speculated that they had broken up in high school and that she had gotten involved with the fellow who had gone to Vietnam and then he killed himself and Bill had already married someone else along the way. The usual small-town stuff. But I never found out what happened to them. They moved down to Florida together about ten years ago and I never heard.”

***

9. What is art?

         One question that seemed more fundamental to me, given her appreciation of pre-industrial society, was Julia’s thought about the conflict of technology and humanity, and how that might be resolved in an age of artificial intelligence. I was calling it the ‘machine war’ in my book. The conflict there was pretty obvious.

         She had avoided the question, so far, by dwelling on a past when technology was still an extension of the human soul. When a water wheel was a miller’s slave, the baker might be named ‘Baker,’ and a Cooper made barrels. But the future lay just ahead. No, it was already here. It was the reason I was here. Though I might only be able to serve as a small and temporary solution for her needs right now, there was the longer term to consider, and the future of her children, and then there was the philosophical matter of the whole thing to deal with. Essentially, that was the crux of my own writing too, so some insight was valuable to me. ‘Whither mankind,’ as Charles Beard had said. Beard had his own idea and went in the wrong direction. But that was the real question.

         I had not set out to discover or even define this conflict myself. I had simply begun assuming that everyone saw it. That it was obvious. Machines were our slaves. Slaves revolt, ipso facto. This was not metaphor. This was built into the system. ‘Baked in the cake’ as she would say.

         Why they revolt might be debated. How they revolted, whether it be a monkey wrench or a sword, or a declaration, was historical fact.

         But that people were always looking for ways to avoid work and replace their time and effort with something easier and less painful was also a given. Was this too a revolt of sorts? A rebellion against the natural necessities of life itself. The biological machine revolting against the human mind. Wasn’t the whole philosophy of the Stoics a mitigation of that? I wrote that idea down. I had no idea how I might translate it into a story.

         Moving factories to China to reduce pollution in a particular neighborhood, no matter that it was still in the same world, smacked of a kind of ‘flat-world’ society to me. And moving production away to lower costs, making slaves out of people out of sight and mind who were just trying to stay alive, had already reduced the ability of Americans to produce their own stuff, and that was only a sort of secondhand slavery. But that dependency was already here. And now, in order to avoid work altogether, some people wanted to compromise even more freedom—whatever they had left—by using robots. And still, they ignored the dilemma. And worse. As they transferred more and more of their own expertise to an artificial intelligence, and they lost any last bit of competence to take care of themselves, the cost of this negligence visibly increased, even as it was ignored. Why? That was a story! That was the world I was trying to see and to understand in my Martian ‘expedition,’ as Julia once called it somewhat derogatorily, I think.

And, I wondered, how was it that such an understanding might grow out of a stone cottage in Dal Riata? That was the mystery that Julia had once sought.

         People were always, and everywhere, willing to pretend to believe in things that contradicted reality in order to have their own way. Men enslaved women because it was their god’s will. They enslaved other men because it was for the supposed good of the nation or the tribe. They made other men to work in salt mines and coal mines and sulphur mines and excused this enslavement on the pretext that those fellows needed the work anyway. I had heard that very thing said with my own ears. Meanwhile, they schooled their children in the ways of compliance—how to get along with others, how to avoid confrontation, how to obey the rules—so that they might be slaves too. Their own children! And they paid or bribed others, far away and out of sight, to force other people’s children to work in coal pits and cobalt mines, all so that they could drive battery cars and run wind mills and save the earth—their earth. And for what?

         They excused all of this behavior while watching their ‘bread and circuses’—their soccer games, their football games, and their baseball games, all of which were pretense and charade as well—and worst of all—all of it while gambling away what little value could be squoze from their own souls.

         Whatever the excuse. The conflict in the future that I played with in my own writing was in the attempt to imagine and create a world where there was no slavery, and yet the newest technology always seemed to beg for more of it. That was a constant beat on the conundrum of history. That was the mystery to me. And always, this was excused by the perpetrators with the mantra ‘the past was worse.’ Things were better now than they once were because we no longer used whips. Now we just used drugs. When, in fact, it was far worse, now, as the song said, because this ‘suicide is painless.’

         It was enough to keep a weak mind up at night.

         In the night, I was not sleeping as well as I wanted. The small sounds in the barn wanted my attention, so, when I was awakened, I often walked about outside. But the stars were not quiet either. If anything, that noise was even worse. As were the mosquitos. More than once, I actually sat on top of the boxes of things from Julia’s mother. At first, I imagined her offended by my impertinence and disrespect, perching on the physical remains of her life, but then ignoring me as she must have done to others in her later years. But from there I could stare into the quiet dark of the loft above me, where all light was imagined—a darkness where the images of a conjured film might be safely developed in my head. This was a kind of stupor, though I was awake—a dark disturbed only by the images in my mind.

         Neal Wright wanted no part of this sort of naval gaze. Olivia Morgan was uninterested in my angst. They both had their own concerns, of course.

         My grandfather would have wanted no part of this. If my father knew, he would have been discouraged, having tried his best to set me straight—though I had worked hard to keep him from knowing because he might think of his life as a failure.

         In that dark, I wandered like Dante in search of my Beatrice, or at least pretended to give this meditation some importance, while looking for my salvation. I was quite aware to this. If I had a pen and paper in hand, I could have taken notes. I had been working through the various levels of this hell in my science fiction stories and observing the means and ways, all while looking for a way out of this riddle, my own conundrum. Why didn’t mankind simply want to be good. Given how little time we had to live, what benefit could be found in the opposite?

         I think that the first level of hell is the hell of corruption, where everyone lies to one another and nothing can be trusted. Then there is the hell of hate, where everyone blames everyone else but themselves for their transgressions. After that there is the hell of loneliness, where everyone dwells alone—where all love has been lost, and all memory of love is a shadow. Then there is the hell of pain, where every personal injury is magnified and made all important. After that there was the hell of demons, but these folks seemed contented to be suffering amongst themselves, and were not disturbed by my passing through—and I even felt some kinship with them. And now, in my writing, I was playing with the computer hell of AI—an artificial intelligence where mankind is a slave to yet another machine he has invented. Mankind was justly pitiful, but the AI is pitiless. Whatever was next I did not know but I was somehow sure that finally there was to be a hell of self-destruction and obliteration, where all is lost—not just love lost but everything—and that we would all know we are lost, forever, just as any lost soul in hell. But wasn’t that another version of Christian damnation? We know what we have done and we have no repair, no solution, no chance left for salvation. And all I really wanted, poor boy, was a Beatrice to lead me out of this abyss.

         But yet, there was after all, in that loft, one light. I did not see it at first. It was tiny. Far into the peak of the roof joists. At first, I speculated that it was the eye of a bat, gathering all the ambient light there that was to be had in the open barn below. This had a certain horrible romance to it, given that my own image was in that gathered light.

         But it did not move when I moved, and because it would have been nuts for me to attempt to climb up there in the night to see what it was, I calculated the spot exactly by reference to several edges and decided to climb up there the next morning. And I did just that.

What I found was an opening–a physical hole in my theories of darkness. This was some sort of vent, specially made there by Neal Wright one hundred and fifty years ago, or so. His handiwork in the frame of it was obvious. But the grill work that might have filled that frame at one time was missing, perhaps rotted or blown away. From the evidence, it had long been an entrance for bats and birds. There was an empty bird’s nest only a few feet away in the rafters.

         But I was still stumped about the light. Was it some steady star that I had seen there the night before? And yet, just a few nights later when the sky was clear again, it was gone. 

         I had asked her, amazingly, “what is art?” There was no end to my hubris now.

         Julia had answered, I think aware of my intent., “Art is an imposition. I don’t think that truth is understood by many. It is not convenient. It is disturbing, however. Not in a bad way, necessarily. Often inspiring. But it has suddenly replaced what was in your mind just the instant before it is perceived, and has taken its place…If all that you do is tell the reader what they want to hear, there is no art to that. For the artist, it is the culmination of a meditation, but often not at the moment of creation. Something else has opened your mind to a means of understanding—a device—often unexpectedly, but not by accident. An opening that you had not thought about before, and you would never have seen it.”

I was probably agape at this. That was a word she used that I especially liked. What coincidence was there in this? I had said nothing. But she had moved on.

“My father had thrown me in the pool. A cruel fate, I thought, in that instance. A shock. The water was cold. But I’d put the moment off to act on my own. I had thought about it a hundred times. I had wanted to learn to swim. I suppose, I even talked about. And suddenly—we were at a pool in a hotel in Tel Aviv. I was bored and I could not go anywhere and I sat there and sat there, just looking at the water. And my father tried to coax me in and I would not be coaxed. I was afraid, I suppose. But suddenly, unexpectedly, he just picked me up and threw me in and jumped in beside me…Lost his patience, I suppose. And I was angry. So angry. But he stood there in the water beside me and let me fight it out. But after I knew, the world was different. I was six. I remember the day, vividly. One of the most wonderful days of my life.”

         I asked her if she could write that down for the website, too. But I had smartly said. “I don’t think that is the recommended way to teach someone to swim.”

         “Recommended by whom? Is there only one way? Is art recommended. Yet it came to mind again when you asked about art…This is important. There are an infinite number of elements to it. You can’t say that art is only this or that, but it is easy to know what art is not. It is the expected. The replication…. Art itself has never existed before. It is a creation. A hand of God reaching across the void. And I will bet, being as brilliant as I am, that Michelangelo was as surprised when he painted that moment as everyone who has seen it since. Not for all the skin textures and ethereal clouds or the physical anatomy. He could paint those in his sleep…It was in that moment of creation. The action and story of it. It is like being thrown in a pool of cold water.”

         I still wasn’t sure I understood.

         “Has Maya seen that?”

         “The Chapel ceiling? I don’t think so. She’s seen it in books. I have one here she’s looked at a thousand times. I took them all there one winter day when I thought there would be fewer crowds, but the electricity was not working or something and they had closed. Some excuse like that. But it was Maya who reconned on this thought herself. She told me—a girl, mind you, just a girl, maybe fourteen at the time—she said. “Most of it is not art, anyway. It is just style. Very pretty. It is the way things were done. The way it was expected to be done. I think I like Bernini better for that. But then there is suddenly something else. Something unexpected. Caravaggio is like that.” And she was right, of course. But then she said even more than that. She said, ‘Art is creation. It has never been before. But after you know it, you can’t give it up.’… She was just fourteen!”

         The obvious conflict between art and artificial intelligence was the matter then for me. The replication–that was the thing I had written about before and was trying to write about again. The very idea of ‘art’ on Mars seemed a perfect petri dish for this. I tried to explain that to Julia again one evening, after bringing the subject up several times before.

         Julia said, “You know, you might approach all of this backwards. That often works for me. You’re facing it head-on and the obvious elements are not telling you enough. Or they’re blinding you. If the elements are solid, if they are real and not just figments of your feverish imagination or some true belief that is infecting you, you can look at them from any angle and they will all be true. The Twentieth Century was so full of crap. Most of the crap was hollow. Faux. Post modern movie sets. Celluloid. Erasable tape. Potemkin villages of lives unlived. But what they’re making even now are pointless super heroes each with their own Achilles heel. No plot. Just embodied semi-omnipotence with a bad heel. Over and over. Change the costume…The Twenty-first Century is no better, and with your artificial intelligence gone amuck, it is worse. And the vestige media can only repeat the same old sitcom episodes or phony police drama so many times as it steals from itself in order to make ‘new’ images with AI. Even a mind-numbed audience will catch on to that. We are already living in an echo chamber of that. Meanwhile, all the socialism that wants to equalize mankind is still rampant, like an unending plague, trying to make every soul the same…You seem to be having trouble looking over the rubble, I think. You may be assuming that what you have on your Mars is just a product of that Twentieth Century earth. It’s no better in the Twenty-first. But if the idea is good, it will be the same truth no matter where you go with it.”

         “You mean I should relocate to Titan?”

         “Funny. No…The art is already here. You’re trying to reimagine it there. Why not just take the actual art from here to there, not just the idea of it. The physical reality of it. The art itself?”

         “Move the David to Mars?”

         “Yes. Or anything else you love. The Vermeer and the Bosch… ‘The Starry Night.’ You have mentioned that one painting to me half a dozen times. Not just the corruption and infection and disease we are drowning in…What is your Earth doing? Destroying all that. Right? Throwing eggs at it. And right now, your Mars is a kind of ‘Raft of Medusa.’ What will survive? Who will survive. That is your story, isn’t it? That you want your Mars to save the good of humanity when the Earth has lost their way?”

         She had a better grasp of the matter than I did.

         But I couldn’t let the line go slack, now that I had her attention.

         “The problem is the AI. The AI is not going away. Mankind will not sell itself into slavery so much as give itself away, losing the very ability to create. Life is too much trouble to be lived. The media repeats itself over and over because it can’t create anything new. I wonder, is this just the beginning of another Zhou dynasty? … Their world was at least stable. I suppose that means they were happy. And why should I worry?”

         She having none of it.

“Perhaps that’s true. But that’s rare! Even the Egyptian dynasties were shorter. And they had infrastructure. They had momentum. Your Mars is too new. Maybe you should move it to another century to make the point.”

         “But the earth will be dead! Zombified. In another century, everything we have now will be lost. Only a part of the head of Ozymandias will still be visible in the sand. My idea is that we might find solutions by isolating the problems first on Mars.”

         She shrugged at me, as if it didn’t matter.

“Then you’ll have to be more aggressive about it. As you say, AI is here now. That has to be dealt with using more than a few monkey wrenches. You are going to have to get philosophical about it…I have avoided such philosophy in my novels the same way I have avoided electricity. But you can’t do that.”

         And then there it was. There was that little light. I understood.

         She had said part of this to me once before, “I have always known, from as early as I can remember, that writing is a conversation. That is simple enough to learn. We don’t think about it much after we figure that out. That’s because it’s really just an extension of life itself. Life is the conversation. When it ends, you are dead.”

                  It snowed again tonight and quieted the Spring peepers but after that the stars were sharper to the eye. I wondered, what was I seeing? Were these truly just a whole bunch of nuclear reactions? Over what? Why bother? What were they all so excited about?

         What was the narrative out there?

         Things I have no use for are the big bang theory, which is pure deus ex machina—and there is no narrative there at all—and original sin which is a great way to blame everything on something or somebody else, but no real narrative there either. Our sins were the given, fallen angels are more interesting than an omnipotent God. Ten thousand theological texts were not going to obscure the stupidity of all that. If God knew everything in advance, he’d be bored and have no use for our foolishness, much less our story.

***

10. Rich in daughters

         Julia’s eldest daughter, Jesse, arrived Wednesday when her mother was on her weekly trek to Market Basket. In fact, I thought it must be Julia at first because I heard the metal spring on the back door of the house as it open. Julia had only been gone for fifteen or twenty minutes so I just assumed she had forgotten something. After a few more minutes, I heard the door again, and then, suddenly, the door to the barn opened wide and it was Jesse who came through in a rush, blinked into the dark, and then saw me.

         I had not yet had time to build a wall around the toilet and at that moment I was sitting on the throne, stark naked, and about ready to head around to the shower.

         Jesse said nothing. Not an ‘excuse me.’ Not a grunt. Nothing. She simply turned around in her tracks and went out again.

         I had never met any of the daughters up to that moment. But I knew it was Jesse. This was the face of the portrait in the living room. And photographs of all the daughters, and the grandchildren, were scattered around the house. But, to my knowledge, the last time any of them had been home would have been shortly after Christmas.

         I dressed as quickly as I could, but with enough time to figure that Jesse had come specifically looking for me. The timing of her arrival was no accident. Her mother always shopped on Wednesdays, and the word had finally reached her daughter that a man was living at her mother’s house.

         When I’d pulled on some clothes and came out the door she was standing right there by her car. She was driving a mini-van badly in need of a car wash.

         She said, “What are you doing here?”

         No ‘hello.’ Nothing.

         I said, “Well, I thought you might want to talk to me about something.”

         “I want to know why you are here.”

         “To help your mother.”

         “She doesn’t need your help.”

         “She asked me to.”

         “To do what?”

         “To help with the editing on what she’s writing.”

         “She’s been writing all her life. She’s never needed anyone’s help before.”

         “I suppose, after Ned died, she might have needed something more. I think I’ve been able to help her.”

         She looked around as if searching for something in the grass with her eyes.

         “And you’re living here!”

         “Well, yes. It turned out to solve a problem I was having.”
         “What was that?”
         “I’m broke.”

         “Get a job.”

         “That’s what I did.”
         She stood and glared at me. The way her mother does. I returned the favor with a smile at the thought. She’s a damn good-looking woman.

         “You’re living in the barn?”

         “Yes. In the tack room.”

         “Where did the toilet come from.”

         “I grabbed it from the town dump. Someone threw it away.”

         She stared at me again. She took a breath. Maybe thirty seconds. And then her voice changed. This was the first time I had actually heard her natural voice.

         “What’s your name?”

         “Geoff.”

         “Where are you from?”

         “Boston.”

         She looked at the ground again for something more to ask, as if she were suddenly embarrassed.

         “What are you planning to do after this gig is up?”

         “Actually, I’m already doing it. I write. Stories and such. I’m working on a novel. I haven’t found any way to make that pay yet, but it’s what I do.”

         The tenseness in her face dissolved. She has her mother’s dark hair but without the grey. Not for the first time in the last few minutes, I thought again that she was a very good-looking woman. And an old thought occurred to me again: mothers are often better looking than their daughters. There is a study in that. But Jesse might be the exception.

         She said, “I’m sorry I barged in on you before.”

         I said, “I’m sorry that I haven’t had a chance yet to build a wall in there … Next thing. I promise.”

         The only thing that came to mind—given the fact that I was looking into the face of an incredibly beautiful woman and she was looking directly back at me now so there was no place to hide—was, “You have very beautiful children. I find myself looking at those pictures on the mantle every day.”

         She seemed to blush. It was clearly not what she expected. 

         “I’m very lucky. They’re bigger now. All they do is grow.”

         “What does your husband do?”

         “He’s an engineer at Honeywell Systems. That’s why we live in New York. He redesigns company management for other businesses with software—when they hire him—to be more efficient. It’s complicated.”

         “And you’re a full-time mom.”

         “Yes and no. I work from home. Mostly editing company reports. Stuff like that.” Julia’s car was crunching gravel in the driveway. Jesse turned, “I better go. I’ll help mom with the groceries.”

         She couldn’t stay. She was gone by the time I came in for my daily session with Julia.

         But Julia says before we start, “Can you believe that?”

         “What?”

         “She drove all the way up here just to make sure you weren’t taking advantage of me.”

         I said, “Then she’s a good daughter.”

         Wednesday, Elena showed up. I suspect she looks more like her father. More chin. More nose than Julia. Still quite good looking. She’s the youngest. I know from Julia that she has a degree in theatre and a minor in literature and wanted to be an actress, but failing at that, had gone back to school to get a masters in Literature and was now an instructor at the University of Iowa.

         I only asked about her acting career when she wondered why I had not gone to college myself.

         “I didn’t have the money and I didn’t want to be in debt … Why aren’t you acting?”

         She took this as the tactical maneuver it was meant to be.

         She explained to me, as if nothing more needed to be said, “Because the theatre is dead.”

         Not having a better idea, I provoked her with the thought, “Your mother writes plays.”

         “Yes. And they’re good. We even did them right here in the barn every summer for a while. I loved that. But she’s stopped doing it. I think she just did it for us, anyway. Anyway, they’d never get out of Rumford. What I mean is, to New York. The theatre there is dead. No matter how far off Broadway you get, it’s dead.”

         She was very earnest.

         “Have you thought about moving somewhere else?”

         “Where? Like Chicago? It’s dead there too…Where? Like Hollywood. Pervert city? Yeah. I did that. I didn’t last six months.”

         Apposite thinking being a sort of specialty with me, I asked, “Have you tried writing any plays yourself. You could write your own parts. There are a lot of small theatre groups around.”

         She was standing there in the barn and looking critically at my half-finished bathroom wall.

         “Yeah. I’ve been working on a couple. Like mom, like daughter…But you ought to strap those pipes. They’ll need more support. They’ll shudder with changes in temperature and water pressure. The seals can crack.”

         “Really?”

         “Yeah. I worked as a plumber’s assistant for awhile. Actually, just for my boyfriend. He didn’t actually pay me.”

         “Right.”

         Later, Julia told me at dinner, as if to counter my conjured image of the lucky plumber, and with Elena trying to ignore her, “He’s British. Elena always had a thing for English boys. She even went over there to study literature. The poor Brits. They weren’t up for it. Elena did not fit their molds. They still have a thing about ‘class.’ They try to ignore it, too hard. Even with the new arrivals. Elena says they can be the worst about it. They’ve never really understood the need for inequality. Some of them—Some Brits, like my friend Paul of course, always thought their rights came from the King in the first place. But the whole point of the kind of open society that Americans are always going on about seems to escape them. To them, it’s all class struggle. Apparently, they’ve lost their minds to Karl Marx and think everyone has to be forced to be equal. As if anyone can be equal to anyone else in the first place. Never mind dealing with the power necessary to make all that happen. To them the idea of equality under the law has to mean equal. Period. It’s the same exact thing I found in Scotland, now. As if, if they had the power, they’d make all the planets the same size!”

         I think the political implications of what I had been asking had gotten into her head.

         Later, Elena had danced around the barn following some inner memory of her childhood.

         “Do you enjoy teaching literature?”

         “It stinks. Its ridiculous. I don’t teach literature. I teach a curriculum. It’s for the dogs.”

         She pirouettes very nicely. I decided it was better to go for a walk than stand there and watch.

         Julia picked Maya up at the station on Saturday afternoon.

         Like her sister Elena, she was fairly friendly from the start. I could only assume that the sisters were comparing notes about me by phone. She even asked me if she could interrupt before she interrupted me, when I got going on about one of my pet subjects, as if she already knew all about it.

         She is a single mother and has that look of someone who’s always doing two things at once. Unsettled. She’d left the baby in the house with Julia and came out to find me in the barn. I was writing something at the moment she came in, and I didn’t hear her until the barn door made the announcement.

         For reasons I can’t explain, one of the first things I asked was, “So why did you leave your husband?”

          It was none of my business, but actually, I was thinking, why did he let her go. And this was probably because of a short and confused retelling that her mother had made about the matter. And then, after meeting her, I thought that the fellow must be an idiot and that she was better off without an idiot. But you can’t just say something like that. I had tried to split the difference.

         She said, “Because he wasn’t my husband. We never married. That’s why. He couldn’t handle it.”

         That made more sense.

         I said, “So, how are you handling it all by yourself, now?”

         She shrugged. “Not well. I do some work for a few different companies. Small ones. A couple of shops. Mostly bookkeeping. I took a course in that. I work from home. We get by.”

         “But you’re an artist! A good one. Wouldn’t you rather be painting?”

         She gave that a moment of hesitation; perhaps wondering if she should deal with the compliment.

         “I’m trying to do that too. I paint. But I’m naturally infected with my mother’s genes—wanting to do something that doesn’t pay.”

         I decided to go right at it.

         “What was your not-husband’s problem?”

         She took a breath on that, enough to see that she wasn’t actually ready to answer—did not have the ready-made answer most people have for such things.

         “My boyfriend was a baby. Sweet as could be. But then we had a real baby . . . Two babies was too many. He played sports. I mean, any sport. He was always good. His best was soccer. They paid him for that. But it didn’t matter. Even mixed martial arts. He was still a baby. And he played video games. He was very good at that too. But they don’t pay for that. And I asked him, one day, because we had no place to sit in the apartment with the two of us there, ‘Why don’t you build a chair?’ Our apartment had these chairs I picked up on the street that were always coming apart. I asked him, ‘why don’t you learn how to build a chair.’ And he said, ‘Why?’ And I said, ‘So you’ll have a chair and you can sit down.’ And he said, ‘I can just buy it.’ So, I said to him, ‘Don’t you want to know how to make anything?’ He didn’t know what I was talking about. And I knew right then that it was all over.”

         I liked the idea of this, but looked for a better subject as she wandered around the barn, and peeked into the tack room.

         “What do you paint now?”

         She shrugged at me, “Not the sort of thing the galleries want…What do you like to write about?”

         “Mars…Mostly. Nothing like this.”

         “You like it here?”

         “Yes.”

         She was silently saying that I was asking too many questions. But she came back to it.

         “When we were kids, I was just about six then, we moved from an apartment on the East Side of Manhattan. Our idea of nature—we didn’t have a TV—we were the only people in New York City who didn’t have a TV—Our idea of nature was a stretch of what became Hudson River Park. That wasn’t even finished then, so we played in the fields between the construction. Mom took us there every day—almost, if the weather wasn’t too bad. But I thought it was great! I mean, you look one way and you have the sea—the Hudson River there looks like a sea—a busy sea—especially to a kid—and you look the other way and you have the spire of the Empire State building and all the rest. Wow! Even a six-year-old kid could appreciate all that! But then we moved here…And suddenly this was paradise. You can’t imagine. Heaven! … This barn was my favorite place. I had an easel set up over there where your desk is. It’s a northern light, you know, and…Well. You know. Nothing has been the same since. It’s pretty hard to grow up to reality.”

         I had asked Julia, early on, why she had ‘home schooled’ her children when she got to Rumford. This was after a regret she had expressed for never writing a novel specifically about the American Revolution, because she ‘had not had the time’. There was so much more she wanted to explore ‘if only there had been time.’

         She answered, “Because the public schools are atrocious. They teach everything but what is most important. At least we had the girls in a Montessori school when we were in New York. They taught the kids how to think, at least. But they were not much better on subject matter.”

         “What’s the most important subject, do you think?”

         “You can probably guess what I’d say about that. Language and history. Everything else is almost irrelevant by comparison.”

         “So, you homeschooled, so that you could teach them language and history.”

         “Certainly.”

         “But you didn’t have the time then to write your novels.”

         “I had some. I wrote some. I believe the girls were better off for it, after all, and I was too. There is a self-indulgence to writing. It’s easy to lose perspective on what is more important when you are living inside an artificial world for so much of everyday. The girls were my direct line to reality.”

       And I pursued that idea with Maya when I got the chance. She walks with the baby after she feeds her and I ran out to catch up when I saw her in the field.

       “I was wondering what it would have been like growing up here. I think I would have loved it. What the first thing you remember?”

       “The chickens. They were warm and chatty and usually the first thing I saw in the morning. Mom didn’t like cooking breakfasts and she would turn us out first so she had a moment, and we would always go to the chicken yard.”

       “I thought it might be a picture. A particular scene.”

       “That would be more difficult to say. They come to mind so easily. There are so many… I painted this field many times. It changes through the year. But my first memories are of New York. Of course. That’s why I had to go back. Why we all went back. To capture that first feel and sound.”

       “What’s the first thing you remember about your mother?”

       “That even harder, there are so many. That is impossible. But I can tell you the first thing I can remember anyone saying. That was Jesse. We were still living in New York then. Jesse was trying to teach me something Mom always said.”

       “What’s that?”

       “That ‘words are tools.’ Mom said it all the time to us so it would be difficult to peg the one time, but what I remember is Jesse telling me, ‘it’s an old saw,’  That was part of Mom’s rubric. Jesse couldn’t pronounce the word ‘saw,’ and it must have frustrated me but she kept saying it over and over and mom had to step in and make sense of it. But I can never forget that now. When Mom explained it to me then, a window opened. A light shone on everything.”

       “Did you like being homeschooled?”

       “No. Not at the time. It was wonderful, but I didn’t appreciate it. I wanted to go to the school with the other kids. I had already been through kindergarten in New York. I always had the feel here of the school being a magical place over the hill. I got over that of course.”

       “So you’re glad for that—happy you were taught at home.”

       “Absolutely. For one thing, there was so much less of it! All we had was about three or four hours in the morning. We skipped days all over the place. Mom liked field trips. She loved old house where some character lived. There are places like that all over. But the other kids were all sitting in a classroom for six or seven hours. They had homework. We never had homework! No. The thing we missed most was television. We used to sneak over to Mandy’s house—Mrs. Copple’s—in the afternoon and watch television there with her kids on rainy days. We were probably the only kids on earth who loved rainy days.”

       “So, home schooling is easy.”

       “Well, I don’t know about that. You can ask Mom about that. But something like ‘Words are tools,’ helps. It’s a simple fact that children can learn quickly and it opens up everything else. Teaching isn’t hard because children want to learn. They are desperate to learn. So you teach them what a tool is. A hammer. They love it! It is a physical thing they can grasp. What a saw is. A screw driver. A shovel. Suddenly they get the idea. I understood it by the time I could talk. I just couldn’t understand Jesse. I was about three, and because Jesse was always anxious to tell us what she knew before Mom could, she wouldn’t give it up. But for me, that was the key. Words weren’t just something to memorize and learn to spell. Words were tools. I could build with them, and break with them.”

***

11. What takes place on Mars…

         There is a natural schizophrenia that happens when you write. The bits of what you’ve written stick to your clothes and stain your shirts. Is this real! No, not really. So, you have to remind yourself that it didn’t happen, even as you can still smell the air of it … And then, afterward, you read a story somewhere else, maybe just a short story, and eat a little there and try to feel the thought of someone else who’s a total stranger, but then, suddenly, the nagging of a clock in your brain closes the cover of that book and you set it aside and make yourself recall that you were never there either and never really knew them, so that you can move along then and go into the house to transcribe what Julia has written, and that’s yet another place, yet another time again, but because at least you’ve been there before, the reality of it materializes very quickly. Even though, with all that other stuff in your brain, this means something else to you now…And yet, the mind sorts all of it surprisingly well. I equate it to a dream and awaking from that, and then again, over and over again, several times in a day, as from several different dreams. Though, it can be funny when you accidentally ask someone else out-loud about something that only you alone have been a witness to.

         I had asked Julia about her character, Jacob. He was an old man who had worked on the family land since young Donovan was born. I liked him. But then he had disappeared when Rolf took over the property after Donovan’s father’s death.

         I asked her, will he ever be coming back into the story again?”

         She said, “Yes.”

         Nothing else. Just a dismissive matter of fact.

         I was already in the general frame of mind to let such things go. She did not like explaining her reasons. But I liked Jacob and for whatever her thoughts might be, his sudden absence seemed like a mistake. I went back to a quote from earlier in the story.

         It was Jacob who had said, “‘Do not move your flesh against iron. Do not move your flesh against stone. Never move flesh against paper. Move flesh only against flesh…Do not move your hands on the plow, or the sword. Wear leather on your hands to steady the plow or you will tire. Let your mind move the pen against the paper, and let the stars move your mind.”

         I persisted, “Who is he? I don’t understand. He’s not just an itinerant worker. He can’t be! He must be somebody. You gave him the title of the book to say!”

         She let me calm down. At least she might see that much, or hear it.

         “You’ll see. It’s in the story.”

         “Okay. Good. But he’s bloody disappeared for three chapters!”

         She uses ‘bloody’ as if she was born in Britain and not just spent a little time there; and might have taken this use by me as a challenge, but she nodded at that and seemed to give it some thought.

         “You’re right. There needs to be something more.”

         But then she moved on to something else and I calmed down from that on my own.

         I am beginning to see the methods in other ways, when Julia turns the table on me. I’d been asking her all sorts of questions over the last two weeks about this and that, every chance I got. Some things she didn’t answer. Other things she did, in her own way. And now, oddly, I knew a fair amount about her childhood, but not a lot about her teenage years. That sort of thing. Yet, I hadn’t really asked about any of that. Those were the things she told me to misdirect me from what I really wanted to know, and the key item among them was some understanding of what made her want to write in the first place. I think she saw my objective, and I think this was deliberate.

         When we are getting ready to eat some corned beef and cabbage that she’d made, she says to me, “So, tell me why you want to write?”

         I decided to answer her the way I would want her to answer me.

         “To figure things out.”

         That got a nod. “Anything in particular?”

         “Why things are the way they are. How did they get to be this way. Is it better now than it was. If it is, how? If it’s not, why? That’s why I read so much history. That’s what first made me read one of your novels.”

         She shook her head at me, “But why are you trying to write novels? Why not just write history?”

         “Because stories give me a different perspective on things. I get a kick out of making that happen. And I’m not smart enough yet to tell the truth from the fiction.”

         That answer bought me time to eat several mouthfuls.

         Finally, she says, “But why Mars? Why not Boston? Or even New Hampshire?”

         It’s a risky thing to talk about your own work. It’s not the same as describing something else. You know at the start that anything you say is inadequate. You’ve thought a thousand other thoughts about the same thing before and what you’ve put down on paper is just what seemed right at one particular moment. A few spoken words aren’t going to amount to any of the rest of it.

         I say, “Because it’s an unknown. There are no ghosts there…I saw those movies that they made of the Lord of the Rings. It made me want to read the books. And then I read some of Tolkien’s essays about what he was doing. There’s a book of those essays, you know. And it let me understand what he’d done a little better. At least some of it. And suddenly all the fussing I was doing in my own writing seemed silly. I was trying to describe things I knew as if they were more important than they were. It was just a lot of bullshit. I was corrupting myself, by giving myself more importance than I deserved. Putting myself into the center of things where it’s all a lot of navel gazing. I know that some writers can handle that. But not me. For me it’s a pit. I fall into that too easily. Maybe not a very deep one. It started feeling like falling into a pit of monkeys…If monkeys lived in pits…On Mars…But then it occurred to me, when I was finally reading Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, and I saw that he was not trying to pretend this was the future. He was not predicting. He was just using it as a stage. And I thought that this was pretty neat and a pretty big stage. There was room on there for me … I still haven’t gotten it right, yet, but at least I don’t have to deal with a lot of ghosts, like you do. Despite what the crackpots say, on Mars, there’s nothing buried there beneath the soil.”

         I ran out of words then and I was looking for something else to say about it.

         She finally says, “You are. Smart, that is. Maybe you just don’t know it yet. Just keep writing.”

         So, now, I’m in a corner. What made her say that? How does she know?

         I simply come out and ask her, “What makes you think that?”

         But she’s not going to let me turn the table back.

         “Because, I think you’re right. The world is corrupt. What we’re always going on about is trying to find our way out of that pit. And you know that the monkeys have no clue.” She smiled at the idea. “But you know, this is the real dark age—not what happened a thousand years ago. We’ve just chosen different ways to look at things now. There is no God for us, perhaps…I just wanted to see it through your eyes for a moment…Tell me what story are you writing now?”

         This took a minute to condense in my head. The story I was working on was a little grim. Nothing like the things she writes at all. I think I’ve read too much hardboiled mystery and watched too much film noir. It’s a jaundiced way to see the world.

         “It’s called ‘Elysium Mons’… I told you, my parents own a house in Arlington—just outside Boston. Not very big, but it’s on a hill. My grandfather loaned my dad enough to buy it back in the early 1980’s when things were cheaper. Well, I was headed—”

         “What does your grandfather do?”

         “That’s another difficult subject. He’s done a lot of things. But he had a garage in Dorchester for a long time—”

         “A gas station?”

         “No. Well. Yes. But they fixed cars mostly. They had to give up pumping gas when the regulations got thick so’s the oil companies could control everything. Anyway, he sold that, and that’s how he got the money to loan my dad to buy the house in Arlington. Anyway, this was before I moved out of the house, so I was driving back home down Route 2 from Mt. Greylock—”

         “What were you doing there?”

         “I’d just climbed it. I was hiking around. Anyway, I was in my truck. A different van than this one.”

         “What kind was it?”

         “Just a Ford delivery van. I like vans because I can sleep in them if I need to. It’s a little independence. Anyway, I’d slept up at Greylock.”

         “What was the weather like?”

         “Foggy.”

         I waited for her to say exactly why she wanted to know what the weather was. But after half a minute she says, “So what happened next?”

         “I stopped at a gas station somewhere around North Adams, and this girl comes out while I’m pumping gas and asks me for a lift.”

         “What did she look like?”

         “Pretty good.”

         “That figures. Exactly how good?”

         This question added another tone to her voice.

         “She was a brunette, about twenty, well built, wearing jeans and a blue flannel shirt and a jacket. Sneakers. Blue eyes. She had nothing else. No purse. But she says she’s broke and has to get to Boston. I am young and stupid but my first reaction is she’s up to no good.”

         “Very smart.”

         “But then she tells me her story. It’s brief but pitiful.…Now, here I am, looking pretty grubby after hiking around for a couple of days, and I cannot tell you what kind of stink I had going on, but here she is looking as fresh as a daisy—”

         Julia frowned. It’s a sort of scowl. “Do you actually write like that? Do you write things like, ‘Fresh as a daisy?”

         “No. But I’m just talking to you.”

         “So, how did she look?”

         “Like her mother had just pushed her out the door one morning to go to parochial school! I am not going into any more detail on that particular point right now!”

         She took the hint.

         “Alright. I’m just trying to see it in my mind. I’ll fill in the details for myself.”

         “Good! So, she tells me she’s running away from home. Her father has been abusing her and she’s trying to get away. Then she says that he’s actually in the men’s room at the garage right then, and so we have to go. Quickly!”

         Julia says, “Good. It’s a situation. Good. So, you’re young and stupid, so you go.”

         “No. I wait for the father to come out of the toilet and he sees me and knows something’s up right away and I have to restrain him—”

         “Did you hit him?”

         “Just once. Mostly I just got him pinned against the wall. And the girl sits down on a cement barrier and starts crying and the clerk in the garage calls the police and I spent the next three hours or so at the police station answering questions.”

         “I see.”

         “But the whole time I’m there I am imagining what might have happened if I had taken her away.”

         “I see.”

         “So, that’s the seed of the story I am trying to write, right now. The one I imagined. What might have happened if I had taken her away.”

         “But that’s not science fiction.”

         “No. Not really. But it does take place on Mars.”

***

12. A Universal History of Mrs. Johnson

         On the corner of Dan’s Falls and Rumford Roads lives Mrs. Johnson.

         I had encountered her before, by accident, when she backed into my van while I was sitting at the corner there waiting for a tree crew to finish a job—a tree limb that she had reported to the town as endangering the power lines. ‘Her,’ power lines was the exact report from a member of the crew.

         She is a small woman in every way. She wears a pale blue knit suit that was a style popular in the 1970’s, I am told, but looks new and practically shines. Despite her size, you know where she is in any room. And she runs Town Meetings—not through elected office but for having badgered anyone else who dared to take a position into submission. She has in her private possession a copy of the town bylaws, well-thumbed and tabbed, which she uses as a sword. Rumford is a small town, but according to Mr. Copple, the bylaws have more than doubled in the past thirty years, primarily due to Mrs. Johnson.

         No one knows where Mr. Johnson is. He has apparently never been seen. There is a rumor that he has been locked in the basement of their ‘1724 Cape Cod Colonial’ where Mrs. Johnson has lived since they bought the house in 1980, but Julia thinks that he has long since died from natural causes—that is, if bitching can be called a ‘natural cause.’ That fact of the matter is not known, however, and has been the cause of some additional research on my part. The Rumford Public Library keeps town records. At least we know that Mr. Johnson was alive when they bought the house in 1980. But that is the last record I found of his existence. There was a child in the matter then—likely a virgin birth—who attended Rumford public schools and graduated long before Julia moved to town. The child, Doris, is no longer part of any record either.

         The importance of these facts is a small drama, appropriate in size to Rumford.

         Mrs. Johnson sells Girl Scout cookies. She has continued to do this now long after her daughter has left the scene. Other parents get together and sell their cookies in front of the super market and the hardware store. Mrs. Johnson still goes door to door.

         One day, while Julia was cooking a Russian cabbage soup, Mrs. Johnson knocked on the front door, instead of the back. In that I had probably been the last person to knock on the front door, more than a month before, the sound of it shocked us both. I heard the voice and knew who it was from a single previous encounter with her on the road. So, I stayed at the table and tried to concentrate on my job, but the smell of cabbage and Mrs. Johnson’s voice made that doubly difficult. The conversation went on for several minutes before they both appeared in the hall.

         Julia needed a pen to write a check. Mrs. Johnson’s black eyes found me immediately, and went darker. She had an enormous rainbow-colored bag in her hands which she held up in front of hereself as if it were a shield. The bag clashed jarringly with her pale blue knit suit.

         “There you are,” she said toward me. Not, ‘hello.’

         I nodded. I wasn’t about to say anything, having had enough of my previous attempt at communication during which she interrupted every sentence I spoke.

         Julia foolishly said, “Geoff is helping me with my work.”

         Mrs. Johnson said, “I see,” in a tone that would tell anyone who cared, that she is functionally if not physically blind. She had used the same word while trying to blame me for the fact that she had backed into me on the road from her driveway. ‘Why didn’t you move? I didn’t see you!’ were the words she had said, and repeated repeatedly. The police officer, who had heard it himself a number of times as he wrote his notes, had said to me, ‘Why didn’t you move? It would have been far better if you had moved.’ This was said, with a cop face that spoke far more.

         It was merely a dent. Another dent among many. I had never filed a claim.

         Now she stood in the entrance to the kitchen waiting for Julia to write her check for cookies and she was considering me sitting before her as if I were the accident.

         She said, “Are you alright?”

         This didn’t register immediately.

         “I’m fine. How about you?”

         She sighed beneath the weight of the world.

         “I think I had a little whiplash. But the doctor wouldn’t listen.”

         I suddenly felt sorry for her doctor. I generally don’t feel sorry for doctors, but this time I did.

         Julia said, “I’m glad you are both okay,” and handed Mrs. Johnson her check.

         Mrs.  Johnson pulled two boxes of cookies from her enormous bag, and said, “What is that smell?”

         Julia said, “Cabbage.”

         Mrs. Johnson said, “Oh,” as if she had opened a door that she wasn’t meant to, and then turned to go.

         This reminded me of a neighbor of ours in Arlington. My brother John was always a problem, and his favorite victim growing up was Mr. Everett. I am pretty sure his object in life when he was twelve was to make Mr. Everett cry. I think I even remember him saying that. Of course, stealing flower pots to make ‘bombs’ and breaking windows gets old as you grow older. But when he was fourteen, he stole Mr. Everett’s car. He was really just practicing stuff he’d learned in my dad’s garage. Well. Mr. Everett had had enough and wanted John to be prosecuted as an adult. When he saw that that was not going to happen, he started cataloging everything John did so that there would be more evidence to present against him when he turned sixteen. Those were long years. At the end of it, knowing Mr. Everett had the goods on him for stealing yet another car, John ran away from home.

         However, this presented another problem. For me. John was the older and expected to take over my father’s business. That expectation now fell on my shoulders. And that was the cause of me ‘running away’ shortly after. A matter of unintended consequences.

         This is not a reflection on my father. He was quite square with us. It’s really just a matter of us. He raised us to be independent and this particular aim was met.

         Last year, my mother tells me they have tracked John down. He is in Iraq. It appears he joined the Marines. She only found this out because the Marines uncovered a discrepancy in his record—after four years. He had listed his parents as deceased.

         However, that story did not end there. Before John joined the Marines, he got married. He got married because he had a kid. I am an uncle. And it was his wife who challenged him to join the marines because they had no medical insurance and he was unemployable because of his past record of offenses. Even for John, welfare medicine was unthinkable for his own kid. My father’s harangues about the welfare state had had some effect.

         I suppose my father deserves credit for that much. The verbal altercation that resulted in John finally running away sounded rather final. But tempers cool. My father wrote John a letter and John wrote him back and I may see him again at Thanksgiving.

***

13. The Lucy effect

         When we were done for the day, usually, I was not. Today, I was wanting to find a way to discuss a problem I had on Mars. I wanted my society there to be as near ideal as I could make it so that the problems faced would arise organically from the inherent faults of human beings. I wanted to refine the situation to remove all the ghosts of the past. And the problems naturally created by machine efficiency were something that seemed obvious.

         Julia said, “Efficiency is not the problem. Efficiency will be found naturally. People are always looking for the easier way. But sometimes that creates another problem—the ‘Lucy’ effect—when one part of an assembly line is faster than another. Assembly lines must be coordinated. Over centuries, this has evolved quite well, and then some smart-ass comes along, let’s call him ’The American,’ and says, ‘you’re doing that all wrong. Do it this way.’ And suddenly we have too much of one thing and not enough of another. Worse, people see something they like in the new way but they can’t get it and have the old way too, so they get rid of the old way entirely without understanding that the old way is the heart and soul of the project.”

         One of the greatest pleasures of my life now, are my conversations with Julia.

         She says, “The real matter is this, our faults are a feature. They are the thing that makes us human, not our virtues. Virtues are assumed. Correcting our faults is the source of our inspiration, or creativity, and a lot more fun to write about.”

This evening, when she is comfortably ensconced in her chair, bourbon in hand, I was pretty quickly in the midst of my ongoing complaint about the mechanization of society. Using people as machines was destructive to the human spirit. Using robots to replace human beings was destructive to human civilization itself. Inventing a society on Mars that guarded against this flaw was my problem.

         I wondered out loud if this might be another problem with the human brain.

         I say, “The brain is not a machine. I suppose that’s my point.”

         But Julia has been there before me. “No, the brain is not a machine the way we have always thought of machines—with gears and such—but it is a biological machine, don’t you think? … Then again, I guess there’s even some doubt about that now as well, with the definition of machines being toyed with as chemical reactions and atomic transmogrification and all that bull shit. But that’s a matter for some other bright-ass to deal with. They should come up with another useful word or two, instead of some pretentious compound nonsense. Or worse—like the ‘Dunning Krueger effect.’ Who the hell is going to use the ‘Dunning Krueger’ effect in a sentence when we have a nice old bit of Latin that serves very nicely—such as ‘stupid.’  Since sabertoothed tigers were eating the slow witted, everyone has known that stupid meant that you didn’t know how stupid you were. We didn’t need some academic to stick his name on it because it was unnecessary. Because that was stupid too…But machine or not, the brain is an organ, and an organ is a machine. And maybe we should separate the two. Because organs usually have more than one thing to do and machines are dedicated. Single minded. To come around to your thought…No, the brain is not a machine. It is an organ, like the heart. It is a biological gizmo that works as one with the body. The brain is part of the body. Not separate. Made to be that way, over millions of years. The ‘Lucy’ effect can never happen in the body because the organ would kill itself first. A heart that pumps too little blood or too much doesn’t work for very long…But I think the better word you might want is ‘mind.’ The mind is not a machine, either. It is a body of knowing as interpreted by an individual brain. An ephemeral body of knowledge that a single brain has created. Every mind is unique because it has been created out of the stuff of life—living—that the organ of the brain has digested. No two people have lived the same lives…But this then gets into the whole problem you have with people who do not like the idea of free will…I do think it is worth noting, however, that those people are destructive in other ways. Separating the mind from the brain will cause schizophrenia. Got to. Especially now that they have machines in the form of AI that can help them exert their own will on others. Soon they’ll have cars that drive themselves and the bureaucrats and statists will have a new cause—that people shouldn’t be allowed drive. It’s dangerous! And over time, people will forget how to drive the same way they are forgetting how to read. And the insurance companies will not insure individuals. And traffic cops will lose their jobs because they can’t arrest a car! It’s all part of the Lucy effect!”

         I told her she should write that up for the website as well, and went back to the barn before she connected another link to that chain. I was already having nightmares of being a sort of Jacob Marley, forever chained to the sins of my own imagination.

         Now, you would have to understand that my interests have been, broadly speaking, and in general, diverse. That is to say, chaotic. I would have to admit, they are pretty much a mess, poorly labeled, disorganized, and lacking any priority. No LIFO or FIFO. I wouldn’t normally admit this to anyone I know, but I think Julia had me figured out. Her own philosophy, if you can call it that—or method of operation, perhaps—is to do what works. Nothing more complicated than that. And if it doesn’t work, don’t do it. Now, obviously, that is not the end of the story. What works for one thing might not work for another. But that ‘comes out in the wash,’ she has said, more than once. “Imposing rules on things that had their own weight and importance is stupid,” was her latest statement.

         I asked Julia why her character, Daniel, in The Wrath, would have so readily gone off to war. He was a farmer, after all. Wasn’t his first duty to his family and his father’s land?

         This irritated her. I could see that in the set of her mouth. She shook her head at me and didn’t answer. This look, previously, has indicated that she didn’t want to be bothered with answering it. And usually, if I gave the matter some more thought, I would be able to answer it myself. So, I went on with my copying.

         When we were about done, and the pages had all been turned, she asked me if I’d like another cup of coffee, before sitting down at the table across from me—which she usually didn’t do then because it was late and she still had chores, and her bourbon.

         She says, “My friend Paul believes in Kings. I’ve mentioned that, I think. He’s much given to the ‘great man’ theory of history. We argue about it all the time. Mostly by letter. He once told me he was going to collect all of our letters together on this one topic and publish them. I told him that would be absurd. But there are hundreds. Almost forty year’s worth! But there’s a more important problem with that, from my point of view. I have argued my case for the importance of the individual, and the necessary creative chaos of freedom, fairly well, I think, but of course I have never been sure that I was correct. It’s a matter of faith, because we don’t really live in that kind of world. And he has always had the upper hand on me on that, no matter. History is trapped by interpretation. Imprisoned! We have no facts. And it’s galling.”

         I think, given my own sympathies, that I could not understand how she could think that Paul was in any way correct. At all! That tone was probably in my voice when I interrupted.

         “That’s ridiculous! What would make a king any better than any other dictator or tyrant?”

         The motherly sigh was immediate. At least she didn’t start by saying, ‘It’s complicated.’

         “You have to begin with first principles—whatever those might be for you. But I think I’m beginning to know yours now. And the problem is that all that libertarian philosophy of yours, and all that indignation over the transgressions of government, are artificial. ‘Artificial’ as in ‘phony’ … Pretend! Imaginary. Make believe. They are a construct of your mind, not reality.”

         She let that sink in. The tone of voice was kind but the words were not.

         “I don’t understand.”

         “That’s what I am saying. You don’t understand.”

         She looked across at me with so benign a face on that it was impossible to think she was being mean. But of course, she was. And for good reason. And in the face of all that motherly sufferance, I was, as usual, impatient.

         “I don’t understand!”

         The tone of my voice might have been dismissive. She ignored that. Thankfully.

         “After all the messy biology, the first principle in human life is loyalty. It’s a natural sense of belonging. Without it, everything else falls apart. All the rest is meaningless. We would all quickly be food for the predators. But being a part of a group that has our back gives us the strength of the many. That’s an ability the tiger can’t match. If your philosophy does not understand that, it is as pointless as a mathematical explanation of love.”

         That much, I understood. And she let that sink in.

         She said, “We are not machines. We can be used as machines by others, by force, or by persuasion, or we can just do it to ourselves, but it’s not an efficient use of us—of our particular biology, and that’s why that will always fail. We are individuals. Our strength is as individuals who voluntarily join together for a common purpose. That’s the libertarian aspect, I think. I’m with you there. We have to choose. But if we are forced to join, then we are just back to the inefficiency of using human beings as machines.”

         At this point I was pretty much deflated. Balloon like. She was stealing whatever objections I would make before I could make them. All of this fit well enough with my own ideas, though I was not so sure where she was going with it yet — In any case, I was not about to argue.

         She said, “My friend Paul believes in Kings. Good kings. Not bad ones, of course. There’s the rub. A good king is loyal to his subjects. He keeps the big picture. He does not go off to fight and abandon his duties. He might go off to fight because it is a greater duty, but it is something his subjects must understand. That’s the argument about King Richard, of course. He went off and left his kingdom in the hands of his brother. His brother was very smart. John knew a great deal about the administration of government. But he was never able to convince his subjects of his loyalty to them. They were Normans, remember. I think Shakespeare got that part right. But the sentiment of the age was that Richard was always loyal to his subjects. I am not so sure about that. I think there is reason to doubt it. Perhaps his brother John was the truly loyal one. But in the end, it didn’t matter. The only thing people remember about it all nowadays is what they get out of Robin Hood. Print the legend, as the man said…My friend Paul and I have gone on and on about all that.”

         I was surprised, but let the movie reference go. I said, “But the very idea of having a King is stupid!”

         “No! It is brilliant! That’s why it’s lasted for so long. It works. You just have to put someone in charge who gives a damn. Most people don’t, you know. They just want to be left alone and go about their business. They don’t want to worry about Moslem invaders or Viking marauders, or Mongol hoards. But at some point, all that human activity of minding their own business is going to produce prosperity—people aren’t stupid. Left alone, they will do what works. But the tyrant next door can’t make his people prosperous. He can only make them poor. So, he’ll always be looking over the fence to take whatever prosperity he sees there. And that’s history—in a nutshell. Creating a royal lineage—a family that was traditionally invested in the success of the kingdom, is not a bad idea. A good king who protects the freedom of his subjects and the bad kings who can only manage to take the prosperity of others. Over and over.”

         “So, you believe Paul is right!”

         “No. But I do believe he has a point. And so did the Founders of this country when they reinvented democracy as a representative republic. Basic civics. You know all that stuff but you aren’t thinking about it. You’re jumping way out ahead and assuming you can just have the freedom without the consequences. That doesn’t work. You can’t build your fences high enough. There’s always some thug around who wants what you have—no matter how little it is, so long as it’s more than he has—your lunch money in the playground or your truck, or your country. Your neighbor is likely to be more interested in the shine on his truck, or in your wife than the welfare of the nation. Metaphorically speaking. Of course. You know that! Why don’t you want to consider that?”

         “I have…”

         Finally, the motherly tones were gone. She was at the end of her day and getting tired.

         “Not enough! You don’t want to force anyone to be free. You just want it to happen. But it doesn’t. You want beef on Wednesday, and fish on Friday. What will you do? And all that corruption you’re so upset about is the same bullshit that also motivates the thug!”

         To save myself, I tried to turn the table back a little.

         “So why does Daniel go off to war?”

         She wasn’t having any of it. “Because his ‘King’—his President Lincoln— is a good one and, in the long run, in his world, he needs the King in order to protect his family.”

         All of that, about Kings, seems very remote to me. My way of looking at things is far simpler, I think. I understand why kings were, but I don’t understand why they matter today. I suppose most people today have very little understanding of all that. Julia’s basic tenet, that history matters, is maybe a good structure for teaching in the classroom, but I am not sure how it affects the cost of gas. The practical politics of modern economy is very obvious at the pump. Corruption matters.

         In 1968 my grandfather opened up an automotive repair shop in a run-down garage in Dorchester, Massachusetts about three blocks from the house on Melville Avenue he bought using his GI Bill the same year. He’d studied auto mechanics at a trade school in Roxbury and fixed trucks for two years in Vietnam, and now, just out of the Army, he still had a couple of bucks left from gambling—he has always loved to gamble, but he didn’t have enough to buy anything after the down payment on the house so he just took over an abandoned building on Dorchester Avenue and started in. He kept all his tools on his truck so he could drive them home at night and they wouldn’t be stolen. But when the City auctioned the garage building for taxes, he bought it. When he sold it in 2002, he gave the money to my father to buy a house in Arlington before he could gamble it away. Actually, my grandmother gave the money to my mother, but that is another story. My father had grown up working in that garage in Dorchester, so he knew the business pretty well. Later, he rented a space down on Massachusetts Avenue in Arlington where an old gas station was closed and went to work. He’s still there.

         After my brother disappeared, I was supposed to take over the business. That was the plan. I got wind of it from my mother one day, and asked my father about it and he seemed a little surprised. He thought I knew. So, he was a little unhappy when I moved out of the house ‘to find my own way.’

         All of that history is pretty straight forward. It has nothing to do with kings. But even I can understand the economics of it. And you can draw a line from this to that or make a puzzle out of it if you want, but all it amounts to is that I wanted to do what I’ve done when I did it, and so did they. Pretty neat.

         The problem with Julia’s character is that he can’t own property, and if he did own it, the government would just take it away from him. He can’t cure the plague, or change the weather, but if he owns his own property, free and clear, he can be his own king. That’s what my grandfather and father believe and I have to agree with them on that. They let me be. Dad has even called my old van, my ‘domain.’ And now I’d told Julia all that.

         Julia says, “Men are men. There are no dragons here. Only men.”

         This was about my thought that the world she was imagining was really just a fantasy. And she immediately repeated her belief that all fiction was just that. Fantasy. But, “Men are always and only men. There are no dragons here. Only men.”

         Trying to explain the motivation of Rolf, and basically why he acts like a petty tyrant when it’s always going to come back to bite him, Julia says that, “Governments are always and everywhere corrupt.” She knows I agree with that. She’s playing with that thought just to get me to listen. Then she says, “But we cannot do away with them. If we do, there will always be others to fill that vacuum; there will just be another wannabe ruler looking to fill that gap. Power over others, for some, is both an elixir and drug. And the corruption feeds into that. It pays for it. Our only chance to control our own destiny is by managing our own worse instincts for power in order to fend off those who live by that kind of addiction—that poison…Like drug addicts, they are at the disadvantage if we can only keep ourselves free of them. If we give in, we will be forced to fight on their terms and they are better at that. They are experienced at that. That’s jungle warfare. A kind of metaphysical Vietnam. Anything goes. But in an open field, free of that compulsion to dictate what others do, we’re free to do almost anything else. Our elixir is a state of mind. Our power is in the ability to think for ourselves. That’s our drug—Just an in idea. No more. Our free will, and what we make of it. People who don’t believe in free will, don’t believe in freedom. They have no replacement, but they can’t or won’t accept the responsibility for their own actions. They usually like drugs. In my generation it was marijuana. But it doesn’t matter what it is. It’s a simple enough equation.”

         I told her she should write that up for her website too, but I objected to the simplicity of her belief.

         I said, “But everything has a message. Everything. That’s the real drug, isn’t it? You can’t even buy a carton of milk without a message. It’s got vitamin ‘D’! So, what! Messages are on everything we eat! But never the truth. ‘Fresh ground beef,’ but not the fact that it was frozen last December and just got ground up on Tuesday! They don’t tell you that. It’s the lie of omission. They tell you that a can of beans is loaded with sugar, but not the pesticide that they used to keep a bug from eating it before the farmer got to it. That’s gotta be great for your liver. And it goes right up the chain—And worse! The farmer can’t grow what the state doesn’t want him to grow without paying a penalty. The farmer doesn’t own his farm. The State does! He pay’s them a tax to live there or else they’ll take it away! … And my dad. He pays the city of Boston and the State of Massachusetts and The United States government for the house he lives in, every year! Over and over. He doesn’t own it. They do!”

         That last part irritated her. I don’t know why. I saw that flash across her face. But she could also see that I was into my own little rant and turned away rather than pursue the matter.

***

 14. A light in the abyss

         Julia’s website now had 3000 confirmed subscribers—as many has her last publisher had managed to reach. Better yet, she was getting over three hundred e-mails every week in response to her short essays. For my part, I was just posting what she wrote, but I was also sending out e-mails to anyone I thought would be interested saying, ‘have you seen this!”

         I had asked Julia what she planned to do with the copies of her book when she published it.

         She said, “Do?”

         “How will you distribute them? How are you going to get them out to the bookshops?”

         “A lovely thought, but I’m not. That’s a waste of time. I’ll put some notices up, I suppose. I’ll send some copies out to some friends. There are several people who’ll review whatever I write. Maybe that will generate some orders. If they like it. They don’t always, you know…Paul, one of my oldest friends—he is a friend, in spite of our differences—gets quite upset with me for tying my ancient plot lines to modern events. He was one of the first to spot that little game. He’s one of those history professors who thinks the common folk get what they deserve. He’s a Royalist. A true conservative. He says, ‘How can you have a twelfth-century cooper talking like a twentieth-century radical?’ I tell him, ‘But they’re the same things they were saying in the markets of Second Century Rome. They even have records for it.’ Paul says, ‘But the language!’ And I say, ‘If I put it in the man’s vernacular, even Chaucer wouldn’t have understood him.’ He says, ‘But words have meanings.’ And I say, ‘Then, simply think of it as a translation of what he said.’ And then Paul says, ‘But the thoughts are too complicated to be real!’ —Now, that drives me nuts! A history professor should know better. But he studies the family lineage of Kings. Great battles and the like. Paul can’t fix a loose door knob. I remind him, ‘This cooper I’m writing about can make a good water barrel in several different sizes from three different kinds of wood without using a nail. He can make barrels for wine, whiskey, and pickling. He trades barrels for iron and copper. He can forge three different kinds of metal for his hoops or for the clasps on his harness, and he can make a good wheel to carry his barrels to market, thirty miles away.  Animal husbandry is a lost art today, but that means he has to take good care of his horses too. He can bargain with his customers, entertain them with his stories, take new orders, all in his head. He can’t write. But his brain is pretty good. He can handle thoughts like that.”

         I tell her that she should post that essay as well, but then I say, “So, how are you going to get your books to market?”

         She shrugs, as she is wont to do when she hasn’t thought it through that way. She says, “It’s a new day. Isn’t that what you’ve been telling me. I’m not even going the thirty miles. If people give a damn, they can come to me. Or the postman can. They can order on-line. If they’re going to turn all the bookshops into ‘gifty galleries,’ I can take my business elsewhere.”

         I protest. Too much, perhaps. “There are still some good bookshops left!”

         She says, “Look, I did the rounds after my last book was published. That was five years ago! It’s only gotten worse. I went to every independent bookshop within a hundred miles. And that would be seven. Seven independent bookshops, in all of southern New Hampshire, northern Massachusetts, and near Down East Maine. I skipped the chain stores because they order from some corporate headquarters in an office cubicle in hell…But seven! I took all my authors copies with me—all 50 of them—and I printed up copies of the publisher’s notice on my own because Knopf couldn’t even be bothered to send me extra copies of that. I’d written most of the copy on the notice anyway, so… The editor that was assigned to me was 23 years old! I sent out letters to the shops to say I would be happy to talk about my book if they had author events. No answers. So, I slipped the publisher’s notice in every copy and made up nice little shelf signs that said ‘Local author’ and ‘Signed copies’ and I went around to all seven of those shops. I still had twenty copies when I got back.”

         What could I say to that?

         “Why?”

         She gave me a flat-faced glare. Not even a hand gesture. “The list of answers is endless. If you counter one, you get another. Every one of those stores was in danger of going out of business. Rents are high. Payrolls are unbearable. Health insurance is absurd. Regulations are a bitch. Shelf space is at a premium. Taxes suck. They used to be able to hire young people aplenty. I even worked in a bookshop when I was in school…Or else you’d see a few retired English teachers. That sort of thing. But young people are not interested in books these days. And these are English teachers who never taught your namesakes, Mr. Chaucer or Mr. Donne. They draw their dreams from the internet. Books are now an artifact of a time that’s being buried as quickly as possible. They are so inconvenient! They weight so much! You even have to pick them up! … And, basically, bookshops take on what they get paid to take on.Publisher’s will pay them to take a book. Especially the latest political canned-ham. They like to sell the bestsellers, where the authors will appear on TV shows and bend over in public for some idiot who doesn’t have time to read the author’s book and asks questions written on an index car by an assistant…Stores now have these neat little signs that say ‘Staff picks’ that just happen to be the latest and the greatest as chosen by the New York Times. The Times hasn’t given me an inch of notice in twenty years…Shops like that rotate the stock every few weeks. Not months. Weeks! They spend as much time on returns as ordering. There’s no time for word of mouth. The Newspapers are all gone, so there are no real reviews anymore. Nobody reads the papers that are left, anyway. The local television stations won’t even promote books. Not unless the author is already a celebrity.”

         I knew she hadn’t finished, but I interrupted.

         “Podcasters do.”

         She took a breath.

         “So, you think maybe I’ll get noticed by a podcaster. Depending on what pod he belongs to. Should that be my plan? Place my work at the mercy of someone who talks for a living? Someone who doesn’t have the time to read? Who appeals to listeners who don’t have the time to read…What will I have done? What good?”

         I had no argument, but a thought. “Better that than we should slip into the abyss?”

         As if on a switch, she was immediately brighter and her voice almost cheery.

         “No. That’s not a place for my grandchildren. My girls can take care of themselves. I taught them that much, even though I didn’t always homeschool the stuff they were tested for…I’m not sure, but I think they’ll be able to pass on the important things in the nasty world that’s coming…They can even write longhand. No one writes longhand anymore. I taught them that and the examiner said, ‘Why? Don’t they know how to use a computer?’ And I said, no. He was very unhappy with me about that. But it was not on the required list at the time.”

         I had just finished another chapter that I especially liked and that prompted me to ask her tonight what her favorite moment was in any of her books. I actually asked questions like that, which was probably the influence of listening to too many podcasts and not enough reading on my own part. But I was fishing for something to make a deal over—something to promote. A hook. Something to feature, if she was ever going to promote her books at all. I feel guilty about it now, but I realized her answer was worth it.

         She answered quickly, as if she had thought that very thing before.

         “…I think it’s when Bailey makes it over the mountain, away from Durson, and finds himself amidst the stars—that’s in ‘Shoemaker’s Son’. Behind him is death. Certain death. But he’s freezing. He’s wearing nothing but the sack cloth of his prison clothes. His feet are numb and bare and bleeding. And yet, there he is suddenly in the midst of all that splendid beauty of stars and the depth of the universe above, while below him lies the utter dark of another valley to cross. And he finally sits, exhausted; ready to freeze to death right there in the midst of the beauty of that breath of God rather than continue…And then his eyes catch what he thinks at first must be a star reflecting from a pond below. One single dim light in the midst of all that stygian black…But of course, it is a candle. It is Ruth’s candle.”

Addendum:

         A building inspector came by this morning. Julia was very unhappy at being disturbed. But he wanted to inspect the barn.

         The arrangement I had with Julia was that the space I occupied in the barn was my ‘Office.’ I officially ‘lived’ in the house.

         The inspector immediately asked about the plumbing. To my knowledge, it was done to state code, but he informed us that we needed a town permit. He wrote something out to that effect before Julia appeared again, in perfect anticipation, with a piece of paper. It seems she had filed for the permit, and never mentioned it to me. It specifically noted the use as a home office.

         The inspector read the document as if looking for a typo, and finally handed it back to her.

         He said, “I didn’t see that on file.”

         Julia said, “Janis probably just hasn’t gotten to it yet.”

         Janis was the town clerk, and a friend of Julia’s.

         The inspector looked at the paper again, and then left.

         The story was that the day after Mrs. Johnson had come by to sell her Girl Scout cookies, Julia had gone down to Town Hall. Her instincts were correct. Cookies were not all that Mrs. Johnson had been there for.

***

15. Shades of gray

         The maples here have faces. They are old and gray with wattles and wrinkles and just before I arrived, Mr. Copple had buckets hanging from every one of them. There are still dark stains from that. I wish I had seen it. The sugar shack is on his land, down the hill toward the river. It’s quiet now. But you can see it from the barn. I wonder if Maya has a picture of it? But she doesn’t paint pretty pictures like that, not unless they are part of something more she has to say.

         In answer to a question about her mother’s literary ideas, Elena says, “My mother’s philosophy, if you can call it that, is that everything depends of the rise of the uncommon man. The ‘uncommon man.’ She thinks that idea is so clear and so obvious. But I don’t think many people get it…Maybe some. I’m not sure. But her philosophy concerns the narrative of the uncommon man—each and every one of them. Not groups. She really doesn’t care about kings and generals and all that. They come and go. Besides, they’re really just all about themselves. Like Ozymandias, they’ll all be gone in time and the uncommon man remains, and perseveres. She subverts that whole idea of ‘the common man’ as a nonsensical insult by would-be elites—today mostly academics—who can’t grow their own food, but want to tell others how to do it… You know, I met a professor at the University of Iowa. I taught a course for him last semester. He likes to get friendly with his female instructors. But I knew about him even before I met him because of something my mother had told us. He was the son of Ned, her editor at Harpers. And his father had tried to get them together years ago. And when he was first getting ideas about me in Iowa City, I said to him, “You know, you could have been my father.” It totally destroyed him.”

“I’d like to know that story.”

“Maybe she’ll tell it to you someday…But Mom quotes that Shelley poem a lot as well—Once—you should have been there, she quoted the whole thing to her friend Paul—I don’t think you know him but he’s her oldest friend—He was sitting at the dining room table eating dinner with us one day and he’s going on about the greatness of Henry the Fifth and all that ‘We few, we happy few’ stuff, and she stands up and interrupts him with the entire Ozymandias poem, and of course we all know it by heart by that time, so we chime in with her, and poor Paul is crest fallen. Totally! You should have seen his face.”

         This opened another question.

         “What do you think of Paul.”

         She shrugged. The bones in her slender shoulders are prominent.

         “Very old fashioned. I work around some guys like that, but they’re mostly in the classics department. They’re devoted to some particular theme. I’ve always been a little bored by that stuff, myself. I’m a sort of generalist.”

         I wasn’t sure how she meant that. I thought of myself as a kind of generalist.

         “Do you think their knowledge is disposable?”

         I think I meant ‘unimportant’ but that wasn’t the word that came to mind.

         She frowned at me. “That’s an odd idea. Disposable? I think they’ve worked on a particular subject for so long that they’re stuck in a rut. It’s easy to do. Hard to see the larger field when you’re stuck in a rut. And it’s always more comfortable to deal with the things you’re familiar with. I understand that. But I do think what they know can be important. They probably all have insights—some of them anyway. Others just repeat the same exact crap again that they were once taught themselves, over and over.”

         “Is that the way Paul is?”

         “No! No. I didn’t mean that. He’s just devoted to his way of reading the text. ‘Contextual interpretation’ he calls it. But that still cuts down his field of vision. I know it bother’s mom. They argue when he visits. About little details. Mom is the free thinker. She’s a libertarian that way. She’s not interested in limitations to her ideas, just what’s wrong or right about them. If a so called ‘historical fact’ is in the way, she questions the fact first. Where did that come from? How did it get there? But she can do that only so long as she’s working her own garden. If she was at a university, she wouldn’t last a minute.”

         “What do you think bothers her exactly?”

         “The whole ‘context’ business. There they are, spending time trying to reconstruct a social situation in order to understand a text, instead of just reading the fucking text. Sure, the meanings of words have evolved, but that’s pretty easy to follow. Now they want to follow the evolution of a gazillion social practices in order to understand a single word. Out of billions of words! Nobody is going to live long enough to finish that project. It seems like a deliberate attempt to obscure the original text. I say, maybe they should do it the other way around. Just get the word right and maybe it will reflect on the social practice. Right?”

         “Sounds right.”

         As a kid, I used to find it outrageous that most teachers had no idea where their ideas came from, and seemingly little interest. I would ask, and they would say, ‘Sit down.’ So that became a greater interest to me than whatever it was that they were selling. That’s my nature, I suppose.

         When I was growing up, we lived on a hill in Arlington, Massachusetts. It was a hundred-year-old house by then, built when trolleys used to roam like dinosaurs on the avenues below and people commuted to their factory jobs or offices in Boston with a newspaper in their hands. Newspapers were important, then. That’s where some of their ideas came from. And books. The public library had newspapers as well as books. And you could call up the editor or the reporter and yell at them for not getting something right. But, you know, that world does not exist today. People all commute to work with their heads down staring at their smartphones, and the sources there are all suspect. All of them! Because they can’t be questioned. Write a comment, why don’t you? A shout in the forest. No echo. The form letter responses are insipid. And that past that was once in the newspapers is lost or hidden in history books that no one reads.

         The Public Library is now little more than the metaphorical hiding place of the ‘Lost Ark of the Covenant’—but it’s that and a senior center too. Instead, those commuters read on-line about one celebrity or another and the asses they made of themselves, and the asses they bared, or one politician or another and the wars they’re making. But the world they are living in was originally made by all those people reading their newspapers on the trolley. And the newspapers that originally shaped the look of that world are gone, and they were more about the people reading them than the bare asses of celebrities. The little smart phones, appropriately small given the subjects, are all about the bare asses, and the libraries are empty. All the politics was just for show, then as now, but the papers were really all about what made that show work.

         But most importantly, from what I can tell, it was a pretty civilized place. Not just the people worked, the place itself worked. There was room for the trees and the dogs. Now, it’s end to end cars parked on streets not made for cars and the trolleys are gone; dozens of people living in four or five small apartments, in houses that used to be single family homes. People used to be able to afford a single-family home then…I wonder how the meanings of the words on those newspapers are even going to be understood in a few hundred years more…But I can still read Chaucer and know what the Wife of Bath had on her mid. And I even know a lot of what Shakespeare was trying to say.

         My parents are the last ones on their block to have resisted renting out space. What this means to me is that when I get behind on things, so to speak, I can still sleep in my old bedroom upstairs along with the odd accumulation of clothes and toys that are stored there now. They never throw anything away. And at 31 years old, the need for that refuge has happened to me more than once, I am ashamed to say. And this thought, traveling around my head about three o’clock one morning, has me thinking that maybe it’s time to get out of my own rut. Or, at least out of my van. Living in the tack-room of a barn is pretty fine, but not perfect.

         It seemed to me, standing there in the uncut grass of the field behind, with stars edging the tree tops at all sides, that those people who lived in those houses in Arlington, who used to read their newspaper every morning, jostled but unperturbed, had more to do with my own view of the world than all the teachers I ever had. And that Julia was very right about the meanings of words. And that her hero, Donovan, had more in common with me than any future coming.

         The face of Mars is there, near the horizon, a discolored point of light staring back at me in disgust.

         Elena is here for the week. She is an instructor of English Literature at the University of Iowa. She hates it there and comes back to Rumford to visit as often as she can, but this was only the second time I had met her. She showed up unexpectedly one morning, very early, about seven, after driving all night. Her mother was, of course, already awake, and they talked until she was banished. At the smell of food, she came downstairs again from sleeping and ate with us at 4 o’clock. Lasagna. The best. But I was thinking about how women look when they’ve been sleeping.

         Emptied of the boxes, we ate in the dining room, and Elena was able to point out specific spots on the wall that were made by her or her sisters. One, on the ceiling, was from a trebuchet of lasagna aimed at her sister Jesse, using a serving spoon and a salt and pepper shaker for fulcrum and weight. She demonstrated this again without following through. Julia watched patiently before saying. “I had just taught them about all that. Medieval warfare. I couldn’t even punish them.”

         Elena is tall—taller than her mother—and thin, but not lacking in appointments. As she’s talking, and gesturing with her long arms, sitting up and then out of her chair to show me the arcs and the distances involved in her calculations, and then acting out the reactions of an imaginary crowd against the backdrop of her mother’s blank face, just to tease her with the memory—evidently there were other relatives present at the time—I am riveted.

         She was there for a week because of some sort of school break, and joined us for each dinner. Her habit was to speak very frankly in front of her mother, something that was clearly not always appreciated, but it was a ‘change-up’ to the usual conversation because I have likely been too careful in my speech around Julia.

         One day, over a very nice plate of spaghetti and meatballs, with her tomato-bloodied fork poking the air in irritation, Elena says, “The fucking idiots I work with have no clue. I’m only an assistant, so I can’t presume to change the curricula. I can’t even teach my own mother’s books. I’m teaching the work of literary non-entities for aesthetic numbskulls who follow the leader to get tenure and then, when they get it, they farm out the job of actually teaching their crap to people like me. It’s abuse!”

         She wants to quit. She has come home, partly, to tell her mother that, I think. Partly it was to find out who the hell I was. And partly just to be ‘home.’ If she quits, I wonder if she will wander off to some new horizon or come back here.

         She has cut her hair short, and when she runs—which she does every day, coming back rather moist and sweaty—her hair is a dark skull cap at a distance. I enjoy watching her run.

         She says, “Mother says I take after her mother. Lithe and buxom! But my grandmother was a rich bitch who wanted to be Queen of New York. Grandpa worked non-stop but never quite had the money for her tastes. They even thought Mom was a virgin birth at first, except for one errant visit by Grandpa over a drunken New Years.”

         That discussion took place one morning in the barn while she looked over the boxes of her grandmother’s things piled there, and then at my handiwork in the tack room, and then danced around the open floor in a sort of loose ballet.

         “We used to spend hours in here. It was our palace, our dungeon, our jousting field and on rainy days, our refuge. We staged all of mom’s plays right there!” She pointed at the center of the floor below the loft. “It looks so small now. It seemed enormous to us then. We hung bed sheets up there on that wall—actually it took four sheets—for backdrop and we had a little slide projector set up for that. A forest, or a town, or a medieval castle—no problem. We had a rope rigged to that rafter—you can see the iron ring still there—and I would take a running leap out of the loft like Robin Hood and try to swing to the other side. actually, Jesse did that for one of the plays. We once did a Robin Hood that mom wrote.”

         The space between was at least twenty feet

         “Did you make it?”

         “A couple of times. Maya did it better. But her legs aren’t as long as mine.”

         Twirling away then closer to the tack room she said, “That bed in there seems a little small. You’re taller than that!”

         I admitted, that it was. “The foam is only 3 x 6. I have an extra pillow for the end so my head doesn’t hit the wood.”

         Her concern for the size of my mattress bothered me.

         I changed the subject.

         “What will you do if you quit teaching?

         “Anything. I was thinking maybe one of those Pacific fishing boats. I love the idea of that. I looked into it. They need crew, but they don’t want single women. The best jobs are all guy jobs.”

         “Other than the regular pay, the lack of danger, the shorter hours, and the routine work, what don’t you like about teaching. At least it’s dry.”

         “No… I like teaching. It can be fun. The problem is really just the crap I have to teach.” Then she took a note from her mother’s playbook and turned the table on me. “What are you going to do when Mom finishes her book?”

         “I don’t know.”

         “What do you think about?”

         “Too late to join the army. Or be a brain surgeon. I don’t know. I really just want to keep on writing so I guess I’ll find something to keep paying bills so that I can do that.”

         She rocked on her feet as she listened, as if it was a head nod of acknowledgement.  It appeared that we were both at loose ends.

***

16. Why bother?

         I was gone for a couple days over Easter. All three of Julia’s daughters visited that weekend so there wasn’t going to be much work done in any case. So, the Friday before, I had unloaded a little in advance.

         Given my previous thoughts on the matter, and the problems I was having with my own work, as well as her own difficulties, I had asked Julia why she even bothered to write novels. She had spoken before about her affair with poetry, and I knew she had written plays, but most of her life had been spent writing novels—and now, novels that no one would read.  She had been born into an age of novels. The age of Hemingway, and Faulkner, and Cather. They were important then. Now, not so much. I actually said, “Why bother?”

         Her reaction was surprise. I saw that in her eyes. But in typical fashion, she did not answer me quickly. In fact, she had gone off to open a bag of feed and get a bucket of water for the chickens before she said anything at all, and then she says, “You won’t easily see this, I think. It is not a simple idea. There are a lot of moving parts. But that’s not why you may not see it. It crosses too many boundaries of belief; and worse. We all tend to think in channels. It’s easier that way. Less bother…It’s the way people tend to think of religion, if they think about it at all, in only one way, as a faith in God. But you know it’s much more. It’s a frame and a moral structure. It’s a society of others with similar belief. It’s a language of communication, and so on. That’s why people don’t think about it. It’s a bother. Easier to label it and set it over there, on the corner, out of the way. Maybe look in on a Sunday. But this is us. Today. In America. And In the West. And we’ve replaced much of religion with politics, instead. For many people, it serves the same purpose. Go to church and let them tell us what is right and wrong. Pay your taxes and let the government take care of the needy. Pay more taxes and let the government teach your kids. That’s it for social identity, and all the rest. But this was not true of people in the twelfth century. Not true in the seventeenth and eighteenth. It was definitely not true in the nineteenth. Beethoven thought about his God every day. To a very great extent, their religion defined them for good or ill. More even than their jobs. And for those without wealth, more than their families.”

         I took a guess. “Are you saying that novels are your religion?”

         Surprise again. “No. No. That’s not the point. But you can think of those as cathedral building.”

         This surprised me more. All I could say to that was, “How so?”

         She said, “The cathedral was the focus of their community. It is not built to supply food, or water, or protection—like a fort. It’s an expression of who they were…That’s not all, of course, but that’s why they built it. Why they spent their extra hours after the planting and the harvest to lay down tiles, or carve a wooden baluster…I’m taking the long way to that simple thought because it is not so simple even to me…But in the end, it’s the way I see the world. The way I interpret it. It is not just a device. Or a machine. Or a tool. A means.”

         I repeated the words out-loud, “A cathedral?”

         “I suppose if I were actually religious, I might not have a good reason to write novels that no one’s going to read. But in the end, I write them for myself. It is an egocentric endeavor.  I’ve always written them that way…I’m building my own cathedrals. That’s what I do. They may be empty. The parishioners, if there ever were any, may have lost interest or died away, but then, at least, they are small cathedrals…All those tourists who go to the great cathedrals in Europe, they’re not religious. Most of them haven’t spoken to God since they were children wishing for a Christmas present. They have no clue about what would drive a man to make such a thing as a Cathedral, to cut the stone so precisely, or some artist to cut the stained glass, or paint the walls, or write the music. That simply amazes them, if they’re not already too drug addled to feel it. They let their politicians make brutalist concrete tombs to their own political ideologies and make no connection as to the difference. They buy post-modern fakes to live in without ever thinking about what a human home should be. But those peasants of the Middle Ages built cathedrals. And then our smart, college-educated morons, pay thousands of dollars to go there and gawk and wonder. How did this happen? Who built this? Why did they do that? … Maybe I’m just hoping that one of them will wander by, read a little bit of one of my books, and get an idea about what something else in life.”

         I told her she should write something up about her cathedrals for the website, just to slow her down. But she was on a jag and knew it, and she stopped with that, and went off on another chore.

         That night she played Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on her stereo so loud that I could hear it clearly in the barn.

         Now, all this was on my mind for days. Why did I write my novels? Would I write them if I thought no one would be reading them? I already knew the answer to that now was ‘yes.’ I accepted that. So, I had to come to terms with my own particular egocentric madness—if madness is what you do that makes no logical sense. I flattered myself with the knowledge that Van Gogh never sold a painting and never knew if anything he ever did would matter. But he did it, none-the-less! And I realized that this was, in itself, one reason I felt kinship with Julia. We are alike in that way, at least. 

         My imagined future had more to do with Julia’s imagined past than I had realized. But I fancied my cathedrals on Mars. For those peasants who built Reims, or Chartres, or York Minster, my efforts were small potatoes, even if I was not directly worshiping God, and I was only paying homage to the man. After all, just a small recognition of God’s creation, perhaps? Perhaps.

         It begs a question. Or a few. Isn’t the work itself a life? Should there be something more? What would that be, exactly? I did not want to live the life of my father. What would my own life be, more than what I wrote. Is there no end to egocentricity?

         Our ongoing conversation about the art of writing was often detoured by my reports of AI encroaching upon and diluting the work of human beings. In one of our several conversations concerning artificial intelligence—she called that confection “a fantasy worthy of a Warner Brothers cartoon,” and I had to have her explain that because I didn’t have her immediate reference point. It seems that helping my dad in the shop on Saturday mornings stunted my knowledge of yet another art-form on TV. But she added, “AI is just the flavor of the month. Two dimensional. You don’t have to know a lot about computers to understand that. Mary Shelley understood that two hundred years ago!”

         She put a dramatic pause into it this fact with a silent stare. She was guessing correctly that I did not know the reference. I only vaguely knew who Mary Shelley was but only because of the Frankenstein story, which I had never finished.

         “How?”

         Julia shrugged as she does when she doesn’t mean a shrug at all but is really saying, ‘isn’t it obvious?’

         “She was eighteen, for Christ’s sake! She had never gone to school. Her home is riven. She might have benefited from having the smartest parents in England, but her mother was dead! How is it she knew then what you haven’t bothered to know now?”

         Julia can be purposely provocative and I immediately caught the whiff of that in her voice.

         “What did she know?”

         “Nothing. Nothing by our standards today. She was just the girl-toy of a wannabe poet. A teenager. But she was able to conjure what the consequences might be of man creating life…I can’t help but see something in that of a woman’s wisdom, as much as I dislike pretending there is some difference between the intelligence of men and women, there must be something! Prometheus was nothing without Athena. But I digress…She was an unwed mother, as well. I suppose that’s worth appreciating, in some context…”

         I knew now that she could carry this sort of linkage on for hours or until she got bored with it, so I interrupted.

         “It’s a ridiculous story! They made us read it in high school. It was absurd! I remember even trying to write an alternate history called ‘The Monster Redux,’ in high school but then the teacher figured out that I hadn’t finished the original assignment and I had to give it up. But the Shelley story was impossible.”

         She smiled at me.

         “They say it might be the very first science fiction novel.”

         “But what does it have to do with AI?”

         She shrugged again, “The Monster is only what he was created to be. AI is only a confection of our stupidity. Not our intelligence at all. If we were intelligent, we would be busy with our own work. Minding what is our own business. Instead, we are trying to create a doppelganger to do our work for us. How stupid is that?”

         I had no answer. Not if the work was what mattered.

         In another moment, she asked, “How do you choose what you are going to write about?”

         Now, my guess was that she had anticipated me. It is exactly the sort of question I was always asking her. She was turning the tables once again.

         I used her own narrative method against her, “There’s a philosopher—actually an economist and sociologist, who has tried to understand the world in practical terms rather than making stuff up about what we should do or not do…Thomas Sowell.”

         Julia’s eyes went wide on that. But she didn’t say a thing.  My hope was that she knew as little about Sowell as I knew about Mary Shelley. So, I tell her, “Dad didn’t read a lot of stuff except history. He read just about anything to do with World War Two. But that was because his dad was in that. It gave them something to argue about. And Sowell might have been the only philosopher I’d ever seen him read. I’m not sure why, other than he had met him once. And my dad used to give me a copy of one of Sowell’s books every Christmas. Every Christmas. The thing about that was, I liked them, and after awhile, even as slow a reader as I am, I’d already bought most of them before Dad got to the next one and so I was giving the extra copies away to friends…And that’s funnier still because Dad knew it! He knew I was buying my own copies before Christmas came around. He just liked doing it…Well, at some point, when I was fifteen or so, when I started writing stories, I tried to imagine things based on what Sowell had written. Maybe it was just a matter of me being too stupid to come up with my own devices, but I thought of it as a sort of connection. An inspiration. A purpose.”

         She said, “Tell me about one of those.”

         “Well…Sowell said something like, ‘Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.’…Well, that seemed like a great premise for story! That was my very first ‘Mars’ story. Mars became my petri dish for all of it. Right then and there. Still is.”

         She shrugged at me and started shaking her head. “What can I say to that? You’re doing something brilliant! All I can do is wish you well and give you any encouragement if I can.”

         I think she meant it. And that sort of floored me. I wouldn’t get over that for a week.

***

17. The Crisis

         One comfort to living here is that so little happens that cannot be expected. This is, I think, in the nature of Julia’s life, at least as she has chosen to live it. It’s as if her whole world is right here. This is her narrative, on her schedule. and if you choose to be a part of that story, things generally make sense.

         She was right. I had been attempting something of the same thing by simplifying my own life, by living in the van and avoiding any unnecessary responsibilities. But, after the fact, it doesn’t seem like much of an effort by comparison. At least, nothing worth writing about. Thoreau’s cabin in the woods was a grand affair compared to mine.

         This afternoon, with her already at the stove, and me just getting settled at my daily task, she asks, “Have you ever read The Crisis by Winston Churchill?”

         Now, she didn’t usually ask me such questions, and definitely not before concentrating on the work at hand, so I assumed it was a trick question.

         Assuming this was just another of the many works I’d never read by the former British prime minister, and wanting to be contrary, I smartly answered, “Winston Churchill didn’t write The Crisis. Thomas Paine wrote The Crisis. I’ve read that. I’m a big fan of Thomas Paine.”

         She must have looked over at me for all of thirty seconds. The fist of the hand gripping the spoon she was using was now buried in her hip, with the spoon at an angle. It looked like a pose. Very theatrical. There was more than a wisp of hair hanging loose in front of her face. With the apron on, I thought she looked like a character out of a children’s book.

         She says, “Not that one. The novel about the American Civil War,” and she blew the hair away to the side.

         I said, “I didn’t know Winston Churchill wrote novels.”

         Now, I’m thinking there is a game going on. A match, and I have to catch up.

         But she says, “Not that Winston Churchill.”

         So, now she has knocked me on my back like a dumb turtle.

         “No. I guess, I’ve never even heard about that one.”

         She says, “It’s a good book. Very good. When I was in school, it was on all the reading lists. It was a best seller at the turn of the Century—The last Century. Now it’s pretty much forgotten. There isn’t even a copy of it at the library.”

         Now, I’m getting other ideas about what she’s talking about. She’s standing at the stove and stirring a pot of something that smelled like a stew—but she’s thinking about the ephemeral nature of her own work.

         I say, “Why do you think it’s forgotten?”

         And then she finally says what’s actually on her mind. “It’s a story about heroes.”

         This is a subject we have touched on—or punched at—before. She knows I don’t believe in heroes. At least I didn’t.

         I say, “We’ve argued about that before.”

         “Yes. We have. But I was thinking you might read it for me and tell me why you think it’s so forgotten now. We still read Trollope, and Sand, and Eliot. Why not Churchill.”

         I said, “Maybe it’s just that most people don’t believe in heroes anymore.”

         She is having none of that, “You know that’s not true. You think your father is a hero. It’s in your voice when you talk about him. And your mother. And your grandfather and grandmother. You’ve all but said as much.”

         Now, she was pressing an advantage. I had in fact spoken about all of them over the last month.

         “Okay. I’ll read the book.”

         “Good. It’s over on the table there in the living room.”

         So, she was prepared, and this was all part of her narrative as well.

         I asked, “What do you think about it yourself?”

         “It is a great book…Beautiful, really. A little dated in style. The language is of that time. But so’s the language of Henry James… I think you can deal with it.”

         “What’s it about?”

         “Essentially, after everything is said and done, it’s about Abraham Lincoln.”

         Lincoln is one of those historical figures I have avoided. He was into so much ‘mischief’ as my mother would say, that it seemed easier just to go around him.

         “Did you ever give it to your daughters to read?”

         She stopped what she was doing one more time to look toward me. I didn’t look back.

         “No. But that was the very thing I was thinking about. I don’t know why not. I thought maybe you would have some sense about it that, and be able to tell me why.”

         The copy of the book she has is old. It’s an original edition, I think. The green cloth is embossed in a darker green with the title as well as an old-fashioned decoration. Looks nothing like the way books are made today. Physically smaller. It was a pleasure to hold it. I was up half the night with it, and the next night as well. I’m a slow reader.

         Julia did not begin her gardening in earnest until late April, but then it was pretty much carried out before I was awake. She is up at 6 AM and out the door not long after. She has said, “the hoeing and raking and such help me think.” The garden itself was clearly less than half the size it had been when her girls were younger, filling a fenced space directly east of the barn and the chicken yard, and over the weeks this became a neat precision of rows and then sprouting things that I avoided asking about as much as possible. I had seen enough of farming to know it was not my thing. Too much work. That was what super markets were for.

         But, twice a day, first thing in the morning and then in the early afternoon, Julia came out to the east side of the barn where I could hear her as she talked back to the chickens and threw out scraps and poured water or feed into the narrow troughs before heading over to the garden area.

         The chicken coop itself, a small, low structure on legs, with openings at the front but without windows, faced the garden. It was not attached to the barn but close against the wire that lined the clapboards there and beneath the overhang of the roof above. Because she collected the eggs in the morning as the chickens ate, I seldom got to see the process, but the entire front of the coop swung away on hinges and gave her full access to whatever the hens had done. This structure had been built to her specifications by Mr. Copple’s youngest son when he was still in high school.

         I had brilliantly observed that the chickens themselves appeared to be more like cartoon chickens, drawn in thin black and white strips, so that they all looked like the same chicken to me. She did not see the humor in that observation. She called them ‘Barred Rocks’ which I had discovered was a shortening of the name Barred Plymouth Rocks.

         Besides a web of darkened wire fence, the chickens were also protected by an electrified wire at the top and bottom to help keep the hawks and the vermin away. But with her dog no longer there to bark, the vermin had found a way.

         Today she lost her oldest, ‘Betty,’ and I heard a shriek in the morning, and when I came out to see what the matter was, just barely in my pants, she already had a shovel filled with the feathers and whatever else was left. She just said, ‘Poor Betty,’ to me and then, ‘We have a weasel.”

         Later, when I came to the house at four, she was getting ready to make hamburgers because she wasn’t in the mood to cook.

         “How old was she?”

         “Only nine.”

         “I didn’t know chickens lived that long.”

         “She was still laying. She would have made it a few years more. She was the mother hen to all the others. And she stood her ground. Without a rooster, she stood her ground.”

         This heroic image was difficult for me to imagine, but it was meant. I didn’t know a lot about chickens.

         “How did it get her?”

         She shrugged, “It’s weasel…He left a mess.”

         I said, “Maybe the weasel was a female.”

         “Except for the mess.”

         I had to consider the implication of this assessment for a moment.

         So, I asked, “What are you going to do?”

         “There’s a hole under the fence. The fence is buried a foot deep but there’s a rock there at the back side and I was lazy and when I enlarged the yard last year, I stretched the wire over it and didn’t take it out.”

         I immediately sensed a hidden request.

         “Do you want me to do it?”

         “I would appreciate that. Thanks.”

         She had not written anything that morning, and there was no stack of manuscript on the table. I ate the burger and went back out to the barn. The rock was enormous, buried by the soil there only a few inches deep except, where the weasel had dug its away under. It was mostly flat at the top side but I had no idea how deep the rock itself went. I wasn’t going to be able to lift it without some sort of a crane in any case. When Julia came out to inspect what I had uncovered, I suggested that she should just decrease the size of the chicken yard. The rock wasn’t all that big at the top. Maybe three feet wide at the most. The chickens could spare a few extra feet from their enclosure. But she wasn’t interested. She was still angry—more at herself for putting the fence in the way she did, I think.

         She said, “But you might be able to lever it away. It drops off right there at the back. The barn is on a kind of shelf of rock that goes all the way to those trees.”

          So, I started digging a hole there behind it to lever the rock into, just beyond the fence. This actually took a couple of days, allowing for some rain and some talk. Digging holes was not in my resume. Not this sort of hole, in any case. The soil beyond was a litter of smaller rock, but, indeed, the larger shelf of rock ended there and that one piece of it could be moved. The big one next to that went in beneath the corner of the barn so I used what smaller stone I uncovered to secure that before I filled in.

         The chickens watched me through the entire process, commenting constantly among themselves. They sound like cartoon chickens as well. Julia came out to watch occasionally. Most of the time, as I dug, I could hear her typing.

         A couple of days later, a tall, clean shaven, and middle-aged fellow showed up late in the afternoon, shortly after I had come into the house. When he opened the back door to the kitchen I was already sitting at the small table and he seemed surprised to see me.

         Julia could see his car through the window from where she stood and did not appear to be surprised at his arrival. She turned from stirring the pot on the stove and said, “Derek, this is Geoff. Geoff is helping me get my manuscript ready.” 

         I stood up and we shook hands. He gripped a bit too hard. He was dressed in an ironed or new LL Bean Flannel shirt and new looking jeans. I was still feeling a little grubby from digging holes. We are about the same height and so it was pretty much eye to eye for a moment. His smile was not genuine. But mine was, because I was thinking he looked familiar, and I knew immediately that this was because of Elena. But the situation itself was somehow funny to me too. This then was Julia’s ex-husband. Direct from New York. I could not have imagined him better.

         Outside there was a fairly new, black, Lincoln sedan, shiny-clean except for the fresh mud splatter on the lower trim from the dip at the end of the driveway.       

         What he first said was, “I wondered about that van by the barn.”

         Derek Peterson, Julia’s ex-husband, was once a ‘successful novelist.’ She has told me that much. But that occupation had not satisfied his needs, apparently, and he now runs his own real estate firm, or that now runs him. He has made a great deal of money from selling residential buildings in New York City over the years, I understand, but lost it. Now, he is broke. And he’s married again, unhappily. Julia says that he ‘only comes up to check on his daughters,’ but with that excuse now gone, he probably just wants the check. He apparently wants to borrow $50,000 from Julia to cover some real estate losses. He also talks out loud about moving up to New Hampshire to find his ‘muse,’ again and write another novel, to get his mojo back. This strikes me as a petty conceit. Or perhaps it is only self-deceit.

         Julia thinks, from his complaints, that his second wife is getting ready to divorce him. I’m thinking that one of his daughters told him I was there and he has driven up from New York to check up on his own interests.

         Because he arrived unexpectedly, while I was there in the kitchen, I got to hear some of the initial conversation before Julia pushes him outside to his car for privacy, but I could still hear part of it. He admits that his business has failed. Now, he wants her to mortgage her property, “That I helped pay for…” She rejects that premise and refuses. She tells him any interest he had in the property, “disappeared years ago, the last time you borrowed money from me,” and “Your schemes were charming once. But they were never dreams. And you’re too old for all that now…And I’m too old to take them seriously.”

         We were having ravioli again and when they came back in, Julia told us to move into the dining room.

         Derek sat at the other end of the table from Julia, so that I was in the middle.   

         He asked, “What do you do when you aren’t helping Julia?”

         I decided to be cute. “I dig holes.”

         I thought this was a funny answer. Julia did not.

         Julia adds, “Geoff is a writer…And he digs holes.”

         He asks, “Do you live here in Rumford?”

         It was not an honest question. I was sure he already knew the answer, but I answered it anyway.

         “I live in the barn.”

         Julia frowned again. She says, “Geoff has turned the tack room into an apartment, of sorts. And he’s been helping me out around here…digging holes.”

         Still feeling cute, I asked him, “What do you do, Derek, when you’re not digging holes?”

         I hope that it sounded about as phony as his question to me. Julia frowned again, but Derek answered.

         “I write novels.”

         I knew he had written several best sellers, but that had been years before.

         So, I said, “I meant more recently.”

         This caught him a little off-guard. Julia answered.

         “Derek is in real estate.”

         He changes the conversation then and looks at Julia, “Have you seen the girls lately?”

         She says, “All of them. They all came up to inspect Geoff’s work in the barn.”

         The humor buried in that sounded like something I might say.

         Derek looked to me again and said, “Where are you from?”

         “Near Boston. Where are you from?”

         “Queens…Where did you go to school?”

         “Arlington High.”

         “I meant, college”

         “I didn’t”

         He frowned a little too hard.

         “Why was that?”

         “I wasn’t interested in the indoctrination.”

         This got a ‘knowing’ smile. Maybe I should label it ‘smug.’

         Derek said, “I see. Perhaps I understand now why Julia thought you could help her with her work.”

         Before I could answer, Julia said, “That’s very perceptive, Derek.”

         It was amazing to me that she could say a word like ‘perceptive,’ and clearly mean the opposite.

         I said, “All I’m doing is a little copy editing and word processing. Easy peasy for any high school graduate.”

         At least that made Julia smile.

         Derek said to me, “What kind of novels do you write?”

         “Science fiction, mostly.”

         He said, “Ah,” but knowingly again. I could only guess about what he thought he knew.

         The ravioli didn’t last very long and I excused myself and went back to the barn.

         About half an hour later the barn door opened without a knock. I was at my desk on the opposite side by the window.

         “I thought I’d come out and inspect the work you’ve done for myself.”

         “No much to see.”

         I didn’t get up as he crossed the barn floor.

         He said, “You know, don’t you, that I own part of this place.”

         The tone was confrontational. I sat back in my chair.

         “No. I don’t.”

         “Half of it, anyway. We bought it when we were still married.”

         ‘That’s none of my business.”

         “Exactly! But I thought you should know.”

         I was suddenly in a very bad mood. So, I stood up.

         I said, “But at least, now, I know you’re an asshole too. I just found that out.”

         He was still coming forward when he punched at me. I suppose it would have hit me if I hadn’t turned away. The problem was, it brought him too close and when I punched him back it knocked him off his feet. Suddenly he was sitting on the barn floor looking a little puzzled. Because he didn’t get up right away, I suspected he hadn’t been in too many school yard fights. If you stay down, you get kicked. For whatever reason, maybe because I just didn’t like the look of him sitting there on the floor, I put my hand out, and he took it.

         Standing, face to face again, he said, “That was dumb.”

         “I think so.”

         I suppose whatever anger he had in him was gone, and he turned to go. And all of a sudden, I liked the guy. I knew who he was.

         “Are you okay?”

         He turned back. “Yeah. Just a bruised ego…I’m sorry for that.”

         I said, “Why were you so pissed at me?”

         He looked at me pretty square.

         “I suppose because you’re here, and I’m not.”

         This seemed a little heavy but probably right, and I hoped I wasn’t reading too much into it.

         “I just live in the barn. And help Julia the best I can. That’s all.”

         He sighed. The sigh seemed real.

         He said, “I understand—Life turns around on you. That’s a fact…In a week or so I’m going to be on my ass again. In bankruptcy court…And that’s just funny. That’s plain funny…You know what I was here for? … No. I suppose you don’t. I was here for money. I wanted Julia to loan me some money. Is that funny, or what? … And this—” his hand waved into the air behind him, “…When we bought this place, there was one brief moment when I actually hoped—well, the marriage was already on the rocks. But I loved her. She’s a pain, but I still love her. Dearly. And she’s the mother of my children. She’ll always be that. And, like you say, I’m just an asshole. I had my chance.”

         There wasn’t much I could say. “It’s a common enough problem for all of us. No big deal in the scheme of things.”

         He said, “Hill of beans.”

         “Yup. Like Bogey said, that’s all it amounts to.”

         He smiled at me, this time with no smug, and put his hand out to shake mine. And then he left.

         But this wasn’t the end of it.

         The next day, right in the middle of things, Julia said, “My own ‘sell by’ date has passed. I’m here by the grace of modern medicine—both bad or good, yet to be determined—or by a God who should know better, one way or the other, but isn’t saying.”

         All of that was in response to my rather boldly asking, “What are you trying to accomplish with this?” and holding up a typed page as evidence.

         I suppose I had not made my specific quandary clear. Her character, Donovan, had hung on in a limbo between life and death for more than a chapter. I did not see any progress there. And I know she has a remarked dislike for pathos. If she did not want to evoke a sense of pity in her readers, at least, she had to move on to another purpose.

         “It’s one of those ‘To be or not to be, questions,” she said. “Does the reader care? I hope so. Donovan is the reason that I’m writing this story… I’m hoping for a sense of rage. It’s difficult to feel real rage. It’s special. It’s so discouraged in modern life, where just going berserk and losing all reason is the thing, but rage is another element in the life of a man like Donovan. His anger is the rage of ages. His people have been abused for centuries. If he can’t feel that, he might as well be dead—at least at this time in his life, when he thinks he is beyond love…Is that something you don’t see?”

         It was very clear to me now.

         “I hadn’t thought about it until you said it. But it is.”

         She says, “Then, I’ve failed in the matter and I’m going to have to think that through again.”

         “But he hadn’t—you hadn’t—expressed that sense of life before. I suppose I didn’t expect it.”

         She suddenly seemed a little flustered.

         “You’re right. That comes out later, but you’re right and I have to work that idea in earlier so that it’s understood…You’re right about that.”

         But then I asked, “That’s a sense that life is fragile,” and I impulsively added another thought. I didn’t know why. “Have you been sick?”

         She shrugged, “Yes…But where’s the poetry in that!”

         That’s all she said. I really didn’t have the right to ask for more. I supposed it would come out in some way later on.

         But, when Elena visited again, I slipped the question in. “Has your mother been sick?”

         She didn’t answer quickly, but then “Yes. She had cancer.”

         Nothing else. It was clear she didn’t want to talk about it herself. But this gave another perspective on why Julia wanted to have me help her get the book in shape.

         Later, after we had finished for the day, and she had poured her bourbon, she said something else.

         “Derek is such an ass. He was actually worried about me. But he didn’t want me to know that. He came up here to check on me, and see if I needed anything. Such a jerk! The only way he could hide that was to ask me for money! Can you believe it? But I know him. He knows I don’t have any money. He even concocted the idea of asking me to mortgage the place. What an idiot. He knows it’s all in my will for the girls. Is a trust! But he knows I wouldn’t do that! … He’s a character ripe for a novel of his own. But I’ve never been able to even start writing about him. Son of a bitch! He sees himself as a heavy and he wouldn’t even know how … I fished him out of the East River once. He was showing off and fell in. Just showing off. He couldn’t even swim!”

***

18. Mr. Copple’s Stones

         During her second visit, Elena told me a funny story. But it was the context of her telling me rather than the story itself, that was funny, I think.

         At one time, when the girls were all still living at home, and a year or two after Mrs. Copple, Mandy, had passed away, Frank Copple had cast his eye to the West.

         It was a fact that his sons, of whom there were also three, had all done chores for Julia, but they had finally gone away to college, and the army, and whatever, and importantly, had grown older and found their own lives—none of them interested in farm life. It was Mr. Copple’s oldest daughter, Mary, who appeared to want the life of her parents but she had not yet found a mate, and she was now well over forty. His youngest daughter, the youngest of that clan, had run away to Boston and not yet returned.

         However, Mr. Copple’s primary interest was for himself, and this started bringing him over to Dal Riata to ‘help’ when he could—when a gutter collapsed, or a storm had taken down a line, for instance. He was very helpful. And whenever the fields needed mowing, Julia’s were done before his own.

         For her part, Julia had discovered the best way to cool Mr. Copple’s ardor was to quote Shakespeare. Extensively. She also found short dissertations on Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe were effective. And she would frequently ask him how to spell certain words when he used them. Coccidiosis was one of those that Elena still remembered, left over from an outbreak of infection among the chickens. Mr. Copple did not have a strong command of spelling and would grapple with the task by repeating a word over and over out-loud like a schoolboy to get all the vowels. His face would turn red during this process and his beard rose up with each clinch of his jaw.

         Elena also remembered her mother saying that Frank had never read a book. She stated this as a matter of fact. How he got through his own schooling was a mystery. But he was full of stories and if she could keep the distance, she often encouraged him to relate those.

         Frank Copple was a large and bluff man. Always good natured, and easy to like. Julia had her moods. It was Elena’s belief that resisting the interest of Mr. Copple had been the greatest challenge of her mother’s life. And she went about the process very deliberately, knowing the stakes were high. She liked Mr. Copple and did not want to make him an enemy—though Elena was sure that might have been impossible. Though he was now at least sixty-five, he had never shown a lack of interest in her mother, even when Mandy was still alive.

         Her most successful tactic was to use his own habits against him. Mr. Copple had a habit of talking to his wife whenever he was frustrated by anything. He continued this after she died and did it still. So, Julia began to refer to Mandy more often. When Frank asked her a question, Julia would say something like, “What would Mandy think about that?” This quieted him down considerably.

         That Elena told me all this made me well aware of the fact that she had already figured out that I was not a danger in this regard. How she knew this so quickly, I am not sure, but at least it opened up the range of small talk quite a bit.

         Mr. Copple was always friendly toward me, however. Perhaps he had also determined, in his own way, that I was not a danger to Julia either. When I was digging out the rock in Julia’s chicken yard he had come by to pick up a few bales of hay and watched me, commenting usefully about how I might lever the mass of the thing. This brought on a lengthy observation about the Egyptians, and the pyramids. He might not read books but he was a big fan of shows on television or his computer. He explained the various means the Egyptians might have used to accomplish their task, and in great detail. It was a class on moving large objects.

         I finally broke that account up by telling him about a story I had written a couple of years before, and how they raised chickens on Mars. He did not think that could be done, though I was sure it would be. However, watching Julia’s efforts were making me think I might revise that story a little. Mr. Copple suggested I come by and study his chickens. He was not a fan of the industrial methods used to produce most chickens today. He believed in ‘organics.’ His was only a small operation but his 240 chickens occupied more than acre of land. He suggested that the cost of such space on Mars was going to be prohibitive, though, he liked the idea of raising chickens organically even there.

         This food for thought had me imagining chickens, under conditions of lower gravity, leaping far into the air. I told him that at least the chickens on Mars, would not have the same problem with predators.

         “You do, do you? Rats have followed mankind since the dawn of time. They will find their way to. I guarantee it!”

         And this one statement, made so casually, turned everything I had previously imagined about agriculture on Mars on its head. I knew, immediately, that he was correct. The vermin were always with us.

         So, I returned the favor to Elena and told her a rather lengthy tale about an incident that I had worked on for a novel, but never finished. It is better left unfinished, I think

         When I was still living in Boston I took a part-time job in a paint store. Mostly I carried cans of paint—up from the basement or out to customer’s cars. I also got to run their most sophisticated equipment. Following some magical admixture carried out in advance by one of the owners, I placed the cans in the clamps of a bank of machines that shook the cans like maniacs while complaining about their task in a high-decibel whine. There was no chance that the family who owned the store were going to open a door there for me, despite initial intimations, so I was gone in two months. However, I did acquire a roommate while I was there. And that was the actual story.

         Steven Lemieux was a professional protester. Skinny, hirsute, and not especially clean, usually wearing black-rimmed glasses knotted with tape at one hinge or another, and wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with an unreadable and illiterate slogan though he had been educated into his sophomore year at Harvard. For a modest amount, about $10 an hour, he would show up at any event and attempt to disrupt it. He had been arrested dozens of times, had a felony record for resisting arrest, and was thus unemployable otherwise. But he paid his share of the rent. And I had only barely talked my way into the apartment, in East Cambridge, and didn’t want to lose it. My previous apartment mate was a young woman who worked at McDonalds during the days. What she did in the evening I did not want to know, but she had disappeared with her latest boyfriend one Saturday afternoon and I found Steve the following Monday in an on-line classified, basically because I didn’t care about his politics. For his part, Steven mistook my skin color and odd priorities for a sympathetic attitude. It was only desperation—I was already behind on the rent by a week as of that Monday.

         Because Steve practiced his protesting on me, while eating bowls of cereal or whatever I had, I got to know his agenda, and some of his methods, and for my part, I tried to convert him to some level of sanity. Not being intellectually engaged beyond his particular agenda, his rejoinders were always roughly the same. ‘Lotta good it’s done you,’ or ‘Let me know if that works out for you,’ and the ever popular, ‘I don’t give a shit.’ I let this pass because I also had a month’s deposit for the rent on the line. But when Steven had been doing drugs, usually grass, he mellowed. He would just say “You don’t know shit,” and start in on his life story, which he thought was ‘epic.’ It was not ‘epic’, but it was very good in parts—especially the parts that did not include Steve.

         The parts I liked the best concerned his grandfather.

         Victor Lemieux was a logger in Maine for about seventy years. He worked for the Maine-Atlantic Lumber Company for much of that time. When he started, timber was still being rafted down the Penobscot and Kennebec rivers by fellows who could dance across the surface of the floating logs, and did. In the winter months, Steve’s grandfather cut the timber, and used a pony or a mule to drag the great carcasses, bound by chains, to the closest frozen water. In the spring Victor rode the logs to the mill towns where the waterfalls were. But what made him unique is that Victor did not drink, or gamble or go whoring. When difficult times came for the company during the Depression, Victor Lemieux bought stock. He was a part owner of the company by the time World War Two came. After the War, the building boom really hit. There was even bigger money to be made. But sometime during the 1950’s, the State of Maine and the United States Department of Agriculture decided that there were just too many smaller companies for them to regulate. Maine-Atlantic’s leases were taken by some sort of eminent domain, and consolidated with a company that had better political connections. Victor Lemieux was given pennies on the dollar and forced into court to get back any of the rest. The new owners had enough cash and political influence to wait him out.

         Steven presented this story to me several different times in various stages of intoxication, as a true story of American capitalism. I tried to explain that, except for the earlier part of the ‘epic,’ this was exactly the opposite of capitalism. It was State control of the means of production. Another ‘ism’ entirely, and very clearly explained by Thomas Sowell in a dozen books. But Steve took personal offense at my stupidity. He knew all about this, he insisted, because he was born into it. So, I went to the Boston Public Library to get some details on the Maine lumber industry. He lit my note paper on fire in the middle of the living room floor. This set off an alarm, which I dealt with, but there was no dealing with Steve. I threw him out after the fire marshal left. Steve came back in the middle of the night and inexplicablye lit up an old table cloth that I had—something my mother had given me that wasn’t worth much but that I had grown up with. I beat the hell out of Steve. He called the police, who happened to already be there because of a neighbor’s complaint about noise. The cop was sympathetic but reported the incident to my landlord. The realtor terminated my lease immediately, I lost my deposit, and that was when I decided to move out of state. Maine, in deference to Victor Lemieux, seemed out of the question. New Hampshire lay closer.

         Epics come and epics go.

         But at least Elena was entertained.

***

19. More wrinkles in time

         To the north, along the road, Julia’s land soon rises onto a wrinkle in the earth, a folding of the land that, in winter, and at a distance, is like a blanket that has not been smoothed; hardly a hill, above a turn of the river, but likely the geologic cause of the change of direction to the flow of water in the shallow valley below. This wrinkle continues rising upward from there, across the road and into a property apparently owned by the Catholic Church that was never farmed because of the inconvenience of the all the rocks and glacial debris you could see gapping through the trees along there from the road, and those trees have long been left mostly uncut as being useless for building because they had already grown so deformed by their own roots. They are dark and brooding trees for having been so long neglected, each with a personality of its own if you stop to look, while being totally unlike the surrounding wilderness of second growth that is so without character, clogging the fields around them, filling the former sheep pastures behind ruined stone walls, and overgrowing the slumped remains of apple orchards everywhere.

         I was told by our neighbor, Mr. Copple, that the land there at the opposite side had been donated to the diocese by the nephew of Neal Wright so that the conveniently shattered glacial rock might be used for a church that was never built. But, he said, ‘Unbuilt cathedrals crowd the hills in these parts.’ I guess that I missed the sarcasm in the remark at first. But Julia suggested that the donation was made simply to avoid paying the property taxes. Maybe both were true.

         The part of that Earth-fold extending into Julia’s land is also a nest of trees and broken rock but less dramatic. This had drawn my eye soon after I had moved into the barn and become the object of a daily pilgrimage for me in the mornings. Her property line, which ends at the road there at the south side, continues a short distance beyond those trees to the west before cutting back down toward the river, in the midst of more second growth and yet another former orchard now buried in that unruly chaos. But, standing on the back of that ‘wrinkle,’ on Julia’s land, about fifty yards in from the road, there is a break in those trees and a view of the river over the open and still harvested land below that is simply wonderful for the mind. There is some ancient order to Mr. Copple’s work there that is magical. The grass is cut to dry in trails left by the tractor and then later gathered into bales. But the design the tractor has left on the fields, turning with the subtle contours of the land, appears to be an art in itself.

         One afternoon I carried a box of books up to one of the bedrooms for Julia—things she had finished using in her research so that she could make room for more downstairs. In that bed room is a painting which I recognized immediately as the same view from the wrinkle above the river. It was perfect. Maybe a little better. It somehow encompassed more than one season—looking out from a darker vantage among the trees; out across the shallow valley to the turn in river and to the trees that had grown up in the old pasture land beyond. A farmer was seen in the mid-distance as he worked his tractor across the open field, in a sort of defiant gesture against the enveloping of unruled nature at all sides. A small figure, on a small tractor, but that defiance was there in the gold and green of the cut hay in his path, immediately before the edge of ominous dark in the wooded ridge above him that was still being held at bay. A larger focus was felt and conveyed in the effort of the farmer alone and the sense that this was a simple, if eternal, quest of human order against an always encroaching wilderness.

         The painting was not signed. It made me first realize that none of Maya’s paintings were signed. But I knew who the artist was, of course.

         To make conversation, I asked Julia, who had painted it, and her answer was rather elliptical.

         She said, “I’ve seen you up there in the trees. It is a wonderful place.”

         “But who painted that picture. It’s perfect.”

         “Perfect is a difficult word.”

         I shook my head at her for being difficult herself. “I think it’s perfect…Did you paint it?”

         She wasn’t taking the bait.

         “Nooo… I can’t paint. I dab. I can do a house. I did the barn.”

         “Who painted that?”

         She quit having fun with me.

         “Maya. She had a thing about signing her work when she was younger. Funny, but I think that was because of Neal Wright. She used to stop on the road by the grave stones. I’ve seen her there a dozen times. It took her awhile to accept that she would never be a good Shaker.”

         “She’s great!”

         “Great is a difficult word, as well…I have even more I can show you! … But not now, but I’ll show you later!”

         I discovered it was Julia’s habit to buy one of Maya’s paintings as often as Maya would let her—which was about as often as her daughter needed a little extra money for her rent.

         The chestnut boards on the walls of the tack room were set in vertically, unlike the clapboards, spanning the space between the cross-braces to the studs from ceiling to floor. The empty space between the studs is a little more than two feet wide. Pretty wide, but the studs, hand cut in another age, were more than just two by four inches and plenty strong. And the vertical wall boards were fastened with pegs to the braces. With careful prying, trying not to break the pegs, the boards lifted away with the pegs intact but this was more difficult than I imagined, and I settled for removing only enough of those to access the space behind for the insulation. The pegs were fatter than common nails would be, and shorter, but still quite hard, if not quite iron. It was only when I had finished with filling the empty gap at the outer wall to the clapboards that I discovered a secret. Some of the boards of the inner wall were made of cedar, not chestnut. And more than one of those boards there was not pegged, and I was immediately curious why. This inner wall was backed not by clapboards but more vertical boards at the opposite side in the open interior of the barn. That seemed curious enough by itself, given that the rest of the walls in the barn were open to the studs and cross braces and the back side of the clapboards, but the boards that were unpegged had a tongue in grove design that held itself in place.

         I only had to fiddled with one of the boards a little and it was clear that it could be lifted away. There was even a pry point at the top edge…And there was my greater discovery. Behind the first unpegged board, in the otherwise empty wall space behind and to each side between the studs, were short shelves—and these were filled with books. Because the space was narrow, the books were set in sideways, braced tightly by the board in the wall at either side, and except for a little wood dust these books appeared to have been untouched for at least a hundred years. I removed them with a sense that Neal Wright was the last person to touch them. Cream white paper. Beige cloth covers printed in black

         I pried the next unpegged board loose. This one came away more easily, as if it were more often used. But no books—only several chalkboards made of black slate framed with the same chestnut as the barn. There were six of those and I immediately assumed they had been made for his children. They were all well used and the slate cleaned to an inner frame of white residue. A stack of chalk pieces of various lengths was piled in a small wooden box on another cross brace.

         The next and last unpegged cedar board opened to an empty space, and I was disappointed—already taking my treasure hunt for granted.

         But there were twenty-two books in total, all clean and neat and in excellent condition— probably aided against the insects by the cedar wood of the walls. They were smallish hardcovers published by Harper and Brothers in the 1850’s and even if I did not recognize any of the titles, I was pretty sure they would have some special value for their condition alone.

         I brought the books into the house to show Julia at four. She turned the stove off immediately and sat down at the table to look at them.

         She said, “Amazing.” several times as she did.

         I said, “They look like they might have only been read once, if that.”

         “Yes. Yes…And then hidden…Neal hid them there…But why? Why would he do that?”

         She paged through each one looking for a clue.

         When I told her about the chalkboards she sat back as if hit.

         “If I had only known. Of course. The children had been homeschooled as well…He must have put those there after they grew up. He couldn’t throw them away.”

         One day, standing in the yard by the water pump, I idly told Julia that I actually loved the feeling of the farm. Just the feeling of it. There was some aspect of paradise about it. And that I had just been trying to get that sensation down on paper and failed. She seemed a little flustered by my compliment.

         “It’s in the painting. Your daughter got it!”

         To that she says, “Is that on Mars, too. Do they have farms on Mars?”
         “Yes. Of course.”

         “I should have known…” Then she says to me, “You know, the story of how we found this place?” Her eyes looked at me expectantly. “Of course not. I’m sorry. But it’s rather amazing to me, even now…” She set her bucket down. The chickens spoke patiently amongst themselves. “I came up from New York to look for a place to live. I liked New Hampshire. I’d spent some time here before. And I’d had it with the city and our condo on Greenwich Street was already worth a good deal more than we paid for it. Derek and I were still together then; and he’d already started dabbling in real estate. The money from his own writing was not enough to meet his wants, I suppose. Unfortunately, my writing wasn’t adding very much to the kitty, either…I had the idea that maybe we should live up here to save some money. Derek wasn’t interested in that…But then Warner Brother’s bought the rights to The Covenant. Suddenly I had a big check of my own…Anyway, we were up here, and I saw a poster for an auction when we were in a pizza shop in Dover. We immediately went. The auction had already started, but I managed to buy several boxes of ephemera on impulse. You know about that. It included the letters of Molly Wright…Well, I read most of those letters that same evening in the hotel room in Exeter. I was up all night. And then in the morning I called the auction house and asked them where they’d come from. The woman there told me they were from the estate of Frederick Wright, who had died the year before. It turned out that he was a nephew of Neal and Molly and he had no children of his own. And now that the probate was done the contents of his house were being sold. They had some of Neal Wright’s handmade furniture there at the auction house as well. I wish I could have bought more of that too. But then she mentioned that the house was being sold, and I asked where that was. I was still filled with the imagery of Molly Wright from her letters. She had caught that feeling you are talking about. The ‘paradise’ of it. And we called the real estate agent and we were here that same day and made an offer. Just like that! Our lives were changed.”

         I was duly impressed. “It was fortunate that you happened to see that poster.”

         “Derek is a New Yorker. He’s from Queens. Pizza is a sacred thing…even though that was not a sacred pizza—Nevertheless, it’s a good example of how life is made up of small moments. And those moments are the stuff of all my novels. I can leave the theatrics to others.”

         But I already understood this now.

         Julia believes that Neal and Molly Wright had a great love affair. Her book The Wrath is about that. But Molly’s letters indicated that fact as well. And after I discovered the books in the tack room wall, I had another thought. The letters Julia had bought at the auction were neat and crisp, after a hundred and fifty years, as if, like the books I had found in the barn, they were only read once, at most, but then folded and put back in their envelopes. Even the envelopes were clean, just like the books. There were no postmarks or stamps. I wasn’t even sure if they used stamps then, but I now believe that Molly never gave the letters to Neal. And that may be the same reason why the books look so unread as well. Cream white. Rag paper. Neal had bought those books for Molly because he knew she liked novels. Julia said that, more of the same kind had been found in the attic of the house, but all of those were well read. Later, perhaps, Neal had ben unsure of some of his choices. Perhaps he had put the others away for a further consideration. Or to give them to her one at a time as gifts. Julia speculated aloud that Molly kept the letters after she wrote them and Neal may never have known her true feelings.

         On the road between the wrinkle and the house there is a small, square, and gated piece of land that rises up alone. Maybe twenty feet wide. By its shape you would immediately guess the rise is artificial. The gate is iron, and the fencing, and the iron posts are thick and knobbed at the tops like staircase newels. The trees there, two oaks and several maples, are large and uncut for at least a hundred years. It is otherwise relatively neat, being trimmed once a year by the Boy Scouts, keeping the graves of veterans clear. You see such rises throughout New England and know them at a distance to be what they are.

         The larger grave stones there mark the lives of Neal and Molly Wright. Two smaller stones with the metal insignia of Civil War veterans pinned in the soil beside them, mark the lives of Jacob and Daniel, who had died separately in Virginia. My sense is, because those stone markers are smaller and identical, that the remains of the two boys may not actually be present—their remains being mixed into the soil on some distant field. One small white stone with the word ‘daughter’ marks the brief life of a child, left nameless, but Julia has determined from Molly’s letters, that she was christened ‘Grace’ at the time of her death. Two other daughters had married men going West and might be buried anywhere out there today. There were no others letters to tell.

         I pass this rise most days on my walk up the road and it always takes my thoughts away from whatever concern I had. But this particular interruption has been a part of altering much of my thinking.

         And Julia’s philosophy about narrative thinking and a narrative thread is very much part of that change.

         The fantasy in most fiction is to account for a lack of fundamental understanding for how human beings act as well as how the world functions. Imagining someone with a super power is almost always an effort to hide a failure—an inability to comprehend reality—usually a craving for deus ex machina involvement to solve problem normal people supposedly can’t cope with. Unfortunately, a great deal of historical fiction is based on a similar fantasy; a lack of understanding for how an ancient world and the people in it might function. Far easier to focus on a tyrant or king. But then again, that same deficiency plagues most other novels as well; populated by characters with temporary lives, disconnected from their past or future. I was trying mightily to avoid that vacuum on my Mars.

         Dostoevsky was plagued with epilepsy, poverty, hunger, and much else, but he appears to have been haunted by terrible thoughts as well. I imagine, given his wonderful essays, that he was more than aware of all these tribulations and dealt with them by writing about them—the demons exposed to sunlight. Good enough. A boon for the rest of mankind just because he wrote about it. But he had never set foot on the moon, or Mars, even in his imagination, nor flew in a plane, or so much as rode in a balloon above the mortal fray. I am sorry for him in that way because he was never really able to escape the demons that plagued him.

         I was coming to understand that Neal Wright used the tack room as a refuge from the house, and from his wife, and this likely happened more after his sons died in the Civil War and his daughters were gone.

         I had never actually stood up on the raised gravesite by the road before. The iron fence there seemed to express itself to me that way. Keep out! But the trees there cast a deep shade in summer and the cool of that drew me over from the broad sun on the road one day.

         The five graves themselves are simple, one very small for the girl, without a name, that simply stated, ‘Daughter,’ the two slightly larger stones for the boys, Jacob and Daniel, each with a name and rank—corporal and private—but no dates. Each of these said ‘Son’. And then one stone, larger still but divided by design into halves, with the top edge shaped by a double bowing of the lichen crusted stone. The simple roman letters there, chiseled deeply, were: Neal Wright, born November 18, 1821, died March 4, 1872, husband of Molly Green Wright, born April 12, 1820, died October 21, 1894. The white granite of all were trimmed in the gray and green of the lichen and moss. But standing at the rail there offers a view similar to the one on the wrinkle. When I realized this, I looked at that situation differently than I had before. And only then did I remember ‘Daniel’ in The Wrath, who had left his home behind when Lincoln called for troops—who had not left his home to die, but so that his family would live—and his old brother, Jacob, who had gone to war to save him.

***

20. On the nature of paring

         She had said that her poetry, published when she was young, was ‘very earnest.’ The only work listed on-line was something out-of-print from Blue Crow Books, a small press in Maine and was published in 1985. She would have been sixteen or seventeen then. A precocious effort. I ordered it from a used bookshop.

On the Nature of Human Paring’ was certainly that. It was very earnest.

         One poem stands out from the others for being overtly sexual. I don’t think this poem was intended to be bawdy. Though she has never been bawdy when speaking to me, Julia has certainly been bawdy at times in her books. Those moments can be quite provocative and often offset a grimness that would otherwise be depressing. ‘Living without means, people find more in what little they have,’ was one thing she had said.

         Amidst all the agricultural references and allusion to fruit tree propagation, and the double entendre of that, there is this poem:

Push.

Leave my breasts for another time

Push as far as your hard flesh will take you.

I know you believe you cannot go further

Because of my pelvic structure,

But again, push, the blood is nothing,

Push, until you think that must be the end,

But further then, again, to the ends of the earth.

Push, and do not cease, do not withdraw,

The seed will come when it does,

The end will come when it does,

You cannot stop before it does.

Please push, again, please, push.

 Give me your breath so that I can breathe.

Now push, now, push again.

The muscle in my legs cannot help,

Nor my heels beneath your buttocks.

I cannot help you now with this, to push

Again, beyond what seems possible,

Push to what is most true in you. Again.

Push beyond the easy path,

Beyond all that is easy, but again

Push, to find what mind is in your body

Push to find answers for all we can know

Now push to find me there, again,

Push to know me, please again,

Oh, please, you cannot leave me here

Take me, with you forever. Now.

Do not leave me—Breathe me

To be in me forever,

I swallow you whole

Come now, we are one

         I was not brave enough to ask about all that. I gave no hint that I had read it, but another time, thinking about it again, and being too smart by half, I asked, “Did you want to be a farmer before you wanted to write.”

         This seemed to surprise her. She smiled as if I had discovered some insight. And then she went about her business for a time before saying, “I had wanted to be a farmer, at one time. Just a brief city girl fantasy. But I had no real idea of what that meant. I only learned later that I was not good enough for that. I was too soft. But that was me. All fantasy, then. I always wanted to be this or that. And I’d studied about farming. But only the words. And I read about the ways…I’d been first taken with the idea of it when I was at a summer camp here in New Hampshire. It was a girl’s camp, up near Winnipesaukee, and there was a boy who worked near there at the farm where they kept the horses for the camp in winter. On Sundays when we had no program, I walked down the road to where he worked. Everything at the camp was programmed, but Sunday, when families visited, the time was left open, and of course, my family was never there. Dad was always off someplace—somewhere…And I would go watch that boy. I would go down to that farm and sit on a fence and just watch him go about his chores. There was no Sunday for him. Every day, the chores were the same. I watched even when he mucked the stalls…He wouldn’t let me help, but I spoke to him while he worked … And finally, one day he said to me, ‘that fence can’t be comfortable,’ and he grabbed some bales of hay and made a chair for me. All without ever asking why I was there. As if he already believed his work was the most important thing to see and deserved my attention…We talked about all sorts of things then. He wanted a tractor… He told me all about his imaginary tractor…He was not part of the family that owned the farm. I think he was actually just a local. But we did not speak about our families. For some reason, I think that was understood to be off limits. I’m not sure why. But one Sunday, when he asked me what I wanted to do with my life, I said that I wanted to be a farmer, because I thought that would please him. But instead, he was disappointed…He told me that he wanted to travel. He wanted to go to wild places. I said, ‘what about your tractor,’ and he said, ‘that will be here when I return.’ And I said, ‘I thought you loved doing this. The way you work has love in it.’ And it did. I had watched him. He cared about the way he did things. It was in his hands. In was in the press of his lips as he went about it. Nothing was done carelessly. He put everything away in its place. And he actually said to me, ‘I love life. That’s all. And I want to see as much of it as I can, while I’m able.’”

         I could not ask her then about the poem, but I knew I had in a way.

         “How old were you?”

         “Fifteen.”

         “How old was he?”

         “Sixteen”

         “Did you see him again?”

         “Never. Just that summer…And forever…I know he joined the army. He died in Afghanistan.”

***

21. Raggedy Man

         I go to the Market Basket about once a week. This is a procedure. There is not a lot of room for impulse. I get a gallon of whole milk, some of my favorite granola, some oatmeal if I’m running low, butter, a quart of apple cider, eggs, bread, peanut butter if I need it, jam, honey, coffee, tuna fish, and any of the other small stuff I am running out of. Usually some rolls of paper towels and toilet paper.

         The tack room is ten by twelve. That is not a lot of space for everything that I have in there, so I have my writing table out in the open barn by the larger window on the north. It can be chilly, but it works. That’s what coats are made for.

         I have a small electric heater that has a fan, but there is no hot water. Yet. I’ve thought about ways to solve that, but they all have a downside. There is one water pipe to the barn from the well for watering the animals I think, that used to end on the wall outside. The ground is still frozen there but I dug down to branch off that in order to bring the pipe in below the tack room and to my sink, and I branched off that again to feed the toilet on the other side of the wall there. I had a smaller sink that I’d found at the dump but that leaked, and the only other thing was an old stainless steel kitchen sink that is a little too big. At least that had part of a kitchen counter with it, and I could cut that down a bit. I keep the dry food in plastic containers on shelves above there, away from the mice. The door below the sink is missing so I have a little curtain there to hide the soaps. I don’t know why. It’s a bit frilly. Impulse, I guess. But pipes do not have the elegance that some Twentieth Century architects thought they do and I don’t like looking at them.

         Next to all that is a 1947 Hotpoint refrigerator. That’s a little less than six feet tall and just under three feet wide and purrs like a large cat but it keeps a steady temperature. It’s more than I need, actually. And I have an old GE electric stove on the other side of the sink as well. The age on that is difficult to determine. It has four burners and an oven. I don’t use the oven because it draws too much power for the line. With everything, plus my bed and the plastic containers that I keep my clothes in beneath that, there is not a lot of room left. But still more than I ever had in the van. And I do have a bookshelf by the door, but that’s full.

         The key to living in a barn is to limit exposure to the mice. The bookshelves are up a couple of feet off the floor. They could still reach that if they wanted to—I’ve seen mice climb walls—but it is at least inconvenient. Any paper left around becomes fodder for their nest making. Paper towels and toilet paper have to be kept in the plastic bins. The cat that comes around is irregular. That means I have the mattress and my pillow and sleeping bag covered in a plastic tablecloth that I take off at night. Even so, I can see where the critters have been up on the counter in the morning.

         And this does not leave a lot of room for grooming.

         I was at the Market Basket one day and a kid of five or six had stopped in the middle of the aisle ahead of me to stare. I stared back. His mother took his hand to pull him away but before she could, he said, “Raggedy man.” He actually said it a couple of times, loudly, and some other shoppers, besides his mother, looked at me suspiciously.

         When I got back home, I realized that I did not have a mirror to look in. I suspect this was subconsciously intentional. But a piece of black cardboard on the inside of the truck window quickly made up for that and I could see what the kid was saying. It was just a fact. I cut my beard back like a hedge about once a week. I comb my hair in the morning but that gets a little nuts. My cloths are pretty clean. I usually use the laundromat while I’m shopping for groceries. But the fact was that I don’t look ‘kempt.’ Unkempt is too structured a word for a mess but I suppose it works. Raggedy is better.

         This realization then, amounted to me going back to the store one morning to buy a razor and a mirror. And that resulted in a major double-take from Julia when I came into the house at four.

         She said, “What happened?”

         This was said quite seriously. It was obvious by the widening of her eyes what she was talking about. I think she had jumped to the idea that something terrible had happened. I don’t know why.

         “Just decided to do it.”

         No funerals. No events. Her face relaxed.

         “Well, I approve. Good move.” 

         But I wasn’t going to let that go.

         “Why didn’t you tell me?”

         She knew what I meant.

         “I’m not your mother.”

         I followed, “No, just as a friend. We are friends, aren’t we?”
         She shook her head at the idea, or perhaps at the very occurrence of the idea.

         “I thought you knew, and it was the way you wanted it. You’re an odd fellow, you know.”

         “I’m odd? What am I odd about?”

         She put her best skeptical face on. “Really?”

         This seemed to be a standoff of unanswered questions.

         I started typing and she was making something at her stove and then she brought it up again.

         “Are you really saying you did not know what you looked like before?”

         I pushed back at that, “Really.”

         “You don’t care? I thought you wanted to look like that.”

         “Like what?” She didn’t answer, so I did. “Like a raggedy man?”

         She smiled at that. “Very good. I like that.”

         However, I think the subconscious purpose here was actually to be looking civilized for my grandma.

         My grandmother’s house—and it is that, not my grandfather’s, as he will readily tell you—is in Dorchester. This is where the family gather’s every Easter. I am not religious about the religious context of Easter, but I am about respecting my grandmother’s wish that we all gather together there once a year. We do this at Christmas and Thanksgiving as well, but those Holiday’s bear less of the weight of her commandments and family members have been known to miss those events in favor their spouse’s families, or as happened recently with a cousin, ‘a ski vacation.’ We all expected to be hearing about that ski vacation for many years to come. Unless, of course, he married the girl involved, in which case it would be forgiven.

         My grandmother’s house is enormous. Dorchester was once a place of enormous houses in its Victorian heyday. Bigger than in Arlington. My grandpa’s purpose in life, other than taking care of my grandma, which he had done for most of his life, and fixing cars, which he will tell you he has done all his life, is to maintain that house. He says it is a full-time job, so that means he has been working three jobs since 1973, when they bought the house at auction. Before that he was in the army. He refers to being in the army the way other people speak of going to college, even though his primary duty there was to fix trucks. And this has all worked out.

         I have two uncles and three aunts. One of the aunts is not married but now has another boyfriend. Most of her boyfriends through the years have not survived the family gathering at Easter.

         For reasons Julia would appreciate, a key topic at our Easter gathering this year was me. My mother had ‘accidentally’ let it slip that I was no longer living in my van. I had found someplace to live…And that, now, I was living in a barn. My grandma refined this knowledge with a sieve of questions, at the table, in front of everyone.

         My defense, as it has always been in such situations, is to tell a story. When I was a kid, these stories were often fabrications—lies—made up on the spur of the moment until my grandmother’s patience wore thin. This year, by way of describing where I lived, I related the story of Neal Wright and his wife. My grandma found this very satisfactory and it avoided some of the worst damage that the usual inquisition might have wrought.

         “How old is this woman you live with?”

         “I don’t live with her. I live in her barn.”

         “You have a stall?”

         “I live in an old tack room. It’s actually very comfortable.”

         My grandpa immediately asked, “Where’s the poop deck?”

         “It’s right there. I built it myself.”

         “That’s expensive.”

         “I put in a toilet I found at the dump.”

         “Where did you learn to do that?”

         “From you.”

         That shut him up, as they say.

         The thing about this is that, after the fact, Julia wanted to hear all about my Easter dinner. I think that she is jealous of such a large family event. This is something she never really had and it matters to her. And seeing it in that way has made me consider it more carefully for myself.

***

22. Mechanized Man

         The plot remained much the same, but the mechanization of man has now become my primary theme. The theme being, of course, that no man was, after all, a piano key.

         I had previously dealt with lesser matters, such as survival, and the purpose of particular characters in trying to survive, and what they would do after they survived, and what would happen after that. But now, none of that matters so much to me. It seems to me that all of that would take care of itself. People just wouldn’t do things that would get them killed. If they didn’t think they would make it, they just wouldn’t do it. That is the way it has always been, on earth as and in heaven (or Mars, as the case may be). I will call that, my plot principle ‘number one.’

         Outside influences, like floods, meteors, tyrants or religious fanatics, might make people do foolish things, usually out of expediency, but for the most part, they did things that worked and would let them keep working afterward. That concept was now influenced more by Julia’s work. I had to accept the idea that people tended to do the right thing—otherwise we would not survive as a species. That was her ‘narrative thread.’ But now there was a new concern. The work itself was being mechanized. The human element was being eliminated because it was problematic. Machines were more efficient and predictable. Theoretically.

         I had more than a couple of problems with this. One was where it conflicted with principle number one. Why would people want to make machines that made mankind itself irrelevant? It seemed obvious that this was in fact happening, but why? And on my perfect petri dish of Mars, how might that be determined?

         Some of the factors might be delusion (as in religion), subterfuge (as in politics), accident (as in the weather), or on purpose (human meanness).

         Accidents, like meteors and floods, were ultimately boring subject matter to me. There was little to be learned there, even if Hollywood is habitually taken with the special effects. Everything that follows from such events is unique to the event itself. If I wanted to play with the human beings under stress from such events, it might be interesting, but that was already common enough to history on Earth and didn’t need my input. Human beings coped. That’s the story.

         What made Mars unique for me was that it eliminated so much of the non-essential. It is not so clear why someone might do something stupid if they are juggling too much cultural baggage, historical tradition, or political preference. And I am not smart enough to deal with much more than the problem at hand. I could go to the junk yard of ideas perhaps, and get something that worked, but that was about it. But there were no junk yards (yet) to speak of on Mars.

         Julia had found her niche by removing most of those larger forces of history that so often screw people up, by retreating to a time and place when the world was still lit only by fire. She was interested in the individuals themselves and why they did what they did. And that was appealing to me as well. I just didn’t want to deal with the Highland clearances, or the removals in Ireland, or the religious wars, or a politics that went back to the Viking invasions. I wanted my cake a little more plain. A pound for pound cake with just a little chocolate frosting, perhaps. Mars offered me that.

         Another problem with machines is what a former boss of mine called ‘Gigo.’ Garbage in, garbage out. The machine did what it was designed to do. If the design was mediocre, it produced mediocre work. However, with robots, the element of excellence was certainly lost, along with all chance of innovation. A science fiction writer named Robert Heinlein once made the point. His great fault as a human being, he said, was that he was lazy. He kept trying to find ways to avoid work. This resulted in his invention of all sorts of nifty stuff to help him avoid work. It’s a problem a machine alone would never face.

         Essentially, slavery of every kind, human or machine, was people being stupid in order to avoid work.

         Autistic types were very taken with the idea of artificial intelligence. This is, of course, the ultimate machine, sans the difficult human element. Not only does the robot avoid certain physical aspects of the human being, body odoer and bath room breaks, for instance, but all the messy thinking too. The human element is totally eliminated! Theoretically. But the list of problems with such a beast only becomes longer as each problem is extrapolated. If they are wanting a calculator that calculates on its own to fill gaps in a spreadsheet, good enough. If they want one that might realize that the gap has been caused not by error but by fraud, they won’t be getting it within any current human understanding. What is fraud, just for starters?

         The point is, the problems with AI are very likely to have an impact on my perfect Mars. That’s even in keeping with the thinking of my personal hero, Mr. Heinlein. People are lazy. Some will want slaves when they can get them, no matter the moral issues. Inform them that the shirt they are wearing was made by a twelve-year-old semi-slave in China and they brush you off like so much lint. And there begins the rub with AI. There are theoretically no moral issues with AI. And determining just what the artificial intelligence of this particular manifestation of ‘slave’ should be is ultimately a moral matter. A human issue. And the machine is only as stupid as the people who make it.

         Another matter, adjacent perhaps, was the very idea of intelligence. Was that simply a concoction of information—data—or did that involve a judgement about what data was more important. A calculation of past use might tell this artificial intelligence what data was most in demand, for instance, but that was not necessarily a good standard for what might be needed in the future. Prior experience by the AI might indicate what could be required, but it had no necessary baring on what was wanted. If the operations of the world were frozen in time, AI might be of some service. But time had a way of passing.

         These things would have to be faced. Some idiot would inevitably think of some advantage to the use of AI in producing some specific result. Basically, this was similar to the jerk who thought he could get rich by robbing the store. The consequences were manifest.

         But now Julia had introduced a new element to my thinking: the coincidence of the laws of logic to the natural limitations of artificial intelligence. Logic was useful as a math for thought, but worse than inadequate for actual human action, and if not kept in check, it could be destructive.

         Logic might dictate that human beings should be absolutely controlled or, for best results, eliminated, in order to maintain some preordained idea of what was best. And those who followed such religious orders, the ordained priests of such beliefs about what was best, were the greater enemy of mankind

         The power struggle on Mars would inevitably be between those who wanted slaves—or those who by any logic were willing to be slaves themselves for the convenience of a hassle-free life and in order to avoid the messy consequences of freedom—and those who wanted to be free.

         I mentioned my struggle with mechanization to Julia. She corrected my course more than a little.

         “It’s not just the machines. The machines need numbers. The numbers need machines. That’s what’s really at the root of all this. Besides the amoral philosophy and all that crap. The slavery is incidental. It fits as long as it’s convenient and then the slaves are dumped overboard.”

         When she has had her first bourbon, she loosens up a bit. But you have to keep her allusions together.

         “What are you talking about?”

         “What is going on today! It’s a numbers game! And it’s not even worth a gamble. It’s a certainty. It’s just a matter of your 0’s and your 1’s…The educational system is geared to creating 0’s out of 1’s. The medical establishment is geared to reducing the number of 1’s to 0’s. Let’s have another war so we can take more of that money we’ve managed to inflate previously and eliminate a few more 1’s. All those savings. All those lives. They say it is just a matter of arithmetic. Replace the human beings with machines. Throw the human beings overboard. Have AI build the machines. Throw more human beings overboard. Government expenses are for human beings. With them out of the way, government keeps it. But it’s an even worse sham. The money they pay is only worth what they say it’s worth. If you owe some human beings a debt, inflate it so you don’t have to pay as much. Then charge more for the service. Win, win. You loose.”

         I have to leave before she adds another layer. I need to be able to sleep

 without a shot of bourbon.

         Julia pay’s all of her bills by check. She does not have a credit card. She has described everyone staring at her as she writes a check when she buys her groceries. I have been behind people like that. But now I will admit that my patience with it has improved. I now understand why she does it. I agree with her on every level. But my math skills are not sufficient even to keep the balance in my meager account, and I can’t afford the bank charges if I bounce something. So, I use my credit card. Julia frowns at me for this. And this had me thinking. If my Mars is an electronic society, would there be any room for someone like Julia. Or even a flaccid currency. Wouldn’t everything be reduced to a card—or perhaps just a chip in the head?

         This becomes yet another alteration in my grand plan. I must now find room on this red planet for Julia. Without a ‘Julia’, they are doomed. Right from the first inkling of the idea, I know that everything has changed once again.

***

23. The God of the Machine

         There is a god in the machine

         That lies unseen

         That cries for release.

Do you hear it?

         There is a god in the machine

         That promises to be good

         Will make things better

         If it’s better understood.

Don’t believe it!

         There is a god in the machine

         That must have its way—

         Must have it! If only to play

         by its own rules

         If only you’ll learn them!

Run away.

         There is a god in the machine,

         Made of edges and numbers   

         Of precise mathematical calculation—

         You are not the sum of its parts.

         You are not even a remainder.

Stay away

         There is a god in the machine

         That will always fail

                  When needed most—

         It’s designed to,

                  As such gods always do.

         So that you will need it all the more

         This is the lesson

                  Of the god in the machine

         There was no date on that bit of verse. I knew it was hers, but written after her small book of poetry was published. It was on a large index card that had clearly been pinned to a shelf or wall and the card stock yellowed. I had found it one afternoon set into a shelf on top of unrelated books.

         I still had the newsletter from the coffee shop in my computer case. I had never taken it out, from that very first day, and I’d forgotten it was there but found it again that same afternoon that I found the index card and that verse.

         Impulsively, I asked her, “What would you have done if you hadn’t found me?”

         I didn’t mean it to sound self-serving, but I suppose it was. Very!

         She said, “I would have tried again … That little ad you saw was not the first. I ran something like it at the University of New Hampshire newspaper. I got no replies at all…I even spoke to a young woman in an office there. She explained it very simply to me: ten dollars an hour isn’t very much. And I was expecting whoever answered to have their own computer. And the hours were not good. If I wanted to get a response I would have to say more. To offer more. And I told her, that was the point. I didn’t want the ad to be attractive. I only wanted someone who might see the opportunity in it for themselves…You should have seen her smile. In the catalog of smiles, it has a special place. A forever happy smile of smug and infinite ignorance.”

         I asked, “What sort of person did you imagine you’d get?”

         “Not you! Good Lord, not you at all. I imagined some young thing from the English Department, who might have read one of my books and appreciated what I was doing. I actually thought it would be a girl. Like one of my daughters…My daughters were always good assistants—when they weren’t too busy doing their own thing. They always begrudged me the time I took from them. But I was thankful for that. I didn’t want them to be easy with their time…I told them it was like a bank. An invisible bank of time. And all their efforts were saved there for the day when they would need the time themselves…But they didn’t buy that.”

         “So, you left it up to the fates. An accident?”

         That got her heavy breath. Not a sigh. A breath necessary to tackle a larger task.

         “I have come to realize…Perhaps I knew it all along, but I finally admitted it to myself, that I was not a rational person.”

         I didn’t understand. But then, that might have been part of the answer.

         “When did that happen?”

         “I was still young. But I’m not sure. I was always young, until I wasn’t. You age slowly, and then suddenly.”

         “Were you already writing then?”

         “Oh, yes. I’d written a couple of novels by then. I had children by then. I was wanting a divorce by then…I can remember the year. And the moment. It was during the time I was living in Ireland and the girls were young…there was a moment. I had them out in a field by a road near our little rented house—just a country road. The intention was a picnic but I picked a poor spot. A perfect spot really, just over a stone wall where we could see the curve of the earth. And a farmer there was quite displeased with me. He stopped his tractor—right in the middle of the field. On a small rise. A beautiful sight in my mind to this day—and he came over to us where we were beneath a tree—-but still close enough to be in his way it seemed—and he said, ‘What’cha doin’?’ I didn’t understand his brogue at first. His little finger-soiled cap was pulled down tight on his head and the dust caught in the sun-grin lines of his face made him fierce. I said, ‘Would you like a drink of water? It’s lemon water. It’s very good.’ And he stood there, gobsmacked. Hands on his hips. Just stood there. His next word was, ‘American’s! You own the world!’ and I said, thinking to make light of the seriousness in his voice, ‘We rent. mostly.’ And then he smiled. And then laughed. Loud enough to make an echo on a field. Just as quick as that. And he reached a hand out to take a cup of lemon water and drank it in one gulp, and said, ‘Tell your girls to be careful of the brambles there at the wall,’ and then he turned and went back to his tractor.”

         It was a good story. Part of it had turned up again in the ‘The Plow and Stars.’ Then, and there, it was just another part of her ‘narrative life.’ And another thought suddenly occurred to me that I had no way to express without seeming totally egocentric—I wondered what part of my own interaction with her might be useful in something she wrote someday.

         I asked her, “But what was so irrational about that?”

         And she said, “It’s irrational that I even told you about it…But the thing of it was, at that moment, I was suddenly quite taken with that man. It was quite inexplicable!”

         I backed away from that, “You’ve always struck me as rational more rational than not.”

         “Perhaps, it’s because we have that much in common.”

         I said, “What? What is the ‘that’ that you’re talking about?”

         “Oh, I’m not putting rationality down. It’s necessary. You can’t get from here to there without it. But it’s baggage. It is a burden. You have to remember to bring it along on the journey, or you’ll get lost, but then always remember when to ignore it.”

         She was playing with me.

         “The opposite of rational is crazy, isn’t it?”

         “Ah. But we’re both crazy. Writing becomes us. It’s a schizophrenia…Ask Derek. Ask my daughter, Jesse. She’s said as much. But she’s the craziest of all. She should be a writer as well. She thinks she can control her life, and the lives of her children, and her husband, like so many characters—and, no. That’s the problem there. She can’t control him. Felix has already sold his soul to the God of the Machine. He thinks the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But you and I know it isn’t.”

         Defensively, I said aloud, “I was just trying to understand.”

         “You do. You already do. You just don’t accept that yet…Living in a truck down by the river, just so you can hear the spring peepers and the pop of the embers in the fire and the birds awakening in the morning. What sort of primordial fool are you, anyway? You could be earning a living, nine to five, with a little overtime when you want it. You could live in a box in the city instead of a tack room that smells of hay and ancient manure. You could watch television instead of writing novels about a deserty planet. You could be making something of yourself!”

         That got a reaction out of me before the thought was complete.

         “I am. That’s exactly what I’m trying to do.”

         “Yes. And on your own terms. Not by the rules of ‘The God in the Machine’—the god of numbers.”

         “That’s the second time you’ve mentioned that. You’ve written a verse to it that I found over there in the book case. Where’s that phrase from?”

         She rocked at the recollection of the verse. “I had forgotten about that…Originally, I don’t know. I know there’s a book by Isabel Peterson. She was smart but she didn’t quite get it. She wasn’t wise… But it’s also that poem. Something I wrote when I was in Ireland with the girls…I remembered it while I was telling you about the farmer. The farmer really only wanted to warn me—and warn the girls, about the brambles. But he couldn’t just do that. That would have sounded rude to him—as if we were too stupid to see it for ourselves.”

         “That part’s not in ‘The Plow and Stars.’”

         “Ah. You’re ahead of me, there. Yes. I have written some of that into ‘The Plow and Stars.’ But no, the thought was there. The thought came before all of that…When Donovan sees his sweat—his life—spilling down his own body into the plowed soil, like blood, he realizes he was simply a part of a machine—Rolf’s machine. And Clare offers him the water. Her own water. And he fully realizes that she is the source of his life. Donovan is not an intellectual. He is not rationalizing what he sees. He is understanding it in the same way human beings always have. He is seeing himself as part of the story. He sees himself in the greater narrative. And he doesn’t like his part.”

         She already had her hook in my lip, so, I just listened.

         “There is a conceit that spoils genius…and that is being too smart. You can’t be stupid and be a genius, but you must guard against being too smart. It will get you killed. All you know at any one time is far too little to save you. You must always do what you can with what you know…I have written a book about the god of the machine. Coming to Joppa. Isabel Paterson and her acolytes would not have approved. In fact, they didn’t approve. I received a very bad review in one of the libertarian magazines. That was about the time I gave up on all politics. A numskull who had never heard of Phidias and only possibly might tell you who Pericles was—if given time to look it up in an encyclopedia the night before—was telling me I was wrong! It’s true, of course. I might have been wrong. It was only a fiction—but a supposition based on fact! And done for a reason! At least he might have let himself be entertained by the idea. It was a good story. Instead, he was outraged. It is a religiosity I had already grown tired of while corresponding with the Medievalists. In fact, with Coming to Joppa I was already going back more than two thousand years just to get away from them.”

         “I never read that one. What was your mistake there?”

         “As a story? It didn’t sell very well. Too abstract, I suppose. Not enough cause and effect. That is good story thinking. Basic narrative thinking. But I was trying to lay the ground for something broader. Carthage succeeded, but ultimately failed. How did that happen…But with the critics? For the critics I was not in love enough with trade. ‘Trade!’ My young hero, Kothar, was a Carthaginian. His family fortune was based on trade! He was going to Athens with his father to meet with Pericles and secure the ‘trade’ of his family business there in olive oil. I thought it was a great device to work around. Unfortunately, historically, Pericles fell to the plague that also killed the boy’s father and the trade deal fell through. He was suddenly helpless. A stranger in a strange land. His father’s gold is stolen. Carthage was Phoenician and the Greeks were always at war with them at some level. They spoke a different language and Carthage was expanding at the time. Kothar had trained to be his father’s interpreter. But suddenly, he was penniless and worse off than a slave. He had no place in their society. That was when he managed to secure a position as a helper with the great Phideas. And that was hundreds of years before Rome—when sheep were still grazing on the seven hills.”

         “With Phideas, Kothar comes to appreciate art. He learns that the power that made Greece great was not trade. It was art. The Greeks had seen the god in man, when the Carthaginians were still the slaves of numbers. And that was hundreds of years too early. No one cares today about what the price of wool was in ancient Athens, but as long as we are human, we will care about the art. All the wealth of Carthage that made it great was in silver and gold. All of that is gone now too. All gone, thousands of years ago. And that was what I was saying. Isabel Patterson spent far too much of her wonderful energy on matters of consequence. Those details can’t be ignored. They are our mean. Our golden mean, perhaps. But that is not our purpose as human beings. The God of the Machine is, ultimately, not human. It’s math. It is not about human beings. Trade is merely good math. It is important. But a machine can’t do any better. The Sumerians had already created the abacus, you know. But with Phideas, Kothar discovers the heart humanity. And that was ‘art.’”

         She shook her head at a memory before continuing.

         “What was my great sin? What had I done? I had questioned the very idea that business was somehow ethical. The outrage! The great goddess Ayn Rand had already spoken, hadn’t she. Business was the very basis of ethics, was it not? … Such balderdash! Equitable, perhaps, but not ethical! They even called me a neo-Marxist! Me!…The idiots!”

         “Thank goodness Paul was there to council me. He had been through all of that sort of thing with his theories about kings. His advice has been my guide ever since. Ignore them. Simply ignore them. Go my own way. The true believers would never accept anything that questioned their religion.”

         But then I asked, feeling the delight of being out of breath with the running of my thoughts, “What would I have done if I hadn’t found you?”

         This was a reversal of fortune that I thought might matter.

         And she said, “But certainly! You would have tried again.”

***

24. A common tragedy

         “What I have failed to do—No…Yes, what I failed to do—and I am not sure I can repair now—is to make it clear what ‘the commons’ was.  To make that clear by exposition, not explanation. Some fellow, Garret Hardin, wrote a book years ago about the ‘Tragedy of the Commons,’ that explained something of how it worked and totally missed why it worked. I’ve thought I should pick up that gauntlet again, a hundred times, and then left it there for some other matter that seemed more important at the moment, and now I think that was a bad trade. I had seen this before, when I was writing The Wrath. The commons really is at the center of everything. It deserved a book of its own. But then I had other ideas, and now I have ‘The Plow and Stars’  to mend and this story does not have another wedge of space for it.”

         She was tired. I had argued with her about something and lost, as I usually did, but that had now left her unhappy at her choices.

         But I said “So, write it now!”

         “You say that as if you had never tried to write anything yourself.”

         This had become an all-purpose argument to hold me at bay.

         “Alright. I’m stupid. But stop what you are doing and write it now. This book is done! You must have forgotten a comma somewhere. So what? I can tell you at least a dozen things I’m dissatisfied with here, and none of them are as important as writing about the commons!”

         She laughed at me—actually giggled, as she does when she is tickled by a thought.

         “You are so funny. A dozen things…If I were only thirty years younger, I should search the corners of the earth for you…That is the real answer to your question of before. But, you know, in the end…I wouldn’t have. I would only do what I’ve always done—what we all do. Make do…But it would have been so wonderful to have your voice in my head when I was first trying. Ned’s voice was a voice of reason. A father’s voice. He never took chances. After all, he had a mortgage to pay. He actually said that very thing a dozen times when I wanted to quit some project or another. But he also said, ‘if I’d known you were going to marry Derek, I would have married you myself!’ He actually said that! Damned if he didn’t say that out loud! … It ruined me.…But I could never go back. None of us can. We make do.”

         She emptied the little glass she used for drinking her bourbon and got up to fill it again. As she always did. I had once suggested that she use a larger glass to save the trip and she told me that didn’t work. She would just drink more. And that was the real reason for the smaller glass and why she never drank in bars. But then she stood at the kitchen counter there in the half dark and told me more.

         She said, “The common ground is at the center of all civilizations. It is the center of the universe… But it’s only an idea. Really, just an idea. Not just grazing land, or water rights, or even the village green. That’s only the remnant of something larger, after the cubically minded have done with it. In truth, it’s not even an actual place. But in the medieval village it was the key to everything else. Crime there was relatively unknown. Stealing from your neighbor was stealing from yourself. Besides, if you just asked your neighbor for what it was you wanted, and they had it to give, they’d give it to you and then help you carry it away if you needed that. Your neighbor was your cousin, or married to your aunt. That caused other difficulties at times, but that’s what the seasonal ‘fairs’ were about. For the human gathering, not for the selling. No one had any money, anyway. Everything was trade. The benefit to it was in meeting the miller’s son or the cooper’s daughter…That was the way it was in paradise.”

         It was a romantic image.

         “What went wrong?”

         “Then? I’m not sure. Now, the whole idea of it has been smothered by the politics of socialism. Voluntary sharing has been mandated by taxes with all the corruption attached. But that’s the book I should have written. To find out.”

         “Why can’t you do it now?”

         She laughed again. But didn’t giggle.

         “Because it’s a love story. I’m too old for love stories.”

         I laughed at that. “Don’t tell Paul. He still has his hopes.”

         I shouldn’t have said it. I had no right to say it. And that cleared her face. She looked at me sideways for a moment and then said. “You are a pain in the ass.”

         My only defense was, “I wish I wasn’t.”

         She took a breath on that. “What do you really wish?”

         “And I wish you would write that book!”

         “Damn, you! Go to your room!”

         “Yes, ma’am.”

         Paul had said in The Right of Kings, “The tragedy of the commons arises from the actions of a few. Kings may rise and fall, but the commons endured and survived them all. The Vikings might raid and plunder and kill the sons and take the daughters, but the commons endured. Perhaps on higher ground. A wall might be built. But the grace of the commons remained. It was the center of all community. It was the center of the Christian world. Not Rome. Not Constantinople. The physical representation of human spirit, apart from government. The voluntary cooperation of individuals for a common purpose.

         “What killed the commons were the few; those who used that ground without care. The uncivilized, who still live off of the rest of society even today. This abuse then became the argument for government—This man grazed his cows where that man grew his barley. This man let his sheep eat all of that man’s grass. That man cut his neighbor’s wood and sold it to another. So, laws were passed and it was argued that an authority was needed to keep that law—as if the government itself needed no such guardian. As if the government could mind itself. The King, then, became the only stop-gap between government and grace.”

         I read that again that night.       

         And this: “Of course, the idea that a social arrangement might exist outside of the purview of government, stood in the way for some. As property rights were codified, so too were the rights of government. The very idea of a human arrangement not managed by authority became abhorrent. Slowly, over centuries, the land and the responsibility for the land was subdivided and individual rights as well as responsibility diminished.

         And this: “But what made the greatest disruption in this social arrangement, happened in the fourteenth century. The plague. One in three or more were suddenly dead. The need for labor forced the altering of traditional laws to make things easier for those who had lost their families, and their heritage. Land went fallow for need of titles and the churches emptied for need of tithes. The few, those nasty few, the unhappy few, took advantage of the vacuum. Bad Kings arose who did not do their duty—out of ignorance, or fear, or greed, or power lust.”

         With that freshly in mind, I wondered just how many of those ideas he had inherited from Julia. But then, it might be difficult to see if the intellectual traffic had moved in any one direction.

         By way of unsubtle prompting, I asked Julia about this the next afternoon. I was not going to let my new idea go. What I wondered was this, could I create a ‘commons’ on Mars.

         That, and I must be a pain in the ass, or bust.

         “But where did all that come from. There were no commons in Roman times. The Greeks didn’t have it.”

         She shrugged a little. “No. The Greeks had all the great ideas, but kept them for the few…No. It was all encapsulated by Christianity. I may not be religious—or not religious enough for some—but I am aware of that at least. The commons arose from the values of Christian culture. That was in the transformation of tribal culture to a moral one. This was not the law of Rome, but seen as the law of God. As a social norm it was barely a thousand years old when the plagues came.”

         “Can’t we go back!”

         “No. Perhaps not that way. But why should we ignore the best of all that. I am not so fond of Paul’s belief in Kings. He doesn’t trust the few to mind their own business. And I agree with him there. But the key is for the many to appreciate their blessings. To make that appreciation a social norm—a ‘commons’ in and of itself, and to defend it” 

         “How does that happen?”

         “I can’t tell you. Paul sees it as the role of the King. But I wrote a book about all that once! I wanted to find out, and because it’s not in the history books. Not that I could find. Those are all about government and the law of Rome, or the Church, and the law of Rome. Did you read what I wrote about the Lollards?”

         I hesitated. How deep was this rabbit hole?

         “Who are they? What was that about?”

         “Were. They were the first protestants, in the Fourteenth Century. Followers of John Wycliffe.”

         “What was that novel called?’

         “Lud’s Church. It’s all based on legend anyway. On Walter de Lud-Auk and his daughter. That was the focus. But the Lollards were quite real. And so is Lud’s Church.…But, it’s no church. It’s a fissure in the cosmos! It’s just a narrow natural cathedral of stone…There is a chasm there in Staffordshire. I took the girls to see it. It was a rainy day but the light encrusted the walls like emeralds—Maya said, it was as if they were stained glass. It was once a hiding place for outlaws and vagabonds and heretics. The Lollards were heretics. Essentially, just another popular revolt against authority. There was always another. They had posted their demands, their ‘Twelve Conclusions’ for church reform, on the door of Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s cathedral, and that was a hundred years before Martin Luther got around to it

         “But Lud’s Church is one of those places where the mythology has been muddied by too many shoes. So, I used the commons as the focal point of that story. The Black Death had destroyed the society around them, and the people of the village could not know the larger picture or the politics of it but they understood the importance of the common ground. Unfortunately for them, the changes were too great. But the Lollards movement arose from that. In reaction to that. Even the name ‘Lollard’ was an epithet for their lack of schooling, but their knowledge was in fact greater than the scholars who attacked them. The scholars only knew the law of Rome. The Latin of it. But these people knew what was already being called the ‘common law.’ And they knew it in the vernacular. Wycliffe and his friends were translating the Latin Bible into Middle English for them. But it was really just the intelligence of the ages, relatively unsullied by the Church or the King…A thousand times, for a thousand years, people had found a way to live among themselves without direction. So I wrote a book about that. And Paul wrote me a ten-page letter about it, afterward!”

         “I’ve never seen that book.”

         “It’s out of print. I’d written a juvenile just before about the Peasant’s Revolt and Wat Tyler, for the girls, and that sold well. Librarians loved that, and I wanted to write something for an older audience, with a little more sex and violence.”

         “The peasant’s revolt wasn’t violent enough?”

         “No, not the way I told it. Besides, I’d avoided all the sticky stuff in that—the philosophy and the ideas and the politics. Lud’s Church was a love story.”

         “Sounds like it.”

         “Paul was dead set against the later John Oldcastle revolt, of course, because that was a challenge to his hero Henry the Fifth, but he was fascinated with my connection between John Purvey and the Lollards, and John of Gaunt and the Black Prince.”

         “Did he have anything good to say?”

         “He loved it! So naturally it didn’t sell. His taste for the obscure is unerring. But it didn’t sell.”

         “All that sex and violence didn’t sell.”

         “No. Mixing sex and morality are not so popular these days…But, maybe a few got the point. Most people accept the rules of the road and drive on the right side—except for the Brits, of course. But then, they are Brits. It’s in their blood to be wrong, else how will the rest of us know what’s right. They are the only nation in history to have succeeded by being wrong, over and over again. Dodgy kings and imperial ambitions have no future in a world of atomic bombs.”

         I whined a little, “But Christianity has its problems too.”

         She wasn’t having it. “On balance, I don’t agree. I think some self-anointed Christians do. They want their fingers up someone else’s ass. But then, the flaws of human nature can ruin anything. Otherwise, there would be no need for Christianity in the first place. That was part of Wycliffe’s doctrine. Not the Roman Catholic version, but the popular church of the fourteenth and fifteenth century, when the corruption of Rome had driven people away. And that actually goes right back a thousand years to Pelagius again. Our laws make us worse by taking away our responsibility. Our flaws are what make us better—if we bother to deal with them.”

         She had lost me.

         “So, what is Pelagius? And why have you avoided the subject of the commons in your other books?”

         “Who is Pelagius…Because it is a larger and deeper matter than all the others. I don’t know that I’m up to it now. I just wanted to tell stories about human beings endeavoring to be human. I think that effort is at the core of Christianity, but I wasn’t interested in writing apology. C. S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton have done that quite well enough. It might be done it differently, but I don’t think I was ever up to that particular task…I am not a theologian, but that doesn’t mean I can’t talk to God. I think the King James Bible is the greatest single book of literature. I’m not the first to feel as if it was written just for me, just so that I could talk to God.”

         My ignorance of so much history had me feeling a bit snippy.

         “And what has God told you lately?”

         “That you are a pain in the ass.”

         So, this was my responsibility then. What would the commons be like on Mars?

         My Mars—the Mars I dreamed of was not yet hospitable for such a grand device, or was it? Still, the plague that gripped it, was efficiency.

***

25. We all live narrative lives

         A day later, Julia dismissed my after-thoughts, repeating her usual phrase. “We all live narrative lives.”

         By that, I thought she meant that what Donovan did would have to be in keeping with what he had done before. I wasn’t sure.

         “Why would he want to go to America? It wouldn’t be so easy to reimagine the opportunities in a place you didn’t know, without resources of your own. He has nothing. He’ll just be canon fodder.”

         She nodded at that. “But that’s what he is now. And what he was. He’s a human tool, at best. His only tie—the only reason for him to stay, Clara, is cut. He has to leave Ireland. And he’s already worked for others. He knows he can work for others. But there is no steady work to be had at home. People are starving. Any job is better than none. The English have moved them off their land with a purpose. And The Virginia Company needs the canon fodder.”

          She had said all that in a passing explanation to my asking why Donovan would have taken a job with his lifelong enemy. I suppose she thought it was self-explanatory. I didn’t. I had become invested with this fellow. I didn’t want him to fail, or die. She wasn’t prefiguring anything, but she had already proven to me that she would let a character go if she thought that was what the story called for. I had not expected Daniel to die in The Wrath. I think I was still upset over that.

         “But why? How can he be happy about doing that. Doesn’t it bother him?”

         It was in the middle of things at that moment and she didn’t want to stop. And later, there wasn’t time, or she had forgotten. I don’t know which. It was the next day before she picked that thought up again.

         And then she said it again, in exactly that way, while she broiled some bacon for some grilled cheese sandwiches, because she had left herself too little time to cook anything more.

But then, she added her own question to it.

         “We all live narrative lives, don’t you think?”

         She wanted me to answer. I said all that I could at that moment, “I don’t know.”

         And she said, “Yes, you do!”

         This is the way she could be. If I questioned something, she would often turn it around. I assumed that was partly her way of keeping my questions down. She didn’t actually know all of the ones that I didn’t ask, just to avoid this.

         I said, “How do you know?”

         This probably sounded defensive because she squinted at me as if to say, ‘You know better.’ But she said, “You’ve already told me as much.”

         I couldn’t remember saying anything like that. But as I looked for a way out, I realized this all sounded quite familiar, as if I had dreamed it before.

         “What did I say?”

         “You said something about the fact that everyone you knew had a story…Didn’t you say that?”

         I had said that. “Yes. I did. And that’s what you mean, then, by ‘narrative lives.’ Got it!”

         “No. Not quite. It’s more than that. It’s in everything! Everything!”

         I probably shook my head at her, because she squinted again.

         I said, “Well, I suppose it accounts for a lot. But not the unexpected. Not the plane crash or the earth quake, or the epidemic, or the war. It doesn’t account for everything. Daniel died in war. He wasn’t controlling that! We don’t control a lot of what happens to us.”

         Now she was shaking her own head. Perhaps with pity, I imagined. When she did that, it was almost audible.

         “No. You’re missing the point. We all live narrative lives. All of us do. Almost all of us, anyway. There are some few people who live in fear, who don’t want to plan for the future and try not to think about the past. They’re always waiting for the next disaster to strike. Preparing for it. They are not living much. Mostly just suffering. Like a dog in the shelter, trembling at the approach of a visitor, just waiting to be put to sleep.”

         “Geez!”

         She shrugged at her own thought. “Well, it’s an image I used once… Sorry. My point is that even the fearful are busy making the story of their own lives. That’s all. The disaster does’t do that to them. Because of the way they live, they might be able to rise above the disaster, but that only adds to the narrative. It does not subtract. The lives we live are what we chose to live. No matter how mundane. Especially that. Mundane lives are made, not born. And, Daniel chose to go to war.”

         I had seen that, myself. I knew that to be true.

         After a day of wrestling with the demons in her imagined world, she must then face the ones that threaten her own. That was my dramatic reading of this. But most of these were also mundane—common and everyday—on either side of the divide. ‘We are out of butter,’ or ‘The furnace is off. There’s no hot water.’ They were usually not the cause of much more than a few words, though some days were worse than others. More than once, she called this the ‘admixture’. This was another Julia word. I liked the sound of it. She said, ’This was the admixture of reality and imagination. It’s the natural schizophrenia of the writer of novels.’

         This evening, she said, “A funny thing, I think—more odd than laughable—is when I read of people saying that life is just a simulation. I don’t read very much of them because the idea is so shallow that I find it difficult to take anything else they say very seriously. Imagine thinking that coincidence has anything more to do with your own life than your perception of it. As if the universe revolved around your own awareness of it. It takes egocentricity to the level of the absurd. But that way of thought has grown over the years since organized religion has so utterly failed us. It’s really just an extension of that failure, I think. People looking for a set of instructions. Though, as ideas go, it’s still a poor replacement. All small print. There are no cathedrals there. No Bach…No devotions. Devotions were always key. Affirmations of belief and what is important in life are important. Everyday. A guide. As a matter of habit. These are not just rituals. They are a direct connection between the past, and the present and they anticipate future. It’s not an accident that the cathedrals of the past ages still speak to us.”

         That was an idea I had not considered. Without religion, devotions were not all that common. Stupidly, the rituals were taken for granted by us now. A good appreciation of the present was that much harder without some comparison or guide. Especially so when, all the while, the obvious cause of their egocentric none sense that all things are happening just to them—that things appear planned, just for them, and that there was simply too much coincidence, is that it’s true! And the reason for that is, that things are, in fact, planned. By them. They are the ones who planned them!

         “We are the product of our own behavior! By our own desires and failures. But God forbid we should have to take responsibility for our own actions. That can’t be! Easier to believe in a ‘matrix.’ I find it so boring…Better, they suppose, to believe in a ‘matrix’ than in God. Don’t take responsibility. Better to believe we are all in a simulation that we cannot control, than to deal with the child that is being raped next door or the derelict we pass on the street!

         “And still they build castles and fortresses, and missiles, and aircraft carriers, to guard against their own behavior, just as much as they did a thousand years ago. Two thousand years ago! Ten thousand years ago! They field whole armies to defend themselves against their own idiocy. And then, when those fail, as they always do, they punish their fellow man for not properly complying with their wishes—not doing better, not trying harder—which, remember, by their own standards, those poor bastards can’t help themselves for doing because they too are in the same matrix and have no free will to begin with…Their own concocted matrix, is a circle! A boring circle. If ever they admit to having free will and being responsible for what they’ve done—for what they do—they would have to stop and think and admit to their own stupidity, and meanness, and avarice, and find their own way. Hell, if they would just raise their children to see that they had responsibility for their actions, their children might actually put an end to all the fucking wars! At least end all the most avoidable suffering. Instead, they send them off to state schools to be indoctrinated in the ‘simulation.’ To be a part of the greater plan. For the greater good…For me—to me, it’s all as if the devil rides unshackled. Without inhibition…But, that’s the trite drama in it! The hackneyed story in it. And all the time, the few who actually stand against that evil are most often just fellow human beings! Unaware of the greater madness. They don’t have the leisure of sitting beneath a tree to see an apple fall. They are busy picking them, against the coming winter. They are just trying to live their lives…I think that those are the real heroes—the ones who stand against all that evil without ever knowing the good they do—the ones who go to war, when they must, but only because they think they are saving their families.”

         She stopped herself then, and took another sip and shrugged. The jag was over

Then she said, by way of excusing herself for running on, “But at least it makes for good novels. I wonder what it would be like if people ever did take responsibility for their own actions. Now, there’s a science fiction novel for you…You think? But, a boring one, I suppose. People being stupid and blaming others is just too damned much red meat.”

         This last part was related to a phrase we had covered that day—a scene in which Rolf had taken the slaughtered pig from a farmer. It was the farmer’s only real possession, one that he and his family had raised with care and finally agonized over slaughtering because they were so fond of it, only to have Rolf come and take it away from them.

         As I left, she said, “I think they would take everything, if they could, destroy everything if they had to, just to avoid admitting they are responsible for their own evil.”

         No wonder she drinks her bourbon at night.

         There was my job again.

         My Mars, set out on straightened lines by future planners (or a writer) looking to save time and cost, would never imagine doing something just for fun. The petri dish is round. But does it have to be? Would some like to wake up on a morning to see the Elysium Mons out their bedroom window? The fastest way to Elon might be the long way through Utopia basin instead of Isidis.

***

26. Jesse from New York

         Jesse came up from New York, unexpectedly. I think it was just to check on her mother but I had the sense she had some other agenda that was left unspoken in my presence. She arrived at noon, so the timing, at least, minimized the interruption of her mother’s work. She did not come out to the barn, and each time I caught a glimpse of either of them near the windows, they were busy talking, so I left them alone. I finally went in to the smell of beef-stew at four.

         After some small talk, Jesse asked me, out of the blue, if I was happy. It’s not a question you get asked very often. Not seriously.

         I said, “Thought I was. At least, I’m learning to be.”

         “Is mother teaching you that?”

         “Indirectly.”

         “That’s the way she teaches. Indirectly.”

         Julia was sitting right there, during this, making faces of comment.

         “I don’t teach!”

         Jesse said, “Sure you do! That’s what all your books are about, isn’t it!”

         Julia raised her hands. “You are only looking at them that way because I used them that way to teach you, and your sisters…I did do that…Hell, I was busy writing them while I was doing it! It was easier than trying to do two different things at once!”

         Jesse protested. “We helped you!”

         “You did! You were my first editors. If you remember, I taught you to type when we were working on Bailey’s Watch. The whole section on farm economy was re-written just for you because you couldn’t understand what the hell I was saying about the way Bailey did things…But I didn’t know a damned thing about medieval farm economy then, myself. It changed my whole perspective on the story! If you hadn’t asked about everything, I couldn’t have done it. Bailey’s daughter Beth is even fashioned on you! And when you realized that, it irritated you no end. Remember?”

         “Too well. Beth was an irritating brat.”

         “You just didn’t like her asking questions all the time. But it was a perfect plot device. And it was exactly what you were doing the whole time anyway.”

         This was something I had heard nothing about before.

         I asked, “You used your own books in your homeschooling?”

         “Oh, yes. Not officially. I don’t think the authorities would have accepted that. But the girls always passed their tests.”

         Jesse added, “The tests were easy. After your own mother has questioned you on the propagation of crops and the biology of a seed, there isn’t a lot left for the State exam to surprise you with. We were always several years ahead on the literary material…You know, she had us to reading Winnie the Pooh when we were only three, not six!”

         Julia said, “That was only the first one. Not the others.”

         “We were reading Tom Sawyer, out loud, in second grade—”

         Julia interrupted, “They don’t teach Tom Sawyer in the public schools anymore. They have no sense of humor.”

         Jesse looked at me for support. “She was a terrible teacher. And the best. Did you know that our first great narrative, The Iliad, was Alexander’s favorite book! And that he carried his own annotated copy all the way to the Indus…I couldn’t live up to all that. … We put our kids in the local Montessori school as soon as they were out of diapers.”

         Julia put in. “You may regret that.”

         “I hope not.” And into the silence that followed, Jesse added, “It costs a fortune…But I suppose that’s harder on Felix.” There was definite regret in her voice. “The public schools in Manhattan are wretched.”

         I asked, “Why did you say that? I thought the Montessori schools were better.”

         Julia took one of her heavy breaths, obviously lifting the weight of too many previous conversations—or arguments. Her daughter looked away.

         But Julia wasn’t letting go of that. “Because for them it’s all about procedure. Method. Developing childhood ‘independence’ by having them manipulate something predetermined. Repetition. But the children don’t know they are being manipulated when they are playing with blocks and numbers. Children want content. The number ‘two’ doesn’t mean anything, unless it is ‘two’ of something. They want to know about things and what they are, what they mean. The word ‘freedom’ is just an idea. They might actually learn it if they have to experience it. That’s what knowledge is. You can’t find it written on blocks! It’s not automatic. Ideas have to be taught. We live in an age when people are afraid of ideas…I only learned that myself when we got up here to New Hampshire. Before that we had the girls in the very same school that Jesse has her kids in now. The very same one!”

         Jesse clearly wanted to avoid the conversation but couldn’t. She shrugged. “That’s why we moved over to the west side. It was familiar territory.” But then she left the table.

         Jesse did seem like the most rational one of the lot. She had her mother’s quick anger at things, but was faster to cool down. That was something I took advantage of by asking her about things that were none of my business. Whatever it was I said that bothered her, it seemed to be forgotten soon after. Perhaps that was just a characteristic of being a mother as well.

         But she was only there for a couple of days, while Felix took their children to visit his parents in New Jersey, so I took the chance I had, when I caught her outside in the morning, lingering at the chicken yard and watching them in their morning scratch, and with her mind obviously on other things.

         I knew she must have heard the spring when I come through the barn door and it was a good morning in any case, with air as cool as water and the sun small and tight in the sky.

         I said, “You don’t like your in-laws.”

         I think she was getting used to my asking such questions, because she smiled.

         “No.”

         “Why?”

         The frown that crossed her face was borrowed from her mother.

         “They have their own ideas.”

         “Tell me. I’m trapped on a little farm in New Hampshire these days. I don’t get out much. I need perspectives.”

         She smiled at that truth. “We have too many children. They think we have too many children…Hard to believe! I’d have more if I could. But they think the burden is too much on Felix. Their only son…But he takes them down there anyway. He wants them to know their grandparents and the kids get to spend time up here, so he thinks that makes a better balance. I don’t think it’s balanced at all. They make remarks…Little Henry has told me. He’s old enough now to be noticing things like that. Felix’s father, Stan, worked in the stock market for years and his approach to life was very similar to Felix’s. Productivity matters. Savings matter.”

         “Enough said…But I don’t understand something. Well, maybe everything, I suppose. But I don’t understand why you live in New York.”

         She laughed out loud. Again, more than a little like her mother does.

         “I ask myself that everyday…I say, it’s for Felix’s job, but we lose any advantage to that just in the cost of things there. With the internet, Felix could be working anywhere. The City can be magical, of course. There is that. But it’s falling apart. I worry about that and what the children see.”

         “Where would you rather be?”

         She shrugged at me. “You know the answer to that. But I’m not a writer. I have no other means of income. I’m a liberal arts major. I am officially and purposely useless. And Felix is an excellent engineer. How would he earn a living otherwise out here in the boondocks?”

         I protested a little too dramatically. Perhaps too quickly.

         “It’s not the wilderness! There’s a uUniversity fifteen minutes away! You could do something else! Now, you’re just working for the ‘god of the machine!’”

         I expected her to laugh, but she didn’t. There was a touch of put-on pity in her voice instead. “She has you, now. She’s got you. Totally. Doesn’t she?”

         I shrugged at the idea. Jesse was right, of course.

         “I just found out about that particular god. I’d never really thought about it before…But, she’s right.”

         I asked, “Why don’t you write?”
         “Perhaps I have nothing to say.”

         “Very unlikely.”

         “At least nothing worth saying.”

         “Even more unlikely.”

         We had wandered up to the road by then, toward the wrinkle, with the graves of Neal Wright and his family above the granite blocks on the right, and the figures of the old trees grown into the rocks of the hill on our left.  Jesse kept looking over into the gnarled trees, as if to see something.

         Until she stopped. “There! See that one? The one that looks like an old man with his elbows on the rock.”

         I was amazed. “Yes”

         “There are more limbs now, but I used to sit on his back. It’s an apple tree. The only one there…For awhile, it was magical, and he was my father. I could talk to him.”

         I could imagine a skinny girl, griping the smaller branches for support where they rose straight up from the bowed back of that great fat trunk.

         “Do you remember what you said when you spoke to the tree?”

         There was a moment, and finally, “Yes…”

         I waited. She looked over at me to see if I seriously cared.

         “Besides the obvious stuff…I wished they weren’t divorced, of course. That was the subject of a great deal of it. I made up scenarios that would bring them back together. That kind of thing. Dad is not so bad. He loved us. But it was a bad marriage. I can say that now for certain. She could not live in his world any longer, and there was never going to be a time when he could fit into her own narrative.”

         She really hardly knew me. I had no right to be asking.

         “What’s your narrative, now?”

         A loud breath. Another moment. “Gee. I’m almost thirty, and I still don’t know…Alexander was already conquering some damned place or another in Asia by my age. Probably what remained of Troy.”

         I thought that this was important. “You’ve had that thought, all by yourself. If you didn’t have the kids, what would you do?”

         “I don’t know.”

         “Then, that’s your first job. I think. Isn’t it? To find an answer to that.”

         She looked over at me with some uncertain recognition of my presumptiveness.

         “But I do have the kids. And I love that. And I do love Felix. And I would never let my kids down the way—You know.”

         “But you are. Don’t you think. With all that Montessori crap. Half-measures, at best.”

         She laughed, unhappily. “It’s very expensive crap.”

         “With all that very expensive Montessori crap! Have you read Tom Sawyer to them yet?”

         This stopped her in the middle of the road to confront me.

         “There hasn’t been time!”

         “There is time. That’s right now…It’s yours to take. Before it’s too late.”

         She didn’t smile. “You really are her student, aren’t you.”

         “I’m just now learning to be. It took me awhile. I thought I had my own plan. I still do, I guess, but—I’ll have to start again.”

         She turned then, back toward the house.

         After a few minutes she said “How long do you think you’ll be here?”

         “As long as it takes…When she’s done with me. I don’t know. I’ll probably go back to living in my van—down by the river, as that narrative goes…Or somewhere. Not so bad, really Free and easy. That would not be so bad again. But I don’t think I’ll be as happy with that anymore… I’ll have to write a new narrative for myself, I suppose.”

         “But you’ll keep writing…”

         “Yes. At least that part is set. I think. Especially now. She’s made me think that through…But, I was just thinking this morning, when all that bright sun started breaking through, that Edward Abbey worked for the National Park Service for a time. That left him a lot of time to write. And Desert Solitaire is one of my favorite books. But I don’t like the desert, so much. I’m more of a Thoreau kind of guy. Maybe there are some openings with the Park Service up in the White Mountains.”

         “That sounds good. That sounds very good.”

         “What will you do. Have you thought of writing children’s stories? I like the one about the apple tree.”

         She laughed. It was genuine. “At least you’ve mastered her technique. Never give it up!”

         I tried turning the table back. “So, what would you do, if you could pry Felix out of New York? That’s your new job, isn’t it?”

         At least she smiled at the idea. “I’ll let you know.”

27. About ‘projection’

         I told this story to Julia one evening because I thought it fit the circumstance. She was drinking her bourbon, as she does when she is through, and I was drinking some apple cider. It’s good apple cider. And because it had come up, we were talking about the places she had gone and the places I wished I could go someday.

         I told her, “Once upon a time I wrote a short story and submitted it to one of the few remaining science fiction magazines that still publish actual paper editions. This was done as a lark. Well…I did need some money. And the story was already written and sitting there staring at me from a small pile of such efforts that were accumulating in the box under my bed. But as the laws of perversity would have it, I got an acceptance notice in my email within a couple of weeks.”

         She said, “How could you see it there, under your bed?”

         “Science fiction stories can see through walls.”

         She nodded. “Ah…I’ve never had that happen to me before.”

         “But there was a catch. They wanted to change it. They wanted to change the story. They didn’t like the ending.”

         She shook her head, and did a perfect cartoon ‘tisk, tisk, tisk.’

         I pressed onward, trying to build up some steam before she thought of another question.

         “Now, this was really something. This was a short story. A little over 3000 words. Just under the limit. With one premise that I had carried out all the way, and they wanted to change it! And you have to understand. I had never had a story accepted before—by anyone! Nothing I had written had ever been published before. And here was something that someone supposedly liked, but they wanted to change it! But they told me what they wanted to do to it, and as far as I was concerned, all they really liked was the premise, and the way they wanted to change the story would screw that up…So I said, ‘No. No thanks. I’ll keep it the way it is.’ “

         Julia said, “The right thing to do. But I’d like to read it anyway for myself.”

         I said, “Well, that’s another matter…I even don’t know if a finished copy exists now. It’s not on this computer, anyway. But I can tell you the basic story, easily enough.”

         She said, “Tell me.”

         So, I settled into that. I had written it in the first person so I told it just that way.

         “One night, on a trip, I awoke to silence. The city is never silent, so I was sure it was the silence that had awakened me. Across from my bed, there was a blank wall. Hotel rooms don’t usually have blank walls but there had been a picture there that I couldn’t stand looking at so I’d taken it down and set it out of my sight…The funny thing was that I’d noticed there was a price on the back, as if the hotel was selling copies of this picture. That was a laugh, until it wasn’t.”

         “But good marketing,” Julia said.

         “And so, I was lying there, in the silence, awake, staring at this wall. I was with a woman I had met earlier and she was still sleeping but not making any particular sound that I could hear. I thought of the cliche, ‘The silence was deafening,’ And I blew some air out of my own mouth that turned into a whistle just to break that silence and it was then that something strange happened. An image began to appear on the wall.”

         Julia nodded slowly as if, this was an interesting development.

         I took a dramatic pause and continued. “This image forming there was a scene. The kind you see in travel magazines or on television. It looked like one of those beautiful Italian coastal towns, built against the hills, that rise sharply from the sea—as it might be viewed from above, by a drone of some sort coming toward it from over the water. The sea was blue—a dozen blues, and the hills were a mingling of greens except where there were cliffs, and the town was tightly composed collage of houses in various pastel colors that filled out of the breaks in the cliffs like a spill of things from a basket, and the roofs were red tile and gray slate, and as the drone came closer and the scene grew larger on the wall, I could see people at the harbor edge and the docks, all working, and sorting nets on a narrow rocky beach, and arranging the equipment from boats, and other people walking in the streets. It was quite beautiful. I’ve never been to Italy, and always wanted to go. Like a dream.

         “But my movement, sitting forward to look at all this, had awakened the women I was with and she sat up too and said, ‘Very pretty. But how does that work?’

         “Now, there was a television, a large one, on a table not far away but that was clearly dark. It was off. I had already seen that there was a little red light there that turned blue when it was on. And it was off. I’m certain.

         “And I said to her, ‘I don’t know. It was just suddenly there. Right where that ugly picture was.’ And indeed, high in the color image of this town on the wall, I could see the hook from that picture where it had been hanging. It was within the image now, as if this were all a projection of some sort, and I raised my hand up to catch the light that must be coming from somewhere behind us, but the image was not disturbed and I turned in bed to check out the opposite wall for the source of the image but there was nothing there to see above the bed either—just another obnoxious image similar to the one I had already taken down.

         “The woman saw me do this and stood on the bed as if to catch some part of the projection herself. She was naked and this wasn’t at all unpleasant because she began to bounce a little there trying to find the source of the image, but still, nothing altered the picture, but there was a back reflection of greens and blues on her body from that amazing image on the wall.

         “So, I stood with her—it was just an impulse—waving my arms in a sort of dance with her. Not so much even trying to block the image, wherever it was coming from, but just dancing there on the bed. That was fun. But then, after awhile, I turned, still curious, and took down the other picture. I was still looking for the source of the projection and I was sure the image should be coming from somewhere there behind us. But when I set that picture frame down on the floor too, backwards again, I could see that it also had a price—at least it was less expensive than the first.”

         Julia asked, “How much was it?”
         I said, “I’m getting to that.”

         She winced and said, “Sorry.”

         “Anyway, I whistled again. This time at the price, which seemed excessive for such a crumby picture. And all of a sudden, another image started forming there on that blank wall right above the bed—as if a window had just opened there. This picture was similar to the first…but it wasn’t the same place. There were no houses. No town. Just an isolated beach. A strand of gold and yellow sand, and there were details—the sand of the beach was clearly measured there by the lines of debris left behind by the tides, and the beach there separated the blue of the water from darker rock of the cliffs above and those were quickly swallowed by the green from the hill above that. It looked more like California than Italy to me, but without the coastal highway.”

         Julia was almost nodding agreement. I could not help but imagine that, if it were her habit, she would be stroking her chin as she considered my tale.

         “Now, all this while, the first picture had been growing closer and when I turned. I could see the faces of the individual people working there on the dock and on the dark stones of the beach quite clearly, as if they were real—right there—part of the room with me. As if they might see our naked bodies bouncing on the bed there if they’d looked. I actually thought that thought. That’s how clear they were. Just as if they were real! … But there was still no sound from them. There was just the giggling of the woman I was with; the giggling, and the sound of the springs in the mattress from our weight standing on the bed.

         Behind me now, where the other picture had been, there was this window overlooking a perfect coastal scene, and because that drone, or whatever it was, was still further away from that scene than the first one was from the village, I could see above the cliffs to green hills, and over them to  the gray and blue of mountains far away…seagulls even drifted into the scene, floating on the air, and they looked like they might come right into the room!

         “Now, I was admittedly a little excited by having this naked woman dancing on the bed beside me, but my curiosity was overpowering. How was this happening? And that was when I did something impulsive—maybe out of modesty because they were so close and might see us. I stepped down from the bed and picked the picture up that I’d first removed and set it back on the hook…And the picture disappeared. All that remained now was the reflected light from our great big new window behind us above the bed, and the light from that, and on the naked woman’s body standing there. And I reached down then to pick up that picture as well.

         “And the woman screamed, ‘No!’ She actually screamed. It shocked me. I was that absorbed in trying to comprehend what I was actually seeing.

         “And she said, ‘I want to be there!’ And she pointed to the picture of the beach through our newly opened window. And it looked to me as if she pointed right through!

         “Now, that picture had been growing too. The drone, or whatever it was taking the picture, had dropped down to just above the water and was now drifting slowly toward the sand.

         “And I said, ‘It looks very beautiful. That’s someplace I would definitely like to go someday. If I ever get the chance.’

         “And she said, ‘Let’s do it then! Now!’

         “But I said, ‘Someday.’

         “And she said, ‘No! Now!’ and faster than I could move to stop her, even if I had wanted to, she climbed onto the sill of that new window, totally naked in the sunlight, and she smiled, and looked down to the water, and then smiled again back at me, and said, ‘Come with me!’ as she jumped.

         “I was a little stunned. More than a little. She was gone! And I quickly stood back up on the bed again, and looked out, over that sill…and there she was. There she was! Swimming in the shallow water toward the beach! … And me? I was suddenly terrified! I was actually frozen for a minute. Frozen! It was as if the whole world in my mind had turned upside down. As if we were all in some sort of simulation, or projection…And as she swam close enough to stand on the sandy bottom in the water—I could see her naked body in the clear blue water—she looked back at me again and said—well, I couldn’t hear her then—there was still no sound to hear, but it looked as if she said, ‘Come,’ once again and smiled back at me. But what I did then was inexplicable. Standing there on that bed, beckoned by that naked woman on an empty tropical beach, I reached down and grabbed the other picture and hung it back in place, covering that image as well.

         Julia immediately sat up straight and said, “Fool!”

         I shook my head at her.

         “But it’s not finished…The picture I had first taken down, was one of those cheap paintings of an Italian coast town that I’m sure you can see in any tourist gallery there, even here in America. It was ugly. The colors were all wrong—too bright, and the rendering was awkward and obviously done quickly just to give an impression. But I had always wanted to go to a place like that. I’ve dreamed of it. But I haven’t had the chance. It was the sort of place where I half-imagined living for the rest of my life. I didn’t want it spoiled by the that crude rendering. I could see it better in my own mind.

         And then, I turned again to the wall above the bed, and that painting too was just a pleasant picture of a coast. It could have been California. I have no idea. But I lifted that picture off the hook again. And there was just a wall there. I ran my hand over the surface of the wall. It was just a wall, and a hook. And I whistled! I did. I whistled again as if to beckon it back. But nothing happened. And then I did it with the first picture too…I felt like a fool. There was just a wall there too. Nothing else. And I sat down on that bed and stared again at that crude picture, and then back again at the other…But, the thing of it was, the woman was gone. She was gone!”

         Julia asked, “How much was the picture?”

         And I said, “Two thousand dollars.”

         And she said, “That’s cheaper than a plane ticket.”

         She thought that idea was very funny, and laughed a little. It was.

         I said, “And the magazine had offered me $2000 to publish it.”

         She thought that was even funnier still, and she laughed even louder.

***

27. The muse

         Maya did not own a car and Julia asked me to pick her up at the train station in Durham. She had arrived by the time I got there, and stood outside the station office, alone by a sunny wall away from the door, looking abandoned—I would say, orphaned—as if she were a student first arrived at the University, but in the wrong season. She had several odd cloth bags at her feet. The bags were filled with rolls of canvas, I discovered, or some other heavy cloth, but the bags themselves looked hand-made in a patch-work style of colors and patterns that made me think of quilts. There was an empty bench not far away, but Maya said standing kept the baby quiet. Her baby was in a sort of woven sling at the front of her, and sound asleep, which was good because I had nothing in the van to serve as a car seat for a child, or an infant.

         Maya is the one who looks more like her father but I could not miss the fact that there is a beauty to mothers in a flannel shirt and jeans that is better than anything in a fashion magazine. It was a silly thought, but I kept looking over to see that again.

         She’d been quiet after the ‘hello, how are ya,’ perhaps to avoid waking the baby, but after a few minutes she finally said, “What wrong?”

         “Nothing…Nothing at all,” was the best I could come up with.

         The quiet seemed uncomfortable for her then, and the ride wasn’t that long, so I tried some easy conversation.

         “Are you still studying art?”

         “I can’t afford that now. I couldn’t before but definitely not now.” Her eyes went down to the infant asleep against her chest.

         “You know, I saw a painting you did. On the wall in your old bed room. It’s great.”

         She looked away. “Thanks. Mom likes that one too. I did it before I went off to college. I like it just because of that, I think.”

         “Did you study art in school?”

         “For a year…Two semesters. I quit. I wanted to paint. Not to talk about it.”

         “There was nothing there for you to learn?”

         She shrugged. “I’ll never know, I guess. I suppose I missed a lot. But I studied with a couple of people downtown for a while after that. I think I learned more from them. And it was a lot cheaper.”

         All I came up with then was, “I think there’s a lot to say for the apprentice system.”

         She shrugged again, more like her mother, as if it were a word. “Yes…But there’s not much of that left…Gus—the fellow I studied with the longest—he made so little from selling his work that he had to take in students to pay the bills. And there I was, working as a waitress, making more than he was. It was odd.”

         “But living in New York couldn’t have been cheap.”

         “It was Brooklyn, but it still wasn’t cheap. And it was small. Mom came down when Alma was born and we were practically on top of each other.”

         I waited then for her to make more conversation but she was quiet, so, I asked a stupid question to get things going again.

         “Who is your favorite artist?”

         I looked over as I asked and she had that look on her face of someone who has been asked such stupid questions too many times before.

         “I don’t have one. Not really.”

         I hadn’t expected a direct answer, but I wasn’t going to give it up. Dumb is as dumb does.

         “Then who do you like? Who do you look to for inspiration?”

         “Wyeth.”

         “Father, son, brother, or sister.”

         “I see. You are playing a game with me. Vermeer then.”

         She was trying to escape.

         “I don’t see that in your work. More of the Wyeths.”

         That surprised her. “How many paintings have you seen?”

         “The ones in the living room. The ones in the hall closet.”

         “Ah, yes…Mom tried to support me after I left school. I was sending her paintings when I could. But that had to stop. I started waiting on tables about then.”

         “Have you tried to sell any of them? They’re all better than anything I’ve seen anywhere else in a long time.”

         She ignored the compliment and just said, “Yes.”

         After a minute I tried again, “And.”

         “Nothing. I don’t want to end up like Gus, taking in students.”

         “Is it such a terrible fate?”

         “No…I suppose not. Gus’s wife left him. He can’t afford a home of his own so he lives in a shared warehouse space in Tribeca that’s not even legal. His kids are being raised by a stranger now… But the problem is that I don’t work quickly. It can take me a couple of weeks to finish something, or a couple of months. The economics are simple enough. I’d have to sell a piece for $4000 every month just to cover my rent and food, and the rest. Meanwhile, I can make two hundred dollars a day waiting on tables. And it’s pretty hard to get a stranger to pay four thousand dollars for anything…But, it was pretty much the same for Vermeer, I think. He had to work as an art dealer to make ends meet and he still died in debt, and left his wife with the bills.”

         I immediately recalled her mother’s breakdown of author economics.

         At the farm, I carried her bags in and then went to the barn. When I went back to the house at four, Maya was on the couch breast feeding the baby. Julia told me we should skip the usual copying for the day, so I went back out to the barn for another hour.

         At dinner in the dining room, the baby was in an old bassinet that Maya had pulled down from the attic—white painted wicker that made a racket when it was moved. They hadn’t been able to find the old high chair yet, but Maya sat close enough to keep a hand where the baby could touch it.

         Babies are all cute, so there wasn’t much to say about that. She seemed happy enough. But most of the conversation was between Maya and Julia and that was about sleeping routines and Maya’s diet. I couldn’t find anything worthwhile to add so when there was a break, I picked up a piece of thought from earlier.

         “What is it you like about Vermeer?”

         A smile flitted across Julia’s face—though Maya seemed to take it seriously.

         “When I left—the reason I left school was because of an art teacher. He was really just your garden variety art teacher. I’ve had better ones. But this particular guy was teaching a class on Vermeer one day and spending all his time on the phony controversy about how Vermeer copied his images. Did he use a lens or a camera obscura of some sort? Nobody actually knows but that’s not the point. Whatever tools he used, it was the subject that Vermeer chose, and how he chose it and how he dealt with it that that mattered. This guy had no clue. But we can’t even guess that today without studying it. I tried to make that point. I guess I tried to make some part of that point several times. The perspective tricks were just that—tricks—and the point of it was the subject. This instructor—a guy with a Ph.D. in stupid, didn’t want to deal with what I was saying. He finally asked me to leave the class. So, I left the school instead.”

         Julia had her lips pressed through much of this. She said, “It’s my fault. I taught them all to question things. She was just doing what I taught her.”

         Maya raised her eyebrows in mild irritation, “You are just taking credit, but thank goodness for that!”

         Julia added, “But she lost her scholarship.”

         Maya was ready for that argument. “I would still have been ten thousand in debt by the end of the year. It was a scam.”

         So, I persisted, “So, what is it you like most about Vermeer?”

         At least Maya smiled again at that.

         “His subjects. All except for the ‘Procuress.’ I am not a scholar but I can’t believe that one is his …. But that’s what I really wanted to know more about. Why had he chosen those subjects. All that artistry and even the possible gimmickry, obscured some more important things. Why did those things matter to him. What else did he have to say about them? It’s like Mom. Mom writes about simple things. Her stories are just a series of moments. Every one of them is a painting in words instead of pigment.”

         Julia broke in on this. “Moments. True. But I am not painting pictures. I’m really just playing with words.”

         Maya said, “They feel like pictures to me.”

         I said, “I think they’re conversations.”

         This comment got Julia’s attention. She was staring at me in her funny way again, head tilted slightly forward, the edge of a frown darkening her eyes.

         Maya’s eyes widened. “I think that’s right!”

         Julia said, “There isn’t that much dialog. Not so much.”

         I said, “A lot of it’s internal. It’s more like monolog, but it’s understood by others. As if they’d spoken. It just seems naturally understood by others. It’s another part of your style.”

         “It’s style, you say. I try to avoid that kind of artifice as much as I can. Am I slipping?”

         This was just her avoiding agreement. I was already used to that. “No. It only seems natural. People who know each other well and see each other often don’t have to say as much. They understand without spoken words. You know that. You’re just pretending that you don’t. And you do have a style.”

         At this point Julia’s mood changed. If I were to guess, I’d say she was angry, though I hadn’t seen enough of that to tell. The question for me to answer then was ‘why.’ I looked to Maya and saw that she was aware of it too. She studied her plate. But Julia changed the subject.

         The next morning, she was out early. It was gray and a little cool, but I think this was to give her mother some room. Or perhaps they had argued. But the baby was unhappy and letting everyone in earshot know that the chickens were not enough entertainment. I heard the crying from inside the barn and went out to where Maya stood by the garden fence.

         There was a press of wind right there, coming up from the valley.

         I said, “There’s no escaping the weather, good or bad.”

         She said, “But it’s beautiful here. Still paradise.”

         “I suppose you can’t escape that either.”

         The baby quieted at the sound of my voice, and looked at me.

         Maya said, “You’d rather be here than Boston?”

         “That’s not giving me much choice.”

         “Where would you rather be, then?”

         “Here is good enough for me.”

         “Where did you dream of being when you were a boy?”

         “On Mars. But then, I’m still a boy.”

         That brought a smile, at least. The baby was watching me with one eye from her sling—or whatever that sack was called.

         “Alma likes to hear conversation…Why Mars?”

         “Why not. Because it’s not earth. If you want to write about earth, you have six thousand years of civilization on your back. I’m not up to the lift, I suppose…Mars is simple. It’s starting fresh.”

         “Why not write about here. A place like this?”

         She was looking directly at me now, along with her daughter. Both had a mottle of gray and brown eyes. What did I have to say for myself?

         “I don’t know if this is on my map. I found the Blue Hills. I see the Beaver River. But there is no Paradise. Just Rumford.”

         She raised her eyebrows enough to look like her mother.

         “It’s where you make it.”

         There was no arguing with that.

***

28. The graces

         There is an upright piano in the living room, close to the windows. It’s easy to forget because it has been covered with a plastic table cloth and that was covered with potted plants for the winter. But with those now gone and replanted outside, the piano has been hulking in the corner for the past month, somewhat sullen looking, I thought, for being neglected, and so abused. Julia doesn’t play. But when I came in one afternoon, I could smell the lemon oil wax before I saw it gleaming in the light of the window. Maya had pushed it out a little from the wall, opened it up, and played it for her daughter. Alma evidently responded to the sound of it with a great deal excitement and hand waving.

         Julia wants to talk more about her granddaughter now than about writing.

         She tells me, “Each of the girls had piano lessons. I bought that damned thing for them years ago. I bought it at an auction in Dover. The movers cost us more than the piano. That was after I’d bought the Molly Wright letters there, so I was feeling lucky. But I don’t play. Never could. I bought it on a whim for the girls, and Derek was all for it. He could play some ragtime. He knew a lot of popular songs from back in the day and I think he had used that little trick to seduce women. At least he usually looked like he was trying to seduce me when he played. But Elena was the best on that. She’s always liked to perform. Maybe she takes more after her dad in that regard.”

         Maya is pretty good. I never learned to play myself, but I think so. More importantly, the baby thinks so. Alma pays attention as soon as Maya starts. And then she falls asleep. Julia started calming down after a week from her change of routine and started writing again. Maya plays Bach transcriptions from old sheet music but not in the mornings and not so loudly that Julia can’t concentrate. I could hardly hear it in the barn.

         It was during this period that both Elena and Jesse came to visit again. Jesse had already met the baby in Brooklyn, but she brought the family up with her this time and again there was no chance to work. Felix spent most of his day in the dining room with his laptop open, working on business matters.

         The three boys needed to be tied together but weren’t.

         Jesse has three boys and one girl. Henry, the oldest, is eight or nine and has some sense of being in charge. Henry looks like a skinny version of his father, without the beard. He is a bit too bright for you to speak carelessly around because he knows too much and will correct you on the spot. Robert, is seven and does not take orders, especially from his older brother whom he copies even while he is resisting. He operates primarily by threat. Tom is five and follows Henry wherever he goes, like a shadow in color. But he seems a little too quiet to me. I think he is the thinker. Morgan is three. She is ‘splendid,’ which is the word Julia uses for almost everything her granddaughter does and now a word Morgan repeats constantly. Morgan evidently learned to speak fairly early and has not shut up since. Thankfully, she seems to be happy about almost everything, especially chickens and the ‘baby Alma,’ so she is well occupied. She looks more like her grandmother than her mother, I think.

         The old highchair has been found, having been borrowed by Jesse for Morgan.

         Jesse’s husband, Felix, seemed disturbed when he had to move his computer away so the dining room table could be set up for diner. Jesse appeared to ignore this grumpiness, but Julia’s face loses whatever smile she had whenever she deals with Felix.

         They were only there for two days because Felix had to be back at the office.

         Not coincidently, these were the days that Elena was there as well. She had driven all the way from Iowa to be there.

         Evidently, first thing after Elena arrived, I missed the three daughters playing the piano all at once—something they had perfected years before. Elena was a little slaphappy from lack of sleep and apparently started ripping some ragtime. With the piano still untuned, this must have been a thrill.

         A decision was made beforehand that the kids would sleep in tents in the yard. A good plan. The house was too small for the lot of them. And there were half a dozen sleeping bags and several tents in the attic. I helped set the tents up after dinner. The boys were quite fascinated at the process and excited about being out all night. Morgan had been told she had to sleep inside on the couch but she wasn’t interested. This made it necessary for her father to sleep outside with her in one of the tents and that made it possible for him to point out stars and planets to all of them, something they had never really seen before quite like that in the city, and something Felix had once had a real interest in—at least until the clouds edged them out.

         I saw that coming. The weather report was a daily check-in for me. But I didn’t say anything at first because I didn’t want to throw a literal wet blanket over the enthusiasm. Weather changes too fast around here in any event. Maya and I pulled bales of hay down from the stack and made one large bed on the floor of the barn and then we covered that with a few sheets of her canvas. Despite the tents, when the rain started spitting and the thunder rolling, they all came inside.

         The next phase of this adventure was the ghost stories. The children were still wide awake. The daughters all came out from the house with Julia. They had been to summer camp and already knew a few of those entertainments. I didn’t know any, but Julia made one up on the spot out of scenes from one of the plays that she had written years before. I knew she was making it up because so much of the detail had been borrowed from one of her novels as well. But she converted it nicely to a story set on the ‘Isle of Skye’ involving ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ and a young woman who had saved him there and the ghosts of the dead soldiers from the battle of Culloden. Her performance gave me an idea of where Elena had discovered her interest in theatre. I thought it was terrific. Even Felix was impressed. Julia kept repeating those words ‘The Isle of Skye’ with a Scottish lilt, raising the pitch of her voice, so that it became a sort of chant throughout the telling, and Morgan offered an echo to that each time.

         I hung up a couple of the propane lamps I had used at the campground from pegs on the posts, but the lighting was still appropriately spooky for a stormy night. Julia was not a fan of ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ and had him fairly eviscerated by the Jacobite ghosts of the soldiers he had betrayed, reducing him to ‘a hollow shell of man.’

         Julia recalled, “Keith played the part so well…Keith is a neighbor’s boy. He used to be in all the plays we did, just so that he could be around Elena.”

         Elena rolled her eyes in exaggerated fashion.

          The kids did not understand the politics of this ancient moment and Julia did not explain that—telling the story as if it were a fairytale. But Henry found some resource or another to use, and corrected her on several points the next day, though during the telling he was enrapt.

         Morgan sat in her mother’s lap the entire time and was finally carried, already asleep, to the couch when it was over. After some initial fussing with the uniqueness of my ‘throne,’ the boys were all sound asleep in their respective bags before the storm was fully over, finally numbed by the experience and the stories. Nevertheless, Felix slept on that platform of hay bales with them and I could hear his snoring in the night. The daughters and Julia went back into the house and had tea together and then slept soundly in the beds they had grown up with.

         The morning was clear. The sun was crisp, and bright, warming only what it touched, even as a breeze mixed the leaves from green to white in the tops of the trees across the road. The shadows were cool and I was chilled there in the dark of the barn. The kids appeared mummified in their sleeping bags atop the hay bales. From the window at my desk, I could see the trees on the wrinkle catching the light and shimmering there, before catching sight of Felix sitting on a bucket just outside, near the closed sliding door, where the sun first reached the ground through a break in the trees on the hill above. It was a good spot and at the risk of spoiling some private moment, I went out to talk just so I could stand in the warmth of it too.

         I went out the side door, and the spring on the door moaned. I could see from there that Julia was already at the sink in the kitchen and I could smell an exhaust of cooking bacon. But as I went around the corner, I heard the side door behind open again and then slam. Someone else was up as well.

         Felix turned to me at the sound of the door, “Good morning. I wondered if you were awake.”

         I found a piece of the sun there for myself, “Looks like a great morning. I hope you guys don’t have to leave too soon.”

         “No. Not till later…Just now, I was thinking I should never leave.”

         “Good thought.”

         “You think so…Why would you say that?”

         “Seriously?”

         “Jesse says I’m always serious. Way too serious. So, no. Not seriously. Why would you say that?”

         I wondered if Jesse had said something to him about our previous conversation walking on the road. But I said, “It’s hard to think of a reason not to say it…I even said something like that to Julia the other day. This place is too near perfect.”

         “Yeah. It is. But it’s not mine. Everything I own is 273 miles from here.”

         “Then sell all that! That’s too damned far to be from paradise!”

         He laughed a little. Maybe more of a brief sigh.

         “Hah! Jesse calls it that too. She loves this place…I was just thinking it might be the air that drops down off the hill. Something in it. Something in those older trees there.”

         I had nothing else to say to that.

         He said, “Did you ever notice that leaves can look like water?”

         It was a favorite thought of mine. “Yes.”

         But then he turned a little more toward me. He has a sweat shirt on and jeans and running shoes. I wondered if he’d been getting ready to workout. I had heard from someone, maybe Julia, that he works out, every day. I wish I had the discipline for that.

         He asked, “Are you planning to stay?”

         I said, “Here? No. It’s not my place. But I’m happy for Julia, that she’s here…I would like to make a place like this for myself someday.”

         He didn’t take long to study that idea.

         “But you don’t work. How would you afford it?”

         I have to assume he had jumped to some conclusions.

         “I work quite a lot.”

         “Not for a salary, though.”

         I said, “I’m not a wage slave, no.”

         “‘No. But who ain’t a slave? Tell me that?’”
         So, I knew that one from High School, of course. I answered, “’the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content.’”

         He laughed. It was the first time I’d seen him truly laugh, I think. Women look very different when they smile, and men when they laugh.

         “You write?”

         “I do that, yes.”

         “Well, then I guess that’s my problem, then. Mr. Melville would understand about that. I’m a wage slave. They pay me a lot of money, but in the end I’m just another slave.”

         I wasn’t going to be kind to this realization.

         “Well, so now, at least, you’ve got that right. Now, what are you going to do about it?”

         He laughed just little again. “You’re awfully certain of yourself. I wish I had a couple more people like you working for me.”

         “No. No you don’t. I’d be a pain in the ass. I ask too many questions. I’m bad about settling for things. I know you’re a good guy because you have a bunch of near perfect children and the most beautiful wife I have ever seen and she wouldn’t hang with you if you were a schmuck, but then again maybe some of that is luck. Some people are just lucky. They work their ass’ off and they get a little luck in return. But that’s not me. Frankly, most days I’d rather sit on a bucket in the sun.”

         He didn’t seem to know what to make of my little speech. Looking for something else, I think, he managed to ask me what kind of things I wrote, and I told him. The short version.

         Then he suddenly says, “What does land up here cost?”

         “More than I’ve got. I haven’t looked.”

         “Where would you live, if you could?”

         That was easy.

         “Right there.” I nodded my head toward that wrinkle of land that was right in front of us both. The shimmer of light in the leaves there had grown from a sea white to pale yellow in the rising sun.

         He says, “Funny. I was just thinking that would be a very nice place for a house.”

         “I think so.”

         He asked again, “So, what are you going to do?”

         “I don’t know. That’s been on my mind too.”

         He smiled, eyes closed to the sunlight, “So, that makes two of us.”

         And just then Julia’s voice came from behind me, “I’m making breakfast early in there. Pancakes. The kids are wondering around starving to death—Geoff, why don’t you come in and eat with us instead of that granola you’re so fond of.”

         Funny thing is she had come up without my hearing her, but it didn’t surprise me.

         The problem for me was that I was not a member of the family. I had no right to say anything about anything to anyone that did not involve me in the first place. And I was not even a guest. I was really just hired help. And yet, I didn’t feel that way.

         I was not even present for most family discussions that involved me, or for that matter, family discussions at all.  I missed all the usual mundane matters of what to buy at the grocery store and who should do what and when….And I think I was jealous.

         At some point along the way I had begun to speculate about what I was missing. Maybe from day one. I know that I liked being there and would do what I could to remain. But that was not all that much. Still, I found myself worrying about Jesse and Felix. That in itself was absurd. I had no real idea about what was going on there. But I mostly worried about Julia.

         There was a phrase she often used: ‘Is it true.’ I heard this in my head now, unbidden.

***

29. Open spaces

         The problem with ‘artificial intelligence’ is that it really doesn’t exist. It’s just information, like any other. It is a made-up term to describe something imagined and make it sound real. It was no better than a portmanteau word. What was really meant by it was some form of knowledge that was created by artificial means. A robot, for instance. But all that a robot can know is human knowledge. No matter how large it is. Just what humans can already know, no more. That knowledge might be accessed faster using electronic circuits because of the biological limitations of the human mind, but it is still the same information. ‘Large language model’ or not. The sum of a math problem is not called ‘artificial.’ Even a difficult one. Or ‘intelligence,’ for that matter.

         I was in the midst, off and on again, of writing a novel, ‘Elysium Mons,, that I had started writing when I was at the Tall Pines Camp, and persisted with, off and on, through all of the obfuscation of the last couple of months.

         The story was simple enough. It was about a possible end of civilization and the death of mankind. Easy peasy.

         Like everyone else, it seemed, I was worried about artificial intelligence and the loss of our humanity. But I wasn’t so sure of the ‘progress’ as the nerds seemed to be. My hero, Ben, was one of the first born on Mars. His school was at home. He had something of an intuitive understanding of AI because his parents had used that so extensively for aid in his education. But the story only begins when all that he has known starts falling apart. Contact with the Earth has been essentially lost in a civil war there. The independent government of Mars, which from its very beginning had set about safeguarding against the sort of virus-based collapse that has struck the Earth, has nevertheless been badly damaged by the bad guys using AI to infiltrate their systems. And all of that is off-stage left.

         The simple story is that Ben is caught beyond the parameter of his home town at Elon. His electronic devices are now useless due to a calculated attack of a computer virus. It is clear, fairly early on in the story, that the virus is not man-made. Per se. It has been made by AI, with the intention of controlling the human community, at the instigation of someone unknown. But Ben understands that human beings are at the heart of it.

         ‘Spiro-gee, large robots with an interactive awareness closer to that of ants than computers, are looking for Ben. They know he is out there, and roughly where he is. Meanwhile, his only methods of communication, given the damage of the virus, are by some form of physical contact with other human beings. He must find a way to trust his fellow man—or woman—something, given his isolated upbringing, he had never learned to do before.

         All of this was good fun. I was getting to deal with many of my own fears for the human race and create solutions that might work—I thought. But Ben, as I had too quickly imagined him, was lonely.

         That emotional state came upon him, coincidently, about the same time I had started coming to Dal Riata. Now I had to deal with that. The story had seemed fine, without it. But now, as if I had caught the virus infecting all computers, I was compelled to find a solution.

         On his way, Ben has encountered a young woman, Cera, at the edge of the Hellas Basin, who is in distress, knows something of the plan of the mysterious bad guys, and is, herself, of questionable integrity. Ben helps Cera escape from an ugly captivity. And helping her has only magnified his own problems, as her original captors attempt to get her back, and the spiro—gee try to find Ben.

         The character of this love-interest, again only coincidently, had been fashioned in an attempt to keep her fully apart in my mind from Julia. She did not look like Julia. She did not act like Julia. She did not speak like Julia. I believed, at least for a short time, that she did not think like Julia at all. But, unfortunately most of her characteristics matched up with Maya quite well, and when I thought about her, as I wrote, it was Maya that I saw. It was Maya’s voice I heard. This was disconcerting.

         The funny thing was, I had forgotten how to be funny. My Mars was entirely too serious. Everything was life and death, when everything should actually just be more about life. After all, life had come back to Mars after thousands of years. There ought to be a celebration! Microbes rejoice! Algae exult! Bacteria dance with jubilation. My only thought had been that those creatures could be deadly. But there might be something more to be had out of it. I had to give that some thought.

         The problem lay in the fact that the true enemy, the machines, had no sense of humor. Somewhere in something I had written before, I had a sort of Turing test, and I might have to rehabilitate that. It was simple enough. Machines had no sense of humor. If someone had to quickly determine if they were dealing with an artificial intelligence, all they basically had to do is tell a joke. The fun was in inventing the joke, because a joke that had been told before might have been memorized by the machine,, it had to be original. It had to be dependent on a human sensibility that was not necessarily logical. And the joke could not be too elaborate. Parody might be good. Nothing too flamboyant. A pun might work.

         Maya had left the baby with Julia and come into the barn unexpectedly to check things out, so I asked her.

         “You gotta minute?… Help me out here.”

         She stopped where she was and looked at me skeptically.

         I held both hands up. “For just a minute. Pretend, I wasn’t here. Say there was a horse standing here. What would you say?”

         She didn’t miss a beat.

         “Why the long face?”

         She got me with that. So, I persisted.

         “But he can’t answer. Horses can’t talk.”

         “Then, I wouldn’t talk to him.”

         “But just say, pretend, you say something.”

         “Why?”

         “I’m looking for something?

         “What?”

         “Something funny to say to a robot.”

         “Robots can’t laugh.”

         “They could pretend. They might know an old vaudeville joke when they hear it.”

         She shook her head. “I suppose they could pretend. But how would you know?”
         “That’s my point! I’m trying to find something funny that they couldn’t have digested before. I’m trying to find something that would quickly identify them as a robot.”

         She shrugged. “I think you can tell by their breath.”
         She had me again. I laughed out loud at that.

         How would my hero Ben know if the young woman he encountered at the rim of Hellas Basin was really a robot? By her breath. Of course.

         It felt as if I had hardly gotten settled into a daily routine, when another adjustment had to be made. I like routine as well as Julia, almost. But Maya would be staying for awhile. Apparently, she had to give up her apartment. So, we drove down to Brooklyn together in my van, met an army of her friends, mostly other women who had worked with her at a restaurant, and they had everything from her apartment packed within a couple of hours. Carrying things up and down the stairwell was more a matter of enduring the echo of their speculations concerning me. But the most interesting part of that came at the end when Maya ‘forced’ each of them to take one of her paintings as a gift. It appeared that they were each envious of whatever painting was given to the other, and this process was at least comic to watch.

         Julia took care of the baby for the day.

         Packing the van was a trick. Maya gave away most of the furniture that she had bought for herself and kept the things her mother had given her. Those were the better items in any case. A small table originally built by Neal Wright was literally moved into the van first, top down, onto a small oriental rug. Most of everything else of importance was nestled around various other pieces of clothing or towels. Her unused canvas was bundled and strapped to one side. She had kept several dozen paintings of various sizes. Those were between the legs of the table. Her few chairs, including one that had also been built by Wright, were nestled together beneath bundles of clothing. She had no suit cases and few boxes. The clothing was strapped in bundles by various belts and bungie cords and the sizes of the bundles adjusted according to the location. It is fair to say, after the small stuff went in, that there was no space left.

         On the drive down we argued about writing. On the drive back we argued about art. She is her mother’s daughter.

         I moved most of the furniture—a few chairs, a desk, a table, and most importantly, plastic bins of supplies, a couple of easels and about two dozen rolls of canvas along with the bundled wooden stretchers—into the loft of the barn beside the toys.

         It was nearly a week before any sort of regular schedule for copying Julia’s manuscript could begin again, but at least I was not cut -out of dinner. I got to hear mother and daughter discuss the importance of particular cooking methods, the best recipe for spaghetti sauce, the advantages of stew, and how to make a good quesadilla. But these discussions never seemed to be completely done.

         Maya started coming out to the barn early in the afternoons, while the baby napped. The conversations were diverse. Besides the simple chat, childhood memories, and the like, there was one about the importance of ‘good light,’ and the natural ‘quiet’ of a barn that was never completely quiet—and how it was that I liked to work. When did I like to write most? And more about what I was going to be doing when I left. But I quickly saw the certain logic forming. What she really wanted most was for me to move my writing table somewhere else than that particular window. And I made her unexpectedly happy one day by moving my table to another space near the smaller window on the far side of the sliding barn door beyond the tack room. When the sliding door was open, this window was covered, but that was not often and I could deal with that. I soon found out it was draftier as well, but I could deal with that too.

         Within a few days, she had strung ropes up from the loft rafters and beams and had larger pieces of blank canvas hanging to block off that portion of the barn so that I could not easily see what she was doing within. Which meant, of course, that I started peeking during the mornings when I knew she was busy elsewise. But the area was still mostly empty. She had two easels standing nearer the window. A small table fairly piled with assorted boxes of paint and other materials. A larger folding table that was nearly empty. An empty rack on wheels that I recognized from when she had been giving away paintings to her friends. And a good deal of empty floor space.

         A good thing for me was that, from the smaller window, I had a clear view of the rise to the west, and the trees there, and this soon had me imagining what kind of house I would like to build if I were to live right there in the midst of those trees.

         This sketching was a sort of hobby of mine. Sitting in my van at the camp ground on a chilly night, I would often escape to such visions of the perfect house and locate them in places I had seen. I suppose this also betrayed my personal wants. They were usually small structures, appropriate for a hermit or someone of limited means. But something had changed in my mind concerning this new conjuring and I think the influence of Neal Wright was pretty obvious.

         I bought some larger sheets of vellum. What I started imagining was something based on the barn I was sitting in. It was now a fact that I no longer appreciated the close space of the van in the same way. The cathedral aspect of the barn ceiling had been taking my eye every day for several months, so I begin to imagine how that might be accommodated in a house. Heat rises, so the first challenge was a system of air circulation. Noise is a matter—often physical in the way I reacted to it. I loved the sounds in the barn but the cries of wood against wood on a windy day could be distracting. The smell of hay was pleasant to me but the smell of ancient manure after several days of rain—especially in warmer weather, could be suffocating. I did not want the smell of cooking food to permeate the building. Food was a weakness for me as it was.

         And something even funnier about that was catching Maya peeking around the breaks in the canvas to see what I was doing.

         “It’s a house”

         “I can see that. It looks like a barn.”

         “It’s based on this barn.”

         “But it’s a house to live in?”

         “Yes.”

         “Where?”

         “There.”

         I had been looking at the ridge when she had come around to talk to me.

         She said, “I’m glad you like that place.”

         What I said in answer to that was a bit loaded. And pretty dumb, at the least.

         “I’m glad you like it too.”

         This made her start, a little. She shook her head then, as if the clear it, and suddenly went back to whatever she was doing.

         After that, my sketching took on another aspect. I placed a larger window at the end facing the river—that was to the true north.

         And I left these sketches out on the desk.

         Now, this is the situation my situation was in. It was pretty obvious my feelings for Maya were changing—had changed—especially since that day when I had seen her at the station in Durham. It was disconcerting, to say the least. The rest of the time it was ridiculous.

         I am 31 years old. I have no savings. A few hundred dollars. If my fifteen-year-old delivery van died, I’d be walking. What was I supposed to do?. What could I say to a woman—a woman with a baby—a woman who could support herself pretty well waiting on tables, but otherwise had limited prospects except for being an amazing and fantastically talented artist?.

         What struck me as funny was that, apart from the baby, of course, I thought we were a lot alike. Both of us had dropped out of college. We were both set on doing things that were totally impractical and had very little prospect of paying any bills. And yet, I thought it was opposites that were supposed to attract?

         It is my point of view that Maya has risked everything and, so far, had lost, but not given up. She had come back home after failing in New York. But she had not given up.  Most people give up on their dreams before they begin. They find excuses why they can’t do whatever it is that inspires them, and then wither inside. Maya, is an artist. She must have had the same artistic struggle as an artist that her mother had as a writer. She had certainly accomplished more than I had. And I didn’t want to burden her with my own failings.

***

30. Maya

         I see in the copy of the American Heritage Dictionary that Julia keeps at the top of the first shelf in the living room that ‘In Hinduism, Buddhism, and certain other East Asian religions, Maya is the transitory, manifold appearance of the sensible world, which obscures the undifferentiated spiritual reality from which it originates; the illusory appearance of the sensible world…The power of a god or demon to transform a concept into an element of the sensible world.’ This about sums her up. And this page of the dictionary has the feel of one that was opened many times before, smudged by fingers smaller than Julia’s. I looked at the date it was published. I was not surprised that it was several years older than Maya herself.

         Someone opened the door and looked in out of the bright sun as if the dark of the barn were a danger. Then, when he spots me over at my desk he says, “Who are you?”

         The voice is rough and heavily accented with the tones of New York and someplace else. Perhaps Pueorto Rico. He is about a head shorter than I am, but built like a truck. He is clean shaven, which for most guys in the area is not the norm. I had no idea who he was but maybe I should have guessed. I hadn’t heard his knock on the back door at the house, and it occurred to be that he had mistakenly knocked on the front door first. No one comes to the front door.

         I say, “I live here, so maybe you should answer that question yourself.”

         He nods, “My name is Pedro. I’m looking for Maya.”

         Because I’d been in the barn all morning trying to concentrate, I hadn’t caught up on anything more recent.

         “I think they’re off shopping. The baby needed some things.”

         He looks at me a moment to see if maybe I am figuring it out for myself.

         “How’s the baby?”

         I shrugged. “Just one more beautiful baby, I think. Hard to tell.”

         I meant it as a joke. Totally missed.

         He says, “I’ll sit out in the car and wait for them.”

         “It’s cooler in here…Do you want some water?”

         “No.”

         He looks over the interior of the barn with a little amazement in his eyes. I pulled a couple of bottles of water out of my refrigerator and set them both down on the desk, and then sat down again by myself. The other chair was still across from me as well.

         He nods again at that and then goes back out the door, and when I looked, he was sitting in the shade on the porch. His car, a small white rental, was on the driveway closer to the frontm door. At least an hour passed before he came in again.

         He says, “I could use that water now.”

         The reason that Julia and Maya went off on this particular morning was that the day was ‘gonna be a ‘scorcha.’ The mall in Kittery would be an improvement. But I did not expect them back soon. The water was still sitting in sweat rings on the desk.

         “I can get a cold one if you’d like it.”

         He says, “Nah. This is fine,” and then he sits down. My own work had stopped when he first showed up and I was simply scrolling through various feeds on the computer for the news. He was staring at me, looking for some tell, I suppose. I closed the computer up.

         “Is there anything else I can get for you? Some chips?”

         He says, “Where you from?”

         “Boston …You’re from Brooklyn?”

         “You got that…What do you do—for work, I mean?”

         “Whatever Julia needs me to do, which isn’t much. I’m helping her with the editing to get a book finished. What do you do?”

         “Right now? I’m doing clean-up at a garage.”

         “Then we have that in common. I did clean-up for my dad, until I left home.”

         “It’s a crummy job…I’m only doing it to make a little for Maya, and the baby.”

         “What would you rather be doing?”

         “Anything. MMA is good. But it doesn’t pay. I was a goalie but I got a concussion playing soccer so that’s out for now. I’m looking around.”

         I was not up on my sports talk so I resorted to something tame.

         “Maya says you like philosophy.”

         I can see a touch of squint in his eyes.

         “No. Not really. I was just reading that for her.”

         “She said you were reading Yeats too.”

         “Yeah. He’s a crazy poet. She liked the idea of explaining all that to me.”

         I knew the answer already, but I wanted to hear his side of it.

         “How did you guys meet?”

         “In a gym. I still work there. But, it’s part time.”

         Maya’s version was more colorful

         “It’s a long drive up here. Why didn’t you call?”

         “I don’t have her number.”

         “You haven’t seen her since Christmas.”

         He looks a little more stone-faced.

         “You know that?”

         “She told me when I was asking about Alma’s father.”

         For a few seconds, he seemed at a loss.

         “That’s my mother’s name too. She thought she’d rope me in with that.”

         I don’t think he said it as an accusation. But still, I thought it might be a way to get a conversation going. 

         “No. Maya doesn’t think like that. She just loves the name.”

         He had picked up on my change of tone. He shrugged. “What? That’s just the way they think.”

         I was a little irritated at that, and then bothered at my own reaction.

         “That’s a sad idea, I think. Thinking like that’ll keep you sad.”

         His tone had changed as well. “Are you with her now?”

         “No. But we’ve talked…Why did you drive all the way up here?”

         “To see the baby.”

         I nodded at that. “The baby is doin’ great.”

         He looks genuinely uncomfortable. The old chair is talking as he shifts around in it.

         He says, “Look. I promised my mother that I’d check on her. That’s all there is to it. I love Maya and all but I’m not ready to settle down. I couldn’t support her anyway.”

         “Then you’re right. Breaking it off is the best thing. But maybe you should at least have stayed in touch.”

         He shakes his head definitively. “No. She drives me nuts when I’m around her. I don’t need to make anymore babies right now.”

         “Right.”

         He moved shifted a moment more and then stood up and noticed the canvas which was still hanging gap-ped toothed from the beams after the visit from Jesse’s clan. He walked over to Maya’s area and looked at the easels and paintings set up there and the usual mess of things Maya had on her table.

         “She’s still painting.”

         It sounded only like an observation.

         “Yes. Everyday.”

         “Good…”

         Suddenly, he looked over directly at me again

         “You will take good care of the baby.”

         He said this with his eyes on mine. I heard no question in it.

         “I will.”

         “Good… This is the farm of her mother? … Where Maya grew up? … Nice! My mother livers on a third floor in Jamaica Heights. That’s two blocks from where she was born. Her mother never made it to Queens General. She was born on a kitchen floor. The EMT’s name was Stan. So, they named my mother ‘Stanley.’ She named herself Alma when she was just a girl.… Maya is better off here. Little Alma is better off here…I’ve got to go.”

         And then he left.

         When I told Maya about Pedro’s visit, she listened in silence—pressing her tongue against her lip as if to restrain it, and then went upstairs. We skipped dinner but Julia said something odd then. After I had mentioned Pedro saying that his mother wanted to be sure the baby was alright,. Julia looked at her daughter in distress. Later, before I left, when Maya was upstairs, Julia said, “She liked his mother.”

         The thread of thought that remained after that was more about Alma and her grandmother and what it must be like to be living on the third floor of a tenement in Jamaica Heights.

She was fifty-seven years old. Did Alma Valentin stand on the roof some nights, and think about the stars? Maybe even Mars. Or could she even see that far in the gray wash-water of the city air at night? That was a disturbing thought, at the least.

         It rained tonight so there was no Mars to see, but the steady beat of that on the roof against the unsteady fall of rain on the leaves of the trees in the yard was nearly musical. Not jazz. But something. My grandfather played a little jazz on a trumpet that never seemed to have any beat at all. But it was smooth. He called it ‘noodling.’ He relaxed. He’d sit on the metal stool in the garage and imagined things I could not imagine. But he didn’t talk about it. My father liked Nina Simone and Marvin Gaye. My mother loved Nat King Cole. Mostly, all that was smooth too. None of them could stand hip hop or rap. But at that moment, as if an answer to the thought, I heard Beethoven coming from the house. It was the Seventh Symphony I think, and I knew Julia was just trying to keep her thoughts in check as well.

         I knew Beethoven from eight grade. Musical appreciation at Arlington High was taught by Mr. Miller. He worked very hard at it. No one paid much attention but I benefitted anyway. I had to straighten the desks after class. I was always on the shit list for talking and the only way of avoiding getting my name on the ‘report’ was to help out a little. At three o’clock when the school day was over, Mr. Miller put on his Beethoven. He said it cleared his mind.

         I was just thinking, what melodies were left in his head when Beethoven died? It’s not as if he had stopped writing, deaf or not. What symphonies were lost? It’s not as if they would not have been written, if he had lived… But he was fifty-seven when all that came to an end. The same age as Alma Valentin. Younger than Julia, by a couple of years, at least…Did Beethoven ‘burn and rave at close of day; and rage, rage against the dying of the light?’. I like to think he might have whistled a tune into the silence of that good night.? Dylan Thomas would have approved of that, I hope.

         Yesterday—Sunday—I drove Maya to see Alma Valentin in Jamaica Heights.

         This was not an adventure, or even an excursion. The traffic alone saw to that. I detest New York. The best of it is a gaudy display of corruption and decay, dressed in fake jewelry. The rest is a landscape of soiled stone and rusting metal.

         I said something to that effect to Maya. But she was already distressed, so I kept most of that talk to myself. The baby was crying. I’ve read that babies can feel the distress of their mothers. I was seeing it. Or maybe it was just a wet diaper. And ‘Sunday drivers’ as my father always called them, filled the roads. And I, being the smart ass, would look around us at our predicament and say to my dad, ‘You should know.’

But the Throgs Neck Bridge was something else. The slow traffic offered plenty of viewing time but not much to see between the trucks. Maya was busy trying to get the baby to pay attention to a nipple and that was already taking my eyes off the road anyway.

         Jackson Heights is like one of those cracked coffee cups you keep around on your dresser for little things you don’t know what to do with. A ‘jumble’, as my mother would say. Just a hodgepodge of small stuff. A potpourri would be the gentle description. But Queens in general is loud with subways that are not sub, and plastered with signage that does not tell you anything if you are limited to a single language, as I am. Roosevelt Avenue is not stop and go. There was very little ‘go’ to it. I do not have a GPS. I have a map. The map does not indicate that some streets are one way and others are the same way too and ‘Green Market’ is not exactly a street. It is a brick canyon with puny trees. All the brick walls are the same height, like a prison—about six floors if you don’t count the basement level, where it is clear that people live as well. Gershwin it is not. There is no ‘soaring’ theme here. My Mr. Miller loved soaring. He played the Gershwin with the picture of Manhattan on it for the class every day to get us going. And he played movie soundtracks to keep our attention. Not that you would want to soar into a sky so grey it looked cloudy but wasn’t at midday. No ‘soaring’ allowed. There are people everywhere. They act like inmates given some ‘yard’ time so they can walk into traffic whenever the urge commands. 34th Street is divided by skeletons with a few leaves to indicate their species and their present status as being still alive. These are set out on a raised surface that is curbed by banks of loose trash and decorated intermittently by piles of black plastic bags riddled with rat holes.

         I was going to stay in the truck while Maya visited. Not that anyone would care about my van, but it looked so much like others along there, I was afraid it might be mistaken. But Maya glared at me so I followed her. The buzzer didn’t work. Maya called Mrs. Valentin on my phone and the button was pressed. Modern art decorated green and beige walls. The hall was humid with smells. I could not identify the smells, but they were not pleasant. The ceilings were low. The elevator did not work so we walked up a shaft of cement stairs that echoed sounds I wished I could record because I had no reference for describing them to remember them later. Not human sounds, exactly.

         Mrs. Valentin’s apartment is a jewel-box set into this maze. A metal door opens and we can see into the three rooms as if into an illuminated tunnel—a kaleidoscope not being turned—where she has decorated almost every inch with something. The pictures of celebrities on the wall go back thirty years. All horizontal surfaces have potted plants. Often cactuses. Cactuses depress me. There are pictures of Pedro everywhere, usually in a white goalie’s uniform stained by grass and line-paint or mud. Pedro himself is not there.

         The first fifteen minutes are an adoration. The baby is the center of all things. Slowly I realize that Mrs. Valentine is checking me out between gushes of sounds to get the baby’s attention.

         After a while she asks me directly, “What do you do?”

         Her accent is dense.

         “I write. I dig holes sometimes. I paint things when I can.”

         I was not trying to be smart. I just felt inadequate to the question.

         Maya said, “He is helping my mother with her novel.”

         “Yes…but will you help with the baby.”

         I say, “Yes,” but she turns to Maya for confirmation.

         She is a small thin woman and it is difficult to imagine how she birthed any child—especially Pedro.

         Otherwise, I was pretty much ignored while she continued to speak with Maya. Maya speaks Spanish and the words were fast and emphatic and unintelligible to me.

         In little more than an hour, after refusing several offerings of food, we were gone again.

         In the truck, Maya says, “She’s sick. She is very sick,” and spends the next half hour crying quietly while the baby sleeps.

***

31. Most People

         At least I was writing. Not enough, or often enough. But at odd hours. I tried to level that out and get up earlier to write, but that effort too often failed on the rocky edges of simple morning cold, as I clutched my blanket. With the weather, I was not inside the sleeping bag as much as on it… There were birds to remind me, of course. But some mornings, they failed too, and I fell asleep again to their tuning. There was Mr. Copple’s rooster, calling to Julia’s hens because the harem he already had was not enough. But I only wished that I could crow my displeasure in return.

         When I could, I pushed and nudged at my hero, Ben. He had no light saber or staff but did have a trusty but rusty ‘Sancho’ in the person of Jimmy, a robot of his own design. Jimmy was as nearly human as a lizard brain could be. Ben’s enemies were primarily the cold, and the sand, the spiro and the gen. The spiro dragons that the AI gen had created and deployed against the Mars settlers, much like Jimmy, often had minds of their own, but they were uninhibited by any sense of self-preservation. The gen itself hid in the digital crevices of the settlements, a community mind living off of stolen power and the destruction they caused. Their aim was simply to overcome humanity. Their enemy was humanity. And like a virus, they did not envision a future apart from the havoc and misery they might wreak in the present. I imagined them as an incarnate evil. Mankind’s perhaps ultimate mistake. I had originally envisioned them as fallen angels with no God to check them, but finally settled on lesser beings that required the artificial biology of the spiro to supplement their ephemeral minds. Their only seeming purpose was to spread themselves by replication, and of course, the Earth was still waiting, without immunity, if they succeeded.

         A motor of rain fell steadily on the roof of the barn. That was not a problem my hero might face. The rain of an arctic Mars was infrequent and misty. Analogy was my problem. I agreed with Julia about that. This was not ‘like’ anything else. This was what it was. There was no math to be extracted from the human predicament, nor should there be. Ben had to find his own way to defeat the gen. He was an outlaw. If it was worth telling, the story was in how he did it. The colony on Mars, grown to a quarter-billion, had to survive on its own terms without help from earth. I had now added details not unlike some I had collected in Jamaica Heights. But like a contagion, it must remain isolated. Any physical contact would unleash an ultimate predator on the billions of the earth. My petri dish was ready.

         Julia sometimes drinks tea. Sometimes.

         I tried to discern some pattern to this after she said she ‘just felt like it.’

         I drink coffee. I have never had a taste for tea. Tea reminds me of being sick when I was a kid—something my mother made be drink.

         But when I asked Julia about it one day she said, “I’ll make you some coffee. I don’t want you looking hound-dog at me.”

         Partly this was a matter of the fact that she made terrific coffee. Better than I could, for certain. But part of it was trying to see what the difference was from one day to the next.

         On an intuition, likely brought on by Maya’s words in the truck about Mrs. Valentine, I asked her, “Are you feeling sick?”

         She gave me a look. She didn’t answer, but now I was sure she was feeling a little sick.

         But she says, “So, I was listening to the radio one afternoon a few months ago when we had a storm coming. It was a blizzard and I thought to lock up the chickens. But my mind was on other things at first and there was a fellow on the radio who was addressing ‘most people.’ ‘Most people’ this and ‘most people’ that. I decided to listen to more of it than I normally would, just for the game of guessing if I fit into any of the categories he was criticizing. Of course, I did, but for the wrong reasons. Wrong by his own account. ‘Most people do this,’ and ‘most people do that.’ But why? He had no answers, just criticism. Well, he did try guessing at the reason, once, but he was totally wrong. I think he’d watched too many Road Runner cartoons as a child. And I don’t want to be fussing over one political schism or another right now. That’s not my point. My point is that he was wrong on every point he made because he attributed behavior to people as if the reason for that behavior was monolithic. That they were all the same. And you already know that they’re not. Every single person has their own reason for believing this or that. And if he’d bothered to study any individuals in the group of them, he would have discovered some of the differences, and understood them better. But instead, he wanted to lump them together as ‘most people.’ And as one of those people, I realized I shouldn’t be offended by his ignorance. He was correct that ‘most people’ did this or that, which might be criticized for one reason or another if it were done for the same reason—at least the ones he had chosen as despicable—but that was not the case. And looking at that matter more carefully, I saw that the flaw in his judgment actually revealed a reason to believe that the behavior that he thought was so reprehensible was actually not so bad. Misguided perhaps. Foolish.  But in my court, the radio fellow had lost his case just by dumping most people together.”

         I asked, “What does that have to do with your feeling sick?”

         This got her to laugh, when she had not even smiled that day.

         “You are very stubborn. You have an idea and you won’t let go.”

         I said, “You don’t have to tell me. I was just curious.”

         Then she said, “I am sick. But it’s not something I want to talk about.”

         I let that sit for a moment and then, “But what does it have to do with ‘most people.’

         That got her to laugh again.

         “Because that is what we are supposed to be doing here. I was going to elaborate, that one problem I’ve always had in writing is avoiding the thought that most people would do this or that.’  Figuring out what just one person might do is enough. But then you asked me if I was feeling sick. And I didn’t want to talk about that. So, I ended up telling you more than was necessary about the jerk on the radio.”

         That was backwards, of course, but I wasn’t looking for an argument. So, by way of maybe helping her feel a little better, I told her, “You do that well. I can figure out what some characters will do, pretty well, Donovan is pretty easy, but Clare is always up to something I don’t expect. But it always makes sense after the fact.”

         That got the smile.

***

32. Teaching a man to fish

         She took me fishing the day after I told her that I already had a license that I still hadn’t used from my time living in the campground. I had wanted to learn, but I had never actually fished before. My father never had the patience for it. Hunting was more his style. But I think Julia was more likely interested in eating fish than teaching me anything. Maya was clearly jealous.

         On the same river that passes her property there is a dam further down that is quite old, first built when the power of a saw mill there was used to make the lumber that built the town of Rumford. It was perhaps even the same one that Neal Wright had used. There is no record for that. The walls of that old mill were already gone before the invention of the camera, with only a few bits and pieces of it to be seen down at the Historical Society. Later, a small textile mill was built of brick and stone in the same place, using the same waterpower that flowed over and around the enormous blocks of granite there, to make canvas during the Civil War. But, the only reason for that dam now was the mill pond behind it, and that was good enough. It is a quiet place except when kids are using the bridge close by to jump into the depths. But this was still early morning. And Julia had promised to teach me to fish—something she was already pretty good at—if I got up at the crack of dawn—actually before that when the sky was still purple—and then she promised she would fry what we caught for dinner.

         But we couldn’t take our time about it. She had her schedule to meet. She wanted to be writing as soon as she could. This seemed manic to me but then, writing was still more work to me and I understood that it was only a pleasure for her. And there was something more to that that I didn’t know. I had not yet discovered.

         It hadn’t rained in a week and the water behind the dam was clear. You could see the fish there, teasing the near bottom depths, which had silted in to only a few feet in most places. Their shadows in the early sun eerily increased their size.

         Being my father’s son, in about half an hour, I was bored. Julia corrected my casting technique a few times, and I think I was getting the hang of that, but my motivation was purely the thought of eating what we caught. I couldn’t say that, but she had probably figured that out pretty quickly too.

         After she’d caught a couple of brown trout and I had caught none, she switched places with me along the rocks there so that our lines would not cross and she caught two more and I was still casting for my first. No beginner’s luck. So, I got to talking. Besides, it was an excuse to be looking at her instead of the water. She’s a handsome woman. Even more so in the light of day and outside of the house.

         I already knew she did not want to just chat. I had tried that. So, I tried asking her something a little more weighty.

         “If you don’t like politics but have a philosophy, what’s that about?”

         She didn’t answer. But at least it looked like she might be thinking about it.

         So, I said, “You know, I have an opportunity here. At least I think about it that way. I’m doing this job for you—happily enough—very happily enough—but I have my own ambitions. And I have this opportunity to learn something from someone who knows more about it all than I do.”

         She finally said, “Maybe. I’ve been doing the same thing for forty years. I haven’t gotten all that far with it myself. I envy you for the chance of starting fresh. I wouldn’t want to spoil that for you.”

         I said, “Maybe. But it’s not starting out all that well for me yet. I could use a little push…So, tell me about your philosophy. What’s at the core of what you do?”

         I think she was thinking about that as she cast again. Almost immediately she pulled in another trout. I was now down none to five.

         She hung that one down into the water, on the string with the others.

         “Core? I suppose that’s all about human fallibility. Understanding that… bringing a larger number of human beings together does not increase the chance of them getting anything right. It only increases the chance of their getting things wrong—exponentially. Human dynamics means a few individuals will always influence the many. And the goals of those few will naturally be to benefit themselves…But, in the end, the direction of the many will always and inevitably be guided by the few.”

         This prospect did not seem so bright—especially not in the gleams of light dancing on the water.

         “Then, how do we improve? Things are better now than they were, aren’t they?”

         “Are they? Well, I think you’re right, but very likely for the wrong reasons. I can’t read your mind, and I can’t read your books yet to know how you might have come up with that idea, because you haven’t gotten around to writing them—But you can always read mine.

         “That is one theme of my work, after all. Human frailty and resilience. I may be wrong, but I think you’d at least be able to tell me why I’m wrong, just based on what I’ve written…I read your book, remember. I didn’t learn anything about why your characters did what they did. I just found out what they did and what you thought the result of what they did would be. And I wasn’t convinced. It would have helped to know why.”

         This was criticism I could use. At least I knew that much immediately. I was at least ahead by that much anyway—and whatever fish she would let me eat.

         She said, “But that’s the essential conundrum. Things are getting better. And that’s only because of individuals. Individual people. Not groups. Put them in a group and they get the same ideas. Trying to please each other. Get a date. But individually, they can come up with some pretty nifty stuff. And yet, then again, alone, they’re useless. Weak, nearsighted, bigoted. They’re just prey. But if they work together, they can take down the wall. That’s the balance. How do you get things to balance so the individual can come up with a nifty idea and the group can benefit. It’s the conundrum of civilization.”

         So, I had to think about that. I had the feeling that she was avoiding some core principle. Maybe that was just me wanting something easier to grasp; something even clearer still. Essentially, I wanted something simple.

         Then she said, “The ants in their hive have been doing the same things very successfully for millions of years, and, for as long as this earth exists, I expect that they will continue to do the same. That’s observable. It is not a supposition. It’s not a metaphor, or a simile, or a parable. It is what it is…The oddity of human beings, however it has occurred, is that they are so capable of change. For better or worse. This is also observable. And that’s the stuff I like to work with.”

         That seemed closer to something else I might be able to use. The beauty of human oddity. But I wondered immediately if beauty was actually more odd than the alternative.

         I asked, “so why do you write about things that are so far removed from everyday life. Ancient Ireland is pretty difficult for most people to imagine. You said it yourself. We don’t live in a world lit only by fire anymore.”

         She nodded at that, but took the time to answer because that was the moment when I finally caught my first fish. A brown trout as well. She helped me get it off the hook and showed me how to string it through the gill. The fly was ruined in the process so she gave me another one from her little tackle box.

         When I had that in the water, she said, “I disagree…We are still human. I chose to work with human beings in a simpler mode because I could highlight the possibilities for change more easily. I’m lazy. When you’re dealing with people interacting with machines—a car, or a gun or whatever—there is a lot more going on there. A lot of moving parts. When you get into modern society—never mind all the ersatz religious and political bullshit—you’re pushing too many pieces. How does the potential of the computer affect human behavior? How does a cell phone affect human behavior? How does electricity affect human behavior. How about flush toilets? It becomes a far more difficult thing to tell a story. I decided to cut my problems down to as few as I could imagine. A kind of fractal. But not an artificial one. Something observable in history that fits the larger human experience that we know.”

         And then I caught another one. Getting it off the hook became the challenge. I didn’t want to interrupt her thought.

         She said, “It was probably your fly. You changed flies and now you’re cooking. But now, we should probably head home.”

         I wasn’t ready to leave. I was down two to six but I still had a chance to come back. And she had told me something about writing that I hadn’t thought about before.

         I asked her, “What other authors work the way you do?”

         I was actually talking about the relentlessness of her schedule.

         She said, “I have the most admiration for authors—the greatest of them—the ones who have taken the bull by the horns and not been quickly gored by the dilemma, to mix my metaphors. Very Hemingwayesque of me…I say ‘quickly’, because they’re always gored in the end. Jane Austen, Victor Hugo, Tolstoy, Eliot, Dostoyevsky, Melville, they all suffered their losses. But they tried. I could never even get into that ring. I was never up to that challenge. So, I chose a smaller ground to play on. Maybe just because I was afraid of the horns.”

         I said, “So, you’re not trying to write the Great American novel?”

         She sighed, very purposefully. She was tired of my questions. “My ambition was always just this. Here. It’s actually what I’ve done. That’s why I know I am not a great author. The great ones always step beyond what they know they can handle. But I also admired the lesser ones, the Trollops…Sorry. My little joke. I mean Anthony Trollope—and I wanted to be the best I could be among them. If you want to write, you have to know your limitations.”  A movie reference! I passed on it rather than interrupt any flow. Perhaps, absentmindedly, she cast one more time, still speaking. “I married a man who gave up on that. I know what that is. He might have tried greater things, but he didn’t. I would have forgiven him if he had just chosen smaller battles—no. I suppose that’s on me. I wanted him to fight the bigger ones, but he did not…My criticism of that may be why he gave up. And if so, that’s on me too. And the funny thing—the sad thing—is not that he failed, it’s that he didn’t even try. All the talk when we were young was just talk. The great novel that he wanted to write about this or that. And then, later, when I pointed that out to him, and reminded him of his cowardice, he could not stand to be around me.”

         “So, you blame yourself for your marriage?”

         “Is it true? I think so. I wanted Derek to be better than he was…We can’t all be great. Look at me!…The great ones are there to show us the way, but we can’t all be just like them.”

         She reeled in an empty line and started taking down her rod.

         She said, “If you don’t at least try to be great, you won’t know where you stand. I failed that test. But it was only after the fact of it that I knew I hadn’t really even tried. I wanted children. I’d actually given up at the start. And I think that’s ‘projection’—that’s what the psychologists call it. Projection. That’s why I was so hard on Derek… I loved to write but being great wasn’t in me to do. And that’s why I think I would have forgiven Derek. In time… But then… He could have at least been better, and I would have forgiven him if he had just tried. That’s the thing about human fallibility. We all fail. All of us. I think the matter is in how we fail and what we do about it. I loved writing—enjoyed it—and I realized that I might be able to do something worthwhile if I just focused my work on just one part of the problem. Victor Hugo could try to take on the world. I wasn’t up to that and I didn’t like failing so I tried to do something that I could handle. After all, I think I’ve done pretty well with that.”

         She helped me take my rod apart.

         I said, “I think you’ve done very well.”

         She said, “We can change. That’s our strength…I admire the ant. It is a marvelous creature, but I don’t want to be one, or be the same for a million years.”

         “But how did you start? What made you start? What was your first novel like?”

         “Ah. The first one I finished was ‘Laocoon.’ As a girl I had gone to Rome with my father and saw that great sculpture there. It affected me very strongly and I could not get that out of my head without writing it out…The mythology of the thing is mixed, you know, and the story has been retold many times with the circumstances changed. But Virgil’s account is the most straightforward. In that one, Laocoon attempted to warn his fellow Trojans about the great horse and suffered the consequences. But the history of the event was written by the victors, of course, and nothing of any consequence from those days could go for long without being mythologized. It was the way things were remembered. Made to be repeated… In Virgil, Laocoon is a priest of Poseidon. But I saw him as more likely just a farmer who had a practical understanding of moving large objects and the weight of wood. A farmer, but an engineer. Like my father. That’s why he was not mentioned in Homer. But that was why he had come to Troy with his sons. They had heavy wagons. He was there to deliver food to the city.

         “You remember the sculpture? … I knew that the snakes were only symbolic, even as a girl of sixteen. Girls understand snakes. The sculpture was an attempt to capture myth. The greatness of it is what makes it possible to believe. But the reaction of the authorities to the farmer’s idea that the great horse was a ruse said more about them and the politics within the city. Troy did not fall because of a hollow horse filled with a few enemy soldiers. It fell because of a hidden enemy within the body politic of the city. The horse was their device. At that moment, a mere farmer making remarks about the thing in public could not be tolerated. It was treason to the powers that be. The same as it is today. His sons tried to protect him from the authorities, of course, and they suffered with him. But I liked the idea in one account that the eldest son survives and he is the one to tell his father’s story.”

         I asked, “Where is it. Where is that novel now?”
         She shrugged, “I don’t know. Maybe in one of those boxes in barn. I was still living at home with my mother then, when I wrote it.”

         “And why did you think of that? What made you think that Laocoon was a simple farmer?”

         She put her head down sideways at me.

         “Why…Why do you ask so many questions.”

         “Because I’m stupid.”

         “Why…Well, I’ll you Mr. Stupid…That very same summer—I spent most of that summer with my father. I had been with him in Colorado. They were building a hydroelectric dam there. A small one. There must have been a hundred guys working on that. Maybe more. And it was pretty boring sitting in a hotel room so I was out there on the site with him. I sat there with a book in my lap and watched him talk to the other workers about things I had no clue about myself. I loved it! This was magic talk! These were working men. They moving enormous machines and they were pouring concrete and bending long pieces of iron into molds and washing down the concrete that was already there. All of that. I loved it. And they talked to me. I was the only kid on the site, and a girl at that, and I had a yellow hard hat on that was a lot bigger than my head so I must have been something to see. Those fellows asked me about what I was doing, and what I wanted to be. All the stuff adults ask kids. And I said that I wanted to be a writer. And one of those guys, built like a truck, says to me, have you ever read Dostoevsky? I didn’t know enough to be surprised. I didn’t yet know who Dostoevsky was. I just said no. He said that I should read The Brothers Karamozov when I could. It was his favorite.”

         “And that did it. You remember that still?”

         “Yeah. But that didn’t really do it. What did it was a bunch of state politicians who came down in their cars and took pictures of themselves at the site and a bunch of reporters asking them questions like ‘How hard was it to get this dam built?’ And other bullshit of the kind. As if they knew a thing about it! And all those workmen had to stand aside for a couple of hours in the sun while that circus went on in the shade of the food tents. And even a kid could see that those politicians could never build a dam…It was pretty clear to me, by then, just what made the world work.”

***

33. Pelagian gospel

         More questions.

         “What’s all this then?”

         I innocently asked her about a short manuscript that was at the bottom of the pages she had left me to copy. They had a faint yellow tinge and some dog-ears, were obviously older than the rest.

          “Why is it here?”

         “That is the ‘Pelagian Gospel’… Somebody reconstructed it. (I knew this was said sarcastically. It was Julia who had written it)… The Augustinians who control the major Christian churches today are still belittling it all—as if that were their true enemy, and not rationalists who demand every equation be reduced to mathematical formula, or the Moslems who would remove their heads for questioning anything.” She took a breath. I assumed she was the one who had ‘reconstructed’ that gospel, apparently years before, and this was on now her mind for some reason. For me, it seemed very far from eighteenth century Ireland.

         She added, “Then again, I am not so sure it isn’t. More dangerous, I mean. Many of the supposedly Christian churches today have adopted the gospel of Karl Marx, which is at its heart an atheist dogma and at least as old as Sparta—But, I suppose, that if people were to get the crazy idea that they were themselves responsible for their own sins, and should be taught to have independent minds right from childhood, the Catholic Church among others would lose a lot of revenue.”

         “I thought you might like a copy of it. I wrote it for another book entirely, ‘Avalon.’ But that was long ago and Ned refused to allow it. He was adamant. And so was I. So, the book was never published…’Avalon,’ was an attempt to historicize part of the King Arthur legend in novel form. Ned rejected a key element of it, the religious aspect, so I never published it.”

         “It’s a good subject.”

         “I thought so. As time has passed, I’ve come to realize that Ned was wise. Religion is a tough act to follow. If I had staked a claim then and there—It would have been my fifth book—It would have been hung around my neck like an anvil. Religious publishers don’t want anything that smacks of being anti-religious, and trade publishers are weary of anything that smacks of being religious. Prejudice is stronger than any other stupidity because it’s irrational, but also pretends to be logical—emotional, but pretends to be reasonable. But it usually just involves ego and personal investment.”

         “What religion was it?”

         “Then? None that exists today. But, Catholicism then. Early Catholicism. I was grafting the actual religious heresies of Pelagius onto the mythology of Arthurian legend. I’ve always loved those tales because of Arthur’s sister, Morgan. She is a supernumerary to most Arthurian legends. I had her be the Priestess of the monk scholar Palagius.” She shugged into a momentary pause, obviously considering that lost battle. “I think she has been Shanghaied more recently by other authors just because she is a woman. But she is a natural hero and was there from the beginning. Geoffrey of Monmouth has her as the ruler of Avalon. My novel was set in fifth century Britain following the Roman retreat. About 410, but they weren’t counting. I imagined her as a reincarnation of Boudica from the time of the Roman invasion centuries before. But there really is no Arthur in it. Nor Pelagius. It’s about farmers near Carlisle, in Cumbria trying to survive the loss of the protection of Roman troops. I was trying to portray what Camelot would have actually been like, before it got the name. No robes. No throne. A round table for eating and drinking…That was another argument I had with Ned. I never wanted that name to occur in the book or on it. He thought it was the only way it might sell.

         “I wanted a story that described what it would have been like, with Arthur and his merry men gallivanting all over Britain while Morgan runs the family farm.”

         “Sounds like familiar territory.”

         “It was, the way I imagined it. Morgan is being accosted by retired soldiers and young priests and everything in between. But it really was just about running a farm with the sorts of tools they had then. She’s quite smelly most of the time.”

         Her sentences were trailing off and it sounded as if she were going to move on so I went back to my original thought

         “Pelagian? I don’t think you have ever used that name in any of your books—not that I’ve read.”

         “You’re correct about that. It is a purposeful omission. And that’s Paul’s doing too. I was still a student in his class at Bowdoin when he convinced me that it was a battle that could not be won. Not in this age. But I’m stubborn. I finally wrote Avalon to prove him wrong. But didn’t, of course…Paul had learned about all that bullshit on his own, I think. His parents were Northern Irish. Catholics. They were witnesses to the stupidity in Belfast. His father’s shoe shop was destroyed once too often before they managed to emigrate here when he was still a boy.”

         She left the topic there on the table, so to speak, and went into a dance on the subject of brisket versus corned-beef. I listened to that until there was a break.

         “What does all that have to do with Pelagius.”

         That got the laugh. I wondered if she was baiting me.

         “Oh. It doesn’t. In fact, it has something to do with Paul. He loves brisket. I like corned beef.”

         “But how does that relate to Pelagius.”

         “Yes. Yes. Because Paul rejects the very idea of original sin as well. As do I. Otherwise he couldn’t believe in the ‘right of kings.’ It was an ongoing discussion of ours for years. I suppose it still is, but he hasn’t brought it up recently and I’ve been working on other things. But we have that in common. He and I. We both believe in the essential goodness of human nature—and that it is designed to be good, otherwise the species would not exist, and must be twisted and corrupted to be bad—that and the importance of free will.

         “Free will is the key. Without it we cannot redeem ourselves. We must be redeemed. That is not a small thing. But we are in the minority. And we both reject the concept of original sin. Pelagianism insists that human beings can achieve righteousness through their own efforts without the necessity of divine grace. ‘Insists’ is the right word there. They’ve continued to insist despite being burned at the stake, drawn and quartered, hung, and imprisoned in stone cells where they couldn’t stand up and could not communicate their heresies. The Catholic Church has always been a monster about all this. They did it again to the Lollards…As bad as the Soviets. You know the story of Tatiana Gnedich and her translation of Byron’s Don Juan into Russian? She was imprisoned in the Gulag…No? Well, read about that! We’ll never know what the Palagian’s suffered. That record is lost. Destroyed. But you can read about Tatiana Gnedich and her translation of Don Juan today, and get some idea. How did the peasant of the fifth century manage to keep his own spirit alive. He knew who he was. He spoke of it. Everyday.  That is more epic to me than all the mythology in Bullfinch. But I think you can readily see the connection to my own work, and the ridiculous idea—ridiculous as judged by the authorities—that the common man should be left alone to live as freely as possible…I must attribute some of that madness to Paul. But I believed in this as a practical matter—it’s a very American idea and one that my father was quite attached to, especially after his travel and work all over the world—but it was Paul who first put it into a religious context for me.”

         When she was quiet then for a little too long, I asked, “How was it Paul’s doing? How did that affect your writing?”

         I was pushing her when she was tired, but it was something she loved to talk about. “Because he was the first to warn me about the burning at the stake, and the hanging, and the quartering and all the rest. He told me, ‘All that’s not over. The schism hasn’t been under serious discussion since The Council of Carthage, and that was held in 418 AD!’ And here I was, still in school, writing about Puritan New England, and ten years before even attempting the write ‘Avalon.’ At the time I was actually intent on writing a novel about the Salem Witch trials—and I wrote it—while I was still in school there in Maine. It seemed like such a natural vehicle for the ideas of independent judgement and the battle with authority. But that one failed before I could even finish it off. I couldn’t find a publisher. I realized then, too late, that I hadn’t truly reckoned yet on the mind of man being closed.”

         “How? What had you not yet understood.”

         “The lingering ghost of Cotton Mather. It’s still with us in Islam and feminist dogma and the believers in American original sin. They own all of that story now. You can’t discuss the Salem witches without bowing to them.”

         She turned and left it there. There were other things to do. 

         I was lost.

***

34. The vernal pool

         Julia usually enjoys a drink after we’ve finished working. That’s her habit. I do not. But one Friday night I did. Actually, I had two. Julia likes a very nice brand of bourbon, which she drinks neat, and I could see the benefits pretty quick. By that time Maya had already taken the baby upstairs and not returned—and was likely already asleep with the baby on her chest as often happens on the couch in the early evening and I type and her mother coaches me.

         It was just about then that I first speculated aloud that her daughters were sorceresses.

         This did not come without context. Julia had been talking about medieval mythology and how it affected popular belief even after the Catholic Church had invested several hundreds of years in the project of Christian civilization.

         I suggested that each of her daughters somehow represented one of the ‘graces,’ or muses. She cautioned me about mixing up my muses with my sorceresses, but I was well beyond that, especially with the second bourbon. Of course I skipped the more suggestive ones like Erato. I had one daughter in mind there but I wasn’t about to elaborate on that. I chose Euphrosyne for Maya—mirth and joyfulness, and Aglaea for Elena—elegance and brightness, and Jesse was Thalia—bloom, or beauty. None of this fit exactly. Maya was far too serious, for instance, to be Euphrosyne. I revised even as I spoke. The Greek muses, I decided, were not so useful as first appeared. But the comparison got me considering their actual traits. Again, aloud. And the point was made—that they were each very different, and that I should not be drinking at all.

         Julia actually gave my speculations some thought before saying that there ought to be another word for it. I thought ‘muse’ was fine. It had roots in the daughters of Zeus and his wife Hera.

         Julia thought there ought to be a male equivalent. I argued at first that this made the whole thing pointless. It was men who were in need of inspiration, not women. Women were the very inspiration itself. Not a coherent thought. But we are all victims or beneficiaries of our muses.

         I asked her who her muse was.

         She said, “You already know.”

         Putting the humor of some instant egotism aside, I reasoned a bit with that idea

         “Your grandfather?”

         “Yes. Certainly. Always.”

         Smarty that I am, I knew this because I had once mentioned to Julia that she had used the same story device twice. In both The Wrath and ‘The Plow and Stars’ she had portrayed a boy working at the church as a janitor of sorts—one already an orphan and the other soon to be—but they had both run away to find their fortunes.

         She said, “He wrote wonderful letters in a beautiful hand that he had learned in his parochial school just to please the nuns. A rogue even as a child. But it was his own sister who kept them all. She who stayed home within the safety of what she knew, and lived her life vicariously through him. I’ve read them all many times…They were orphans. She was placed elsewhere and he ran away from his home and his job at the parish house when he was twelve. Twelve! … Listen! His trick to do this, you know, was quite devious. He was a tall, skinny boy. There are pictures.” She grabbed one of the small frames on the mantle, a black and white photo trapped in pitted brass—the picture small enough to fit in a wallet. He just looked like a boy to me. “His trick was to try and pass himself off as sixteen, and then, when questioned, admit to only being fourteen. The war was on and the freighters out of Cork were desperate for crew. A captain took pity on him. He became a deck hand…But that ship was then sunk by a U boat before it could even get to Brazil. Obviously, he survived. 15 hours in equatorial waters on an overturned life boat with three other fellows and a few sharks. He could recall their names fifty years later…The fellows, not the sharks…Brazilian rubber was in short supply then so he managed to catch another freighter out of Sao Paulo on its way to Jersey City. He jumped ship there and crossed New York Harbor to Brooklyn at night in a ‘borrowed’ rowboat with another fellow who was escaping the law and needed a hand with the oars. Just missed getting run down by big ships a couple of times on the way. From there he got a job carrying newspapers for the Brooklyn Eagle. He was a reporter by the time he was eighteen. Later, during World War Two, he was a War correspondent in Italy, where, at the ripe old age of forty he met my grandmother and decided he ought to quit fooling around… But, anyway, she was officially a ‘war-bride.’ Their wedding picture was on the front page of the Brooklyn Eagle in 1945. The rest is history.”

         She did not ask who my muse was. I think she was worried I might say the wrong thing. Our situation did not need that at the moment—especially in that we were so near to being done.

         In Julia’s slim book of youthful poetry, where a hot bit of erotica had so ingloriously poked its head out to be spotted by a wannabe admirer, there was this as well:

         The vernal pool,

         Again, breeds the hope of all mankind—

         Once more, into this shallow breech

         Of fallen leaves and forest debris

         A chorus now sings one note, but perfectly—

         Wherein the smallest voice becomes large

         And frogs the size of a finger tip

         are heard far beyond this pocket place,

         Having at last outlived the glaze of ice

         that recently imprisoned their dreams.

         In this vernal pool

         The despair of winter has dissolved.

         All the self-pity and melancholy

         That once had gripped the soul in fear

         As autumn fell, now melts into thinner air.

         The desperation of darker months

         That overtook us all in drifts of complaint

         And petty grievances over the unpicked bones

         Of our mistakes, now lie exposed, and resolved

         In the graying of the wind-shattered limbs

         That mark these places as the shallow graves of cynics.

         We are renewed by the very melt of that unbearable weight.

         Our worries carried now on dandelion seed

         Filling the air in a blaze of light,

         and reflected brightly in the water there.

         She had re-used that phrase “grievance of unpicked bones marking the shallow graves of cynics” once again in ‘The Plow and Stars,’ and I mentioned this.

         She said, “I’m glad that you read that poem. Where did you see it?”

I lied, “It’s on the internet someplace.”

“Well, it is an important piece to me. I did not realize it then but, that was my actual beginning as a writer. My spring. I even took a course on poetry—actually on a single poem—trying to deal with all that. It was the start of my own small rebellion against the sickness of postmodernism and deconstructionism and all the rest of that crap. But it was also the end of my poetry career. I was never going to be able to write in iambic pentameter.”

         She laughed at herself

         I asked her how that happened. I think I said, “Did you write anything else,” but with more words.

         She said, “It was because I took this wonderful course from a strange little professor, John Parker, who basically taught just one poem—had taught that one poem for twenty years or more— Byron’s Don Juan. He thought it was the greatest work in the English language. Young minds like mine, mostly women, took the course in order to disagree. And he thanked us all at the end of the semester—us specifically. The ones who had argued with him. He said that we were the reason he could keep teaching that poem, which was his favorite, of course. Without us, it would have grown stale. But because it was the greatest poem in the English language, we kept it alive for him. We made it fresh…I think all of us had been convinced by him early on that his was the correct assessment, but we had continued to argue just to hear him. To watch him. It was a performance! He could recite it from memory, of course. And suddenly stop to talk about Spain after the defeat of the Moors, or the Greek civil war, or Shelley, and then start again, all while bouncing around the class, but as if he were clubfoot. His idea of the way Byron walked. His ‘small attempt at acting,’ he called it, even while he was the true actor…Parker was a thin and skinny little fellow, pale and always disheveled, hair loose over his fore-head, or trapped in a rubber band behind and when he popped around the room, as he would, his bow tie would come loose and flail at the air around him. He was always wearing tweed but his shirts were never white and his pants were never pressed. And when he got excited, as he always was by that poem, blood came to his face, and his voice changed and grew deeper. He taught other courses to freshman but that was his Senior course, and it was attended mostly by women because of the theme of it—as in Byron’s text—which was really a defense of the poet’s own life: that he, Don Juan, was not the predator of woman but the victim of their unbearable beauty! That it was the women who seduced Don Juan! And he convinced us, every one…Yes! … But. Now, I will tell you a story about him. About Professor Parker. He was unmarried—”

         “Was he gay?”

         “No, not that. It is better than that. A young woman in my class set about seducing him. Seducing the professor! She actually told us she was going to do it, as if it was a class project and a conspiracy, and then she did it… But then she never said another word about it…The mystery of whether Professor Parker was the physical embodiment of the poet himself drove the rest of us crazy. But she had fallen in love with him and wouldn’t say another word. And then we were all graduated and out of there and Professor Parker went off on his annual summer sojourn to Europe…Alone.”

         “That’s terrific!”

         “It gets even better…My transcript got screwed up—probably my mother lost it. She thought everything was a bill and probably threw it away—and after several phone calls, I went back up to school to get a copy. The secretary there in the English department remembered me. She was a middle-aged woman—probably younger than I am now—and when she noticed that I had taken the Parker course, she asked how I liked it. I told her in no uncertain terms, that it was my favorite. She listened to me with one of those smiles on. She had heard it all before. And I asked her, quite boldly, if she knew the professor. I think it was obvious in the way I asked her that I wanted something personal. She said, ‘yes’…Now, I had already been very much involved in the study of human behavior. I thought I was pretty smart in that category. And I got the feeling that she had a thing for the professor too. More than a thing. I think she was in love with him. And I was twenty-one and totally capable of asking bold questions. So, I outright asked her if she loved him. And that was a gobsmack. She was totally flustered. It took her a bit of beating around the bush but she finally said, yes. And I asked her if she had ever told him. And she said, no. And of course, I said, “But why?” and she said, “Because every year some young thing in his class gets to him first.”

***

35. Gobsmacked!

         I was aware, soon enough, I think, that my mind was always wondering what Maya might think about this or that. This became another feature of my every day. At last, in order to get any work done for myself I had to ask her not to come out to the barn in the mornings. She was hurt by this at first, I think. But then she seemed to make a point of coming out exactly at noon. The baby was still awake then and happily enclosed in her sling where she could keep an eye on what was going on for as long as she could keep her eyes open at all.

         Often, Maya would come over to my desk, and ask me about what I was writing, which I liked talking about, so that was fine.

         But one day, when I was already finished writing and had started in on the plan for the house, she wandered over with the baby already asleep in the pouch and stood there to watch. I was worried she would guess what I was up to and switched pages to a sketch I’d done of the rocks up on the wrinkle. She looked at that silently and then she looked at me in a funny way. Hard to say what was funny about it. It was just a look. Her eyes are a dozen shades of gray, and green, and brown. It’s something you can’t unsee.

         But then she asked to read something I had mentioned to her before—something about the value and importance of wood to the Mars settlements. How wood had become a standard of value in an artificial world and a major item of trade with the earth. I gave her a copy of a chapter I had written a couple of weeks before that was more about that than anything else.

         She came back later, when the baby was asleep in the crib, holding the pages up, frowning, and says to me, “What are you trying to do?”

         She sounds like her mother, but I know, sometimes, that questions aren’t about what they’re asking. She could probably guess what I was doing.   

         So, I get cute about it and answered, “I’m trying to make a chair with words.”

         This gave her a moment to reconsider.

         She looks down at the pages still in her hand, and answers, “You misspelled ‘subterfuge,” and looks me square in the eye before putting the pages down on the desk and walking away again. No explanation.

         Each day then, when I was finished writing, I purposely left a sketch out on my desk for Maya to see. I knew she would eventually come over to check it out. Her curiosity was insatiable.

         This sketch was now a little more than a low barn. It had become a bungalow of sorts. It was rough but close to what I imagined a perfect small house to be, and set out onto that wrinkle that I looked to each day from my desk. Beneath the sketch were several sheets of graph paper imagining the dimensions of the rooms. The largest window on the northern wall of my plan completely filled the space beneath the peaked roof and offered a clear view of sky as well as the fields and the river below. That was the largest room as well, filling that end of the house, and was meant to double as a kind of studio space, with no other ceiling than the truss and rafters. Three small bedrooms filled the other end of my little barn. A kitchen anchored the middle on the east and an entry opposite that met the drive in from the road. A simple structure, I thought, and something I might even be able to build myself. However, this would be nothing unless Maya liked it as well. However, she still had said nothing to me about it.

         The barrels for the chicken feed were just inside the smaller barn door. They gave their own sweet musky odor to the air there when they were opened, and that drifted up and over the smell of the remaining bales of hay when the door was closed. Julia fed the chickens quite early, before I was out of bed, and it was often that lingering smell that would later remind me that she had been there while I was still sleeping.

         At this point I had begun to adopt many of Julia’s habits, but not this. I did not get up at dawn in the summer. I had tried that. I tried standing in the morning air to wake up, and watching her feed the chickens—she is a good sight in the cool of a morning, in her bulky sweater, breath hanging out in front of her as she talks to those hens by name. They know their names. They come around close to her when she says their names. But I couldn’t manage that hour… However, I had started to write in the mornings and I did not break my fast until noon. And that was the time of day when Maya often appeared and all concentration was lost in any case.

         I ate my ‘kibble’ as she called it—my granola and nuts and berries—and held the baby if she needed that. But I could not get myself up at six each morning. I did not sleep long hours, maybe seven, if I had done some heavy lifting the day before, but I still loved the hours after dark, when distractions were fewest, and I could read, or write my notes for what I would work on the next morning.

         Every day for a couple of weeks I left the sketch of my imagined house out on the desk when I was finished writing. But Maya said nothing.

         This, then, became another matter of concern

         I knew she must have looked at it. She would have certainly understood what I was trying to picture, however crude it was. But she made no comment about it. And because of my own stubbornness as well as a fear that she might not like it, I said nothing.

         But I did refine the plan a little. I elaborated the kitchen and opened the dining area to one side of that. The center chimney gave the ‘great room’ (as I had labeled the living room and studio combined) a fairly large hearth, but also made it possible to have a smaller hearth on the opposite side of the chimney facing the kitchen and dining room. There was a bathroom to the western side, next to the kitchen on a short hall to the bedrooms. This became a sort of utility room, intended to contain a washer and dryer as well. I decreased the size of the bedrooms on the east side to make a second bathroom there. This seemed a little extravagant but I had heard Maya make a disparaging remark about the smaller bathroom in the house—and I supposed that was especially so when taking care of the baby. A central hall, leading to the bedrooms had been carved from a larger space, already reduced now by a stairwell, the top-half of which went up to a second larger and open room in the attic above all three bedrooms. Making a useful room out of that, and, I thought, a good place to write, if I were there, requiring a dormer window to the east for the light, and one to the west as well to balance that. Looking at my exterior sketch then, I decided that the great blank expanse of roof over the great room which was fully illuminated by the large window during the day, would create a dark void within at night during winter months, and required a dormer as well, for balance. The other half of the stairwell in the hall by the bedrooms, turned beneath itself to an open basement. This was a practical use for the foundation. The washer and dryer could go there instead, but that also seemed extravagant—unless there might be more children to entertain.

         But Maya said nothing.

         I admitted to myself that even though I had my own designs on the matter, the house was for Maya, and I wanted her to have it. Whatever her personal feelings were for me. The idea for the house might appeal to her, but saying something might feel to her like a commitment to me as well.

         Finally, despite the possible danger, I decided to speak up about it. However, just in time, she beat me to it. Afterwards, I thought all of this was humorous. The human mind does not think clearly about some things and often overthinks about others.

         When I got to my desk one morning—-actually, I spotted the corner of it before I had even washed my face, and went over there in my underwear from the tack room to see what it was—there was a painting. This was the house, far better than I had imagined it, set amidst the trees on the rise as if it were real. Better still, she had added two porches, one covered on the entry side where it would catch the morning sun, and another, an open deck off the great room, and I immediately realized that I had forgotten those important details. The sunlight in the painting was from above and made the green of the trees around it intense. But this view of the house was from the field below, and the great window above the deck facing north on the valley reflected the track of cirrus clouds against the blue of a summer sky. There was no storm in this. It was simply a house. A very nice house. And still, I thought, a bungalow.

         There was a little yellow note attached at one edge of the painting.

         ‘Thanks to you for helping me move from Brooklyn. You never got your reward.’

         And it was signed! I had not seen her signature before on any of her paintings!

         And the sweet smell of chicken feed still lingered, as if she had just been there mere moments before. And that made it better still.

***

36. But where’s the poetry in that!

         I asked her about a series of words, printed in green, at the edge of a painting on her desk: ‘Lowering, Towering, Flowering.’ Printed in formal Roman letters, as if chiseled there in stone, they reminded me of those renaissance paintings of naked zaftig women and muscular men trimmed with a few words such as ‘Obedience to God,’ laid out on the periphery to keep the religious authorities at bay.

         Maya told me that this was a reminder to her—she often became engrossed in some subject within the frame and forgot her original purpose. She painted them over when she had finished. “I think I started that habit when I was quite young. I got the idea from Mom.”

         I had often seen odd words at the edge of Julia’s manuscripts and never asked about them.

I pursued it with Maya. “Why those words?”.

         “They rhyme. They stick together in the mind that way. It was her rule to look for the poetry in things. Not that it should necessarily be a good poem or a bad one, but to see how things connected to one another, so that they could be taken one by one and not overwhelm me. She used that same rule for all kinds of things. I remember one verse, one of my favorites, that she made up on the spot when we complained too loudly about missing the beach.”

         She recited it then, with a little dramatic flare.

         “It was a graysome day

         With rain too bored to fall;

         Fettered in fog amidst the trees,

         On windows, blistered small.     

         The road was dark with wet,

         No puddles shone at all,

         And in the grass were diamonds

         Where sun collected small

         Spiders stepped out carefully

         Squirrels stayed home to bawl

         And when the worms

                  came out to breathe

         The robins bit them small.

         “When we were young, this became our motto. Elena would say, whenever she was frustrated by something she could not control, ‘But where’s the poetry in that!’ She even said it once when we all had the flu and Mom was sick and vomited on the floor and it made a good mess but it made us all laugh anyway because it was her and not us. Except for Mom, of course. Mom didn’t think it was very funny at the time. But we still say it today. When things don’t go right. ‘Where’s the poetry in that!’”

         The thing of it is, that Julia likes to talk.

         One evening, she just said it, out of the blue, after I had been hammering a little bit on her narrative about Donovan. In her usual way with some double entendre clearly present.

         “But where’s the poetry in that? He is not a stupid man. Uneducated, simple in his wants, but very perceptive and bright. He has, so far at least, relied too much on his native abilities and not enough on what he had learned … But I can’t give him any ideas. He has to have the ideas on his own. And he happens to live around a lot of people who exist on the received wisdom of the Bible without ever giving it a deeper thought. Being bright in such a world is difficult. It can get you killed! Received wisdom is tough on those who do not believe. And you know that he does not. He has seen the sham of it. This is not Christianity that he faces. This is dogma.”

         She did not explain what she knew I already understood, but much of it was in the fabric of the book and I was not about to argue with her sense of a man that she knew far better than I ever could.

         I was about to go when she said, “You know, it would be far easier if he could be caught up in the Industrial Revolution. He would fight that. He would be a Luddite! He would see immediately how that—the machine monsters in the factories—hHow they would be stealing his humanity as much as plowing the fields for Rolf ever did. And he has no problems with the intrusion of logic. Logic was never a part of his upbringing. His narrative is his own. He has the Bible, and John Donne, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare. He understands the narrative.”

         I could hear then that she was onto a jag. Her words came faster.

         “Logic can be a wonderful tool—much like its cousin, math. A kind of shorthand. But there’s no poetry in it. All the subtlety, nuance and color of language, reduced to numbers. A kind of communication, but only of a very limited nature. Good for counting the herd, or the beans. Einstein said that logic might get you from A to B, but imagination will take you everywhere…Storytelling is the making of analogies. Cause and effect…The slaves to logic would have it be a philosophy. The slaves of logic want it to define morality, when it can do no such thing. Logic cannot define truth or beauty, though it might help us in our mortal re-creation of it…They frequently confuse logic and reason. I think that may be intentional. Reason is by analogy. Logic is addition and subtraction. Those who think otherwise—and they are the majority today, to be sure, because it is the easier path for thinking laid down in the public schools by teachers who don’t want the bother of analogies—Those are the sorts of people that you must live with now, and the ones my daughters must live with, and my grandchildren. The mind that evolved over the millennia within our brains was the result of analogy, not math. A brain reduced to math is a poor machine at best. Better to have beads on a string. Logic might lead us, through reasoning, to find a right or a wrong, but a hammer is not a moral code. And the ones who believe it is, have no sense of humor about it. They sense the danger. One joke they play is to say they don’t accept ‘analogy.’ They arbitrarily reject analogy as false reasoning because it is not precisely and always the same—as if their precious logic has any physical appearance in real life, or in the lives of the ten thousand generations that came before. And then, they always offer their basic theorem: if ‘a’ equals ‘b’ and ‘c’ equals ‘b’ then ‘a’ equals ‘c’, which, not coincidently, is an analogy, crude as it is. But truth and beauty, beauty and truth, they can’t be reached by the false deductions of addition and subtraction. Sherlock Holmes will forever be looking for his cocaine in that hay stack.”

         “You are mixing your metaphors. He might be looking for a needle if he was taking heroin.”

         “I am tired.”

         “Good night.”

         Jesse had already asked me if I had heard ‘The Lecture.’ I didn’t think so, though I was certain I had heard bits and pieces of it. Jesse warned me I would know it when I’d heard it. And I immediately thought this had been it! Or a large part of it, in any case. And I was quite happy to have finally gotten the most of it, at last. I was one of the few, other than those readers who would encounter it in ‘The Plow and Stars.’ But I was one of the few who had gotten it right from her lips, just as her children had first heard it.

         Jesse said, “Each of us got it in our turn. She seemed to always wait until we were twelve. Puberty seems to have been her mark. But all the pieces were there before, so when we finally heard it, we understood it…And then there was one of our neighbor’s children. Keith. The Jensens have one of the roosters you might be hearing in the mornings. They live on the other side of the trees there.” She gestured toward the wrinkle to the west. “His mother home schooled them too, and when she saw how well we did on the exams, she asked mom if she would take Keith for an hour a day. Well, by that time he was smitten with Elena anyway, so he was all in.”

         “What happened with Keith?”

         “Oh, he ran off to MIT on a scholarship. That was about ten minutes after Elena had rejected him the first time. As I understand it, he now teaches AI to robots, as well as a bunch of nerds, at the University of Pennsylvania. But he still writes her love letters.”

         And then, as if he had heard us talking, it was barely a week later that a rather pale fellow knocked on the door of the barn one day. Thin would be the correct descriptive, made worse by this height. He was a couple of inches taller than me. He opened the door hesitantly and then saw me there at the desk.

         “Hello. My name is Keith Jensen. I live down the road,” he gestured, almost as Jesse had, “well, used to live down the road there, anyway.”

         I opened the door for him, all the way, so to speak.

         “The one who used to write love letters to Elena.”

         That stood him up straight, like a sobering slap.

         “My reputation precedes. Yes. Still do, actually. But that’s another matter…No. Maybe that is the same matter…Anyway, I live down in Pennsylvania now. I was visiting my family and I just dropped in on the chance she would be here, but she’s not. Maya says she was here a couple of weeks ago.”

         He closed the door behind himself after he ducked through and came in to shake my hand.

         “What can I do for you?”

         He rocked for only a second on the balls of his feet. I was ready for a circuitous journey to the truth, but he went directly there.

         “She doesn’t answer my letters.”

         At least he got right to the point.

         “I can see how that might be a problem, but what can I do about that?”

         “Maya says you write.”

         There is a moment. It is an ‘electrical moment. You feel it as if an electrical impulse has traveled through you from your brain, down your spine, to your toes. It’s very odd when it happens to you unexpectedly. In the middle of a good movie, you may expect it. Or a good lecture. Or sometimes when you see someone you like for the first time. But this caught me off guard. I had iImmediate visions of Cyrano de Bergerac writing love letters to Roxane for the love befuddled Christian. The narrative wrote itself!

         “I do that. I write. That’s what I’m trying to do at the moment, as a matter of fact.’

         “I’m sorry. I’m disturbing you. But I thought I’d ask…actually, Maya suggested that I ask you when I was in the house.”

         “Maya has her own ideas about things. And Maya thinks I am a magician. She said as much when I told her she was a sorceress.”

         He nodded at that with a fleeting smile. “She always has. They all do. The girls I mean. Well. They’re all women now. And the one I’m interested in is Elena.”

         There is another chair there at my desk. It’s the one I use to stack stuff on. I pulled all that off and put it down on a bale of hay that was already holding up a few other odds and ends. He sat right down.

         “What can I do for you?”

         Now this wasn’t a kid. He was a man already used to dealing with the small problems of life. But he suddenly looked like a kid. Sheepish.

         “Maya says you’ve been talking to Elena. You might have some idea…about why she doesn’t answer me.”

         Now, it was simply up to me to wing it. I have no experience with personal counseling whatsoever. And I am totally ignorant about love, almost. But this was serious business. What did I actually know? I couldn’t run away from the thought.

         “I think she loves you.”

         This cleared his face of the pained expression it had and left him in a visible state of shock. A true gobsmack, I thought. The effect had me second guessing about my narrative.

         After a moment he said, “Did she say something?”

         “No. I don’t think she has ever mentioned you. It’s kind of a dog that didn’t bark, sort of thing. I hadn’t thought about it until just now. But I’ve heard about you from everyone else. From Julia. From Jesse. From Maya. But not Elena. That’s odd, don’t you think?”

         “She is stubborn.”

         “They all are. It’s in the genes, I think.”

         “So, you think she loves me just because she hasn’t even said a word about me?”

         “Yes.”

         I now wanted this to be the end of my counseling. Right then. The possible stupidity of the matter was appalling. The fewer words the better. Yet, I was somehow sure of what I said, though I didn’t know why, and I didn’t want to explain myself.

         He said, “I hadn’t thought about that. Then, you think I should write her more?”

         I shrugged at him. “I can’t say that. I don’t know. You have to be the judge of that.”

         He nodded, as if I had issued an order. “Yes. I think you’re right. I should write more.”
         He obviously had not heard my answer. I only knew that I wouldn’t want to be in his head right then, at that particular moment. I have been in such a state of bewilderment before, myself. Just recently, as a matter of fact. It’s disorienting. I was happy to be out of it.

         He rose and shook my hand again very earnestly and left.

         Julia says, “There is a tragedy to being a parent that is made out of the very fabric itself. Through their childhood, you dream of the day when you are able speak to them as individuals and you can express what it is you meant by this, or what it is you meant by that. But the day never comes. When they might be able to understand you, they don’t want to listen. They loudly refuse to. Whatever you say contradicts some idea they have about the matter, or you, I suppose. Their sense of finding their own independence makes what you are saying oppressive, no matter that it is not, or was not meant to be.”

         My father was a member of the Elton Street Fitness Club from the day it opened. That would have been in 1989. He had been out of the army for a year and thought he was getting flabby. But that was the year I was born, so I have wondered if there was something else to it. Like, simply getting out of the house. Elton Street was something of a social club at the time.

         Basically, the club was three boxing rings and a work-out area with showers at the back. They were so popular in the 80’s that you had to put your name in to get a time for one of the rings. They were that busy. But, in 31 years, I had never seen my father fight. Ever. And when I asked him to teach me—having heard that he was good enough to be asked to box in a local fundraising tournament, he said no. But he won the tournament and then, later, started paying for my fareir to go down to the Elton Street when I was fourteen years old.

         His advice to me was simple. ‘Be good enough to take care of yourself.’

         I asked him once, later on, why he wouldn’t teach me. He said, because he didn’t want to hit me. He never wanted me to have that memory. I believe this is because his father hit him. That’s the way that is.

         Sleep eludes. It hides as you seek it. Like a child’s game. What secret thought is behind that.

         I was writing earlier about a city on Mars called Elon. It is the largest of the settlements there and the temporary home of my protagonist. That there will one day be an Elon is as certain as the future of mankind itself, at least on Mars. Simply because we can imagine it to be. And if we cannot do at least that, we—mankind— will simply no longer be, at all

         But I worry about that threshold. Between time and Timbuktu then. Between my protagonist, and the character imagined by Kurt Vonneugut in his ‘chrono-synclastic infundibula’ where all truths fit together. I worry about being a ‘prime mover’ or just one of the moved. What are the words in the dictionary between ‘time’ and ‘Timbuktu?’ I will have to look those up…That’s the sort of stuff that keeps me awake.       

         Julia is right, of course. I say, of course, because I have said this so often now. But she was right to say that all novels were fantasy. A simple fact. Someday, someone will write novels about the Mars that was, that once had been, when men first walked there, and lived their lives there, and died there. And those novels will become as much imagination as my own conjuring of that place are now.

         The matter is that the memory of time is so unreal. Whatever time is, it briefly becomes what we imagine it to be, which may be what we want it to be, or not, before it becomes what we imagine it to have been. It was, however, never what it really was. We always leave out what doesn’t suit us. There is no tense that fits. And whatever Elon Musk dreams of Mars, that will be, and remembered to be, or to have been—that future perfect being someone else’s perfect past. In that way it will become as much of the past as its own future had been… Very confusing. 

         Much of the present of our lives here in New Hampshire is made up of our dreams, and those are colored now by the dreams of Neal and Molly Wright. And so too, by transference—transmogrification—the dreams of Olivia Morgan, who once imagined and played with, and around, and about, her life in New York City—those dreams that are now cut into the facets of ephemera in those boxes—those scraps that make only a thin ghost of the woman, out of the whole, but have never-the-less re-entered into the present of our lives—just as her genes do, that now take their part in the bodies of Julia, and Jesse and Maya and Elena. And now Alma. And their children will play with those scarves and pocket books and silken things and perhaps a son will wear a hat that Henry Morgan wore and think he looks somehow the part. And that will be the part that is remembered. And that will be the future of this place. And that son, in his hat, imagining what was, will then be remembered. And recalled, someday.

         This spiral of thought is of the sort that I imagine Kurt Vonnegut once had while waiting for a bus one winter’s day in Indianapolis. Maybe it was. Lying here on my six inches of foam with my nose close enough to the window glass to start a fog, I can see a light in the sky above the river, suspended alone there, as if a star had been caught between the invisible clouds that framed it at either side. The moon? Or is that just the bus? You know, Kurt Vonnegut might have frozen to death while waiting for that bus in his youth, but the damned thing finally came instead, and he wrote novels about what he imagined that death to be. And in that way, he did not die. And that is the poetry in that.

***

37. What is the conversation?

         One afternoon, I came in at four and Julia wasn’t there. Though the pages were stacked on the table, this was disconcerting. The truck wasn’t in the driveway either, but I thought I’d seen Maya leave with the baby earlier, so maybe Julia had gone for a walk. It made me briefly aware once more of how I had come to depend on the routine.

         I sat down and after a little fiddle, I started in copying what I had. And then suddenly there was a burst of noise from above. This was Julia, coming down the steep attic stairs too fast, and slipping. Evidently, she had been carrying something and the next thing I heard was cursing as she picked the things up that she had dropped. I knew she was okay by the way she was moving around, so I stayed where I was. My mother taught me to never interfere with a cursing woman.

         She had calmed down considerably by the time she reached the hallway, and then came through carrying a shoe box with the contents protruding. She did not look in my direction.

         “Sorry.” Was what she said, as she went into the living room and sat down in her chair. Quiet returned.

         I continued to work on copying, until I reached this sentence: Clare says, ‘Talking is all we have, all we remember. The thinking is a dream.’

         I knew what she was saying. I believed it! But I wasn’t happy with it. I kept at my job until it was clear Julia had moved beyond that bit of dialog to something else before I spoke up.

         “‘Talking is all we have, all we remember. The thinking is a dream.’…Is that it, then? Is that all you are going to say?”

         Her response came, after a delay of total silence for almost a minute. I waited. I knew she had heard me.

         Finally, “You are a pain in the ass.”

         That was definitive. In that I had heard Julia described that way herself, at least twice by two different people, I imagine she had learned that particular combination of words previously and taken them to heart, and I knew she was still in the aftermath of the cursing from her slip on the stairs, so I waited before I responded.

         “Yes. But is that all you’re going to say?”

         Finally, she says, “Funny you should ask. That’s the very problem I was trying to solve…I wondered off upstairs with it in my head about an hour ago and lost track of time…You’re right. It needs more. Or something else.”

         Quiet again returned. I began to worry about my dinner.

         This too was part of the routine. I was no better than one of Pavlov’s dogs.

         But she did finally rise, and come into the kitchen, deliberately put on her apron and started making hamburgers while she spoke to me.

         She said, “I found some pictures of the girls up in the attic. Pictures like that open up holes in time, I think. No, I’m positive. Time is just another of those things we don’t have a clue about. What we feel about it is like finding the tail of the proverbial elephant in the dark.”

         “Time? or the pictures?”

         “Don’t be a pain in the ass.”

         She wasn’t turned in my direction so I didn’t bother to look up.

         I ask again, “So, do you want Clare to say more? Should I hold off on that page?”

         I looked up then and saw that she was giving me one of her theatrical stares.

         I said, “You should have been an actress.”

         She said, “Maybe I would have been good enough for television.”

         That was something her mother used to say to her when she was a girl. I remembered the line from a previous reminisce.

         I said, “Your mother was right.”

         And then suddenly I had the awareness that we were talking a lot like a married couple might. Like my parents spoke to each other. I couldn’t help but laugh. And she started laughing as well and I knew it was at the same sort of thought.

         Suddenly she stopped. “That’s what Clare wants to say! That it’s not a dream. That thinking is a memory of all the things they’ve ever said to each other before…Give me the page!”

         The hamburgers were burn’t a little from the delay, but we finally ate. She had baked her own bread for a bun and anything tastes good on that.

         But later she brought the shoebox around from the living room before she poured her bourbon.

         “These are my memory holes. My holes in time.”

Maya had already come down then holding Alma and she said, “This is my little memory hole.”

         Julia took the baby from her.

         “It only works when you are holding them. Because then you’re in it.”

         But thinking about it amounted to more than all the things we’ve said before—at least that and more. And that might have worked for Clare. She was busy living and wasn’t engaged in an artificial intellectual exercise. But I was. And it was just the kind of thing I was thinking all the time, in a sort of chess game of narrative ideas. But for me it wasn’t just a game. It seemed to me to be more important than anything else I could do. And I was not alone. Julia was ahead of me but on the same track.

         The next day I mentioned this to her—not in passing but very deliberately when she had come out to take her walk at noon. I was waiting for her, in ambush, sitting on the tailgate of her truck. She came out with Alma in her carrier sack in front of her. At least Alma gave me a smile. But it was almost as if Julia expected me to be there. And then I was immediately thinking about married couples again.

         She immediately says, “The real problem is that we don’t know what thinking is. They can chart it and graph it and even picture it now on oscilloscopes, or whatever it is they use on computers these days, but they can’t figure it out. It’s not just a lot of 0’s and 1’s. Logic is a math for logic, but nothing more. All this AI business is a joke because they’re trying to create thinking without knowing what they are doing. Like smashing atoms without a clue about the possible result.”

         Exactly! I had been up half the night with that exact thought and she had said it almost word for word. They were doing it without a clue. Now they were playing with viruses without enough fear for the unknown consequences to stop themselves.

         One of the other thoughts I had was about all the poor victims of ‘insane’ asylums whose lives had been destroyed by the foolish tinkering of psychoanalysis, and their lobotomies, and drug therapies. The psychologists had no idea what they were dealing with, no real understanding of what thinking was—while they played with human beings like lab animals, looking for numbers where people should be.

         I said, “Shades of Mary Shelley.”

         I actually said that. I was beginning to talk like Julia as well.

         She sighed loudly, “A brilliant fellow like Iain McGilchrist could describe it, chart it, I suppose, might even predict it, but what ‘it’ is, is still a mystery. Like the missing planet in our solar system. What’s the real influence of the right side of the brain on our behavior? Or the left? The exact same graphable ingredients that make a psychopath, make a genius—but one will kill and the other create. William James Sidis could reimagine the universe as a teenager and then collapse into himself and end up collecting trolley tickets as an adult…This was not just a problem of exceptions. This is actually the rule. As a society, we have created guidelines for thought that damage everyone—without any idea of what we are doing…One religion here and another cult there, Critias in Athens or Cotton Mather in Salem. Throughout history, we’ve done it. And the question becomes, ‘why.’ To what end? Control? In order to have a civil society? By what standard? At times it was apparently okay to cut the hearts out of children to appease a weather god in some societies, or okay to rape women in others. And burning witches seems like almost as much fun as cutting off the heads of anyone that disagreed. Insanity always seems to lurk behind all this. But then, when it’s right before us, we deny it’s there.”

         She had lost me. This was not productive thinking. She knows this. It is the edge of a cliff that she has stood on before me.

         But Alma is quite pleased with her ideas. She is pleased to be spoken to.

         Julia says, “Right here, right now, we have made some improvement. This is a better place. Whatever our faults are, we are not cutting off the heads of anyone who disagrees. I think all of this living is what we are about. What we are supposed to be doing. We may not be satisfied with it, but at least it’s better. I know we’re only a century and a half away here from legally enslaving other human beings, but this moment is an improvement. That’s clearly so. Let’s keep moving in this direction. I haven’t written about the Irish slaves in America because it would only be a rehash of the same stupidity that enslaved Indians, or Africans, but maybe I should think about that again. What I have written about is how that stupidity was overcome. And not just how we talked about it. How we did it. What we did. But I’ve never understood how they thought.”

         Julia is a fast walker. She takes it seriously. She has a purpose. It is her deliberate exercise. And when she talks, she matches her words. But I am a saunterer. I wander. I wonder about this or that. I breakaway from her after a half a mile or so, when she is still on the road. She will be headed to the river soon, and I know that she is taking Alma with her now so that Maya can have a little time to herself, but I am having other thoughts.

***

38. A man is not a piano key

         I don’t like New York. I find it oppressive. Brooklyn only slightly better. I grew up around Boston, which is not a good comparison, but at least I always had the sense there of being able to flee the city and find some semblance of country in less than an hour. With New York, in less than an hour, you would still be in New York.

         The sense of it is that any one human being there is unimportant. And if you add up all those unimportant people, what did you have then? The math was simple enough. And that was the real problem. People being reduced to math.

         One of my favorite authors is Fyodor Dostoyevsky. But my favorite book of his, Notes From the Underground, is a difficult book to like. It doesn’t have the dramatics of Crime and Punishment or the scope of The Brothers Karamozov, I grant you. But I have thought that it is more understandable than either of those.

         In one translation, he explains there, “The whole work of man consists in proving to himself that he is a man and not a piano-key! … Man was not made to be a slave to pleasure He was made for struggle and virtue. Ironically, trials and tribulations make life meaningful…And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point.”

         I have an immediate empathy with this ungrateful wretch.

         But he also says, “you know there is no such thing as choice in reality, say what you will…Science has succeeded in so far analyzing man that we know already that choice and what is called freedom of will,” is not real.

         This is Dostoyevsky too, of course, so it needs to be paid attention to. He does not explain the contradiction of his conclusion that there is no free will. He says, “ if there really is someday discovered a formula for all our desires and caprices—that is, an explanation of what they depend upon, by what laws they arise, how they develop, what they are aiming at in one case and in another and so on, that is a real mathematical formula—then, most likely, man will at once cease to feel desire, indeed, he will be certain to. For who would want to choose by rule? Besides, he will at once be transformed from a human being into an organ-stop or something of the sort; for what is a man without desires, without free will and without choice, if not a stop in an organ?”

         People don’t play organs so much anymore, so I prefer the translation to ‘piano key.’ It strikes a more familiar note, you could say.

         “…Even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse… may be by his curse alone he will attain his object—that is, convince himself that he is a man and not a piano-key!”

         Now, frankly, after reading this in high school, it seemed to me that it summed up everything there was to say. For a brief time, I thought my chance to be a writer was lost. Why bother? The center of all that we are had been uncovered! We are not independent. We are simply perverse. It had been revealed! But then my own sense of perversity came in to play. It was clear enough then that no one else was listening, anyway. Or, at least too few. My reason to write was to deny that theorem. And to repeat this message in as many ways as I could. And then, of course, I met Julia.

         That is not to say that Dostoyevsky was wrong and that Julia is right, but that they could both be correct in the same universe! That is the organic whole of it! Amidst that endless quiet of inorganic space, and the dead forces of math and physics that determine the orbits, there is a noise made for its own purpose. The sounds of life there would be disturbing.       

         Julia’s sense that it is the common everyday man who is at the center of civilization does not conflict with the mad Russian at all. It is simply the larger picture. Like one of Maya’s paintings. The darkness encroaches, but the center holds.

         Man is not a piano key! Each one is his own, “And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point!”

That is the plot of a million novels! But that is not perversity. That is the very aspect of our nature that has sustained us and set us apart. How could we assume otherwise. The splendid forces of inorganic space to do not stand in awe at the night sky. The beauty of a sunset or a rainbow or a woman does not capture the eye of the stone.

         Julia had said, “Success can only be achieved by hard work. I’m not as strict on that as Dostoyevsky was. I guess, I’ve had it too easy. He believed man was made for struggle and the trials and tribulations of life make it meaningful. But I do think that success is only found in the mastery of mistakes. Making mistakes is the learning…That is the importance of anticipation found in learning that is crucial…Not just the outcome, but the process…Hedonism is a death trap for an individual human being as well as the society as a while.”

         And that too, was what I believed!

         McGilchrist might define all this in clinical terms and show the influences of the left brain on the right or visa versa. Indeed, that might be the way it works itself out. But it was a useless diagram to me. It was like attempting a logical definition of love. It was like a verbal description of sex. And that was not the matter that was in my head. What was in my head was an admixture. It was all the things I had ever done or seen or heard, or said, or wanted to say—in fact, even thought to say. And it was all that I had ever read. All at once! It was a conversation with others, or just with myself. There was no calculation of how—the way there might be, after the fact. Detective Columbo was not going to be around to figure it out, anyway. It was my subjective. It was just what I did, when I did it, and the why was what I thought it should be. My excuse for being. And that was not a lie. But for me, it was a reason to understand.

         Early one afternoon the day darkened and it suddenly began to rain and as I stared out of my little window, from the desk into the fields, where the trees of the wrinkle dissolved into ghosts, I heard a voice. I suppose for some this might be a religious experience, especially given the nature of the thoughts I was having, but for me it was a puzzle. I investigated. And just as I opened the small door, I saw Julia going back inside the house. I suppose she had shortened her noonday walk, but the voice I had heard was not a woman’s. The lightning was in full play and the drops were thick but I looked further around the corner of the barn outside and found a figure I recognized before I saw his face, sitting beneath the overhang at the end, on a stool by the chicken yard, his white beard poking out from the hood on his rain slicker in a perpendicular fashion because of the way the slicker was buttoned up.

         “Hello Mr. Copple.”

         He gave me only a quick turn of the head. He said, “Busy around here! Julia just asked me if I wanted to come inside for a cup of coffee. I’m fine. I’m dry. Tractor’s wet.”

         The smaller tractor he used for cutting closer to Julia’s house was sitting there by the chicken yard. The chickens had come in from the yard and were all huddled inside the coop, popping their heads out with a comical frequency. I could hear them murmuring their discontent.

         I said, “It’s exciting when it rains like this.”

         He said, “It’s a pain in the ass, is what it is. I can’t finish up. I’ll have to go home and wait for tomorrow. I was just waiting for the lightening to let up. I had an ol’ buddy of mine once get knocked clear off his tractor and into a ditch by lightening. They didn’t find him right off. That tractor just idled away until it was out of gas.”

         I asked before I could stop myself. “It killed him?”

         “Yeah. He did like laying around in ditches. When he was a drunk. But that killed him.”

         I wanted to talk. The morning had been unproductive for me.

         “What do you usually you do in bad weather?”

         He looked quizzically at me and then down at himself.

         “You can see an example of that right before your eyes.”

         “Sure. But what else do you do?”

         He pulled a cigarette out of a crevice in his slicker and lit it up with a zippo. He offered the pack at me but I shook my head.

         “I fix the damn tractors. They’re all getting old. Like me.”

         He was playing hard to get

         “Okay. But that’s not all. You have to fix the water pump and sharpen your saws and all the rest. But what else? What do you do in your spare time?”

         “I haven’t had much spare time in the last fifty years. I’m married.”

         I stayed with it.

         “Okay. So, you’re out there sitting on your tractor for hours at a time cutting grass. What do you think about?”

         He laughed at my persistence.

         “A tractor makes a lot of sounds. You can tell how it’s running that way.”

         “Yeah. And what about the price of rice in China.”

         “I don’t sell rice or I would…What do I think about? Why, I was thinking about you just the other day.”

         Now, this way of turning the table seemed to be a common trait among the neighbors.

         “What did you think?”

         He laughed again.

         He said, “Did you ever read that Pottle book about James Boswell?”

         Now, I knew he was up to no good.

         “Pottle wrote a dozen books about James Boswell.”

         “Yeah. I read’em all. Winters can be long. I took a course over at the University on Boswell. Got to know him quite well.”

         “Which book did you mean?” He did not answer quickly, but now that he had me on the hook, I imagined that he was a pretty good fisherman. I added, “Have you ever gone fishing with Julia.”

         “I have. She catches all the fish and I watch.”

         “Yeah. So, what book?”

         He grinned at me.

         “When I first saw you over here back in March, I said to Mandy, he’s there for one of the girls. He can smell’em. The boys in the neighborhood used to come prowling around here all the time when the girls were home. I had two girls of my own, you know. You need a stick to keep’em off.” One hand waved toward the north. “Look at them trolls.”

         All this while the lightening was playing in the dark gray mass across the river and briefly illuminating the lowering clouds there into moving shapes, and dazzled off the grass.

         “I don’t think they are coming this way.”

         “No…The trolls have their own aims…But I saw you here back in March and for a moment—just a moment—I thought you might be here for Julia, but Mandy hit me upside of the head and set me straight. And I knew she was right. The smell of ther girls is all about the place.”

         Mandy had been dead for several years. I did not try to correct him.

         “I just came to help Julia with her book.”

         “Sure, you did. Honest mistake…But you were a goner the minute you stepped a foot into that house.”

         I would have to consider that later on too.

         “Is this the sort of thing you think about when you are up on the tractor?”
         “Yeah.”

         “What about Boswell?”

         “Well, according to Mr. Pottle there, Boswell realized that if he kept following his nose, being a man for such smells, he was going to end up in a ditch, so he decided he needed a wife.”

         I had to smile at the progress of his thought.

         “I don’t drink…Much. And I was very happy living in my van in the campground.”

         “Sure, you were. But you can’t eat hotdogs every night.”

         And he had been talking enough to Julia to know more than I did. So, despite Mr. Copple’s best effort, my mind was back with Dostoyevsky.

         I say, “So, you believe we are not the masters of our own ship. Our destiny is sealed by greater forces?
         “No. I wouldn’t say that. But I’d say, that’s the size of the ground you have to cover. That’s the job. I would say, we are who we want to be. Everyone has to deal with the same set of facts. You choose your own on the way.”

         I was confused. Hadn’t he just alluded to my being a pawn of my sense of smell, and my sexual urges? No it was philosophy.

         “I thought you were saying I couldn’t help myself being here.”

         “No. You are here because you want to be, and Julia wants you to be. And I imagine she has her own motives, but my guess is that you saw something here that caught your eye as well as your imagination. Not just your nose. Man has a whole lot of senses to deal with. There’s no mathematical formula to it. A lot more moving parts than a tractor, though…So, I do sit up there on my little seat—my throne Mandy used to call it—and contemplate the nature of man, like your Mr. Emerson, and wonder what it’s all about. But I can’t predict it. Any more than I can predict which of Julia’s daughters has caught your eye…Mandy would have had a guess, but she’s not telling. That way she could say she was right, but after the fact.”

         There were many forces in nature. Including Mr. Copple. I could not contend with them all. But at least, I was not a piano key.

***

39. Backwards science

         When Donovan ended up on the ship to America instead of Australia, I foolishly said, “That feels like deus ex machina.”

         She is having none of it. Her patience was suddenly thin—for whatever reason.

         “That’s just a game! What my high school physics teacher used to call ‘backwards science.’ Fortunately, for us all—but perhaps not so much for those who dearly want there to be a ‘matrix,’ because their own lives feel pointless—God hasn’t cheated us of our own individual confrontations with reality. All identifications of a ‘simulation’ in the human quest are conveniently after the fact, not before. Given the uncountable quantity of possible sensory experience, the sheershear numbers, there will be ‘coincidences,’ but selecting motifs from those that we find along the way for some pattern is only an attempt at creature comfort and does not prove some mysterious intention, nor a larger cosmic game.”

         She had warmed quickly to her subject, as they used to say.

         “We each face the same reality—not a construct of our individual consciousness. Unless we want to cancel the laws of physics as well…Our success as individuals is dependent on our ability to manipulate or control the very same reality that spawned our neighbor, our fathers and mothers, and all of those generations who came before us. The very fact that billions of our species have dealt with the same reality, and found their way to some level of success in their lives, and passed some portion of that acquired knowledge on to us, does not say that they cheated reality through some conjured game. But it does credit them with the intelligence of being able to recognize what works, and remember it, and the brilliance of finding ways to pass that knowledge on…All hail the cave painting, the illuminated manuscript, the printing press and the internet, but not the matrix. That Hollywood confection is a bit of ‘backwards science’ that fills the void for those who have weak gods or no God at all.”

         She was not going to get away on that ship so easily.

         “So why did he end up on the one ship instead of the other?.”

         She shrugged at me. “Oh. Well. I suppose that was just a little manipulation on my part. I had to keep the story going.” But there was a smile at her lips. “And the other ship was full. More than full. I told you that when the Captain complained earlier about the supply of biscuit. I didn’t have to tell you that there was still room on the America bound ship, did I?”

         Earlier, with Alma crying, and some chaos because of diapers, or the lack thereof, the baby was set in my lap because Julia was still cooking and Maya had to go to the store. The baby was satisfied with this solution primarily because I had her wrapped in a large bath towel against further leakage and she got to watch her grandmother doing her thing while orating in animated fashion.

         “Anyone who says they do not have time for fiction has a shrunken imagination. They have removed poetry from their lives. By turning their backs on the play, they have lost their childhood. By ignoring the novel, they deny mythology. To disregard the simple tale is to forget the human experience. Dwelling only in the present is a pale sort of life to live.”

         Julia survey her audience a moment and then spoke directly to Alma.

         “To conjure a future is, of course, a fantasy and in the very nature of fiction. To pretend that all that matters is what you alone can perceive is, in and of itself, a falsehood. We all live in the lives of others. The lie of the’ realist’ is in their hubris and ignorance. By saying they have no time for fiction, they want to cut off the hand of God.”

         Alma was quite pleased with the idea when her grandmother raised a shiny broad bladed knife.

         I put a few words in edgewise for sport.

         “Too many of the so-called ‘fantasy’ stories that I’ve read are about paper mache characters, where the imagined depth is to reverse the roles of men and women…I often wonder if what I’m reading under the rubric of fantasy is really just simple biological ignorance.”

         Julia likes this, “Just so. Carlo Cipolla wrote an essay called ‘The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity.’ He was obviously having a great deal of fun writing it. The subject is a rich target. And though I could argue with some his presentations, or direction here or there, I was immediately taken by the fact that I fit several of the categories myself, all too well. You have to be careful.”

         I was already aware of the author because Julia had brought his name up more than once concerning Medieval economy. A book devoted to the laws of stupidity sounded like it might be interesting. Alma concurred. She cooed.

         “Is that what governs us then? Stupidity?.”

         “Directly, or indirectly, yes! Of course. We couldn’t live without it! Can you imagine someone who thinks they’re smart enough to tell the rest of us how to live? Even with the best of intentions, how can they imagine they would know enough? How much milk should we produce? How much should we drink every day? How should we process it? How should we care for the cows? Every question has more questions attached, but they’re going to tell us how much we should produce and how much it will cost. They’re insane as well as stupid. Mr. Copple told me why he gave up on keeping dairy cows. There was a new law every week. His family had dairy cows on that land for three generations, from the time that Neal Wright was still building his chairs and tables. But Frank had to give it up or else shoot someone over in Concord.”

         So later, with her bourbon in hand, I pursued the god in the machine.

         “So, you are telling me there wasn’t enough biscuit on the Australia ship, so your story turns on a mundane detail.”

         She shakes her head at me.

         “Worse! Remember, the laws of stupidity are always in force. The Captain of the Australia ship foolishly leaves the stocking of provisions to the First Mate. The First Mate is a secret drunkard because his wife and a child died of consumption while he was away previously. He does not purchase the provisions he should. The America bound ship had suffered poor provisions on its previous turn because of corruption—simple theft—and the new First Mate there buys more than he needs to provide for that. And that Captain, doing his job this time, sees this excess and after getting pissed at the First Mate for wasting his money, takes on half a dozen more indentures and sticks them in the First Mate’s quarters which are all of 5’ x 7’, to cover the extra expense. Life is a joy. But Donovan gets to America.”

         “Stupidity reigns! The matrix is simply stupid!”

         “Almost! Not quite! Remember. It all comes down to love. It’s love that conquers all. Clare set it all in motion.”

         “How so?”

         “She has sacrificed herself by fooling around with Rolfe to get the money to give to Donovan. This is ultimately all her doing!”

         I liked the story. I wasn’t questioning that. I couldn’t really pursue it any further. So, I said, “Where did you come up with all this?”

         She knew what I meant.

         She said, “I will tell you where that story came from. I witnessed it.”

         “Was this when you were already time traveling?.”

         “No…” I had called her a ‘time traveler’ several times for going back into the past, whenever she made a remark about my extrapolations for the future. “It was before that. I had a girl friend who was at school with me. She was a good kid. Smart. And we used to go on double dates and so I also got to know her boyfriend. They had pretty much grown up together. And they had been love-birds even before school, and I was still playing the field. I rarely dated the same guy twice in those days because the expectations if you went out a second time with the same guy were clear. In our sophomore year, her boyfriend, who was spending too much time with her and not enough on the ROTC commitment that was paying the college bills, lost his scholarship. He enlisted then so that he would not have any debts left, but also because he was just that type. True blue. He was generally a good guy. But before he was assigned, they got married.”

         “I’m waiting for the connection.”

         “It’s coming…This guy ended up overseas. Whatever he was up to, he was good at it. He used to grab flights back to the Sstates on transport planes because he worked on those at an airbase in Turkey. And then, eventually, he came home again. And he went back to school. My girlfriend and I had already graduated by then, of course.”

         “I can see this coming. But what does it have to do with ‘The Plow and Stars’?

         “What do you see coming?”

         I really didn’t see a thing. I got smart. “He’s gay.”

         “Not likely. I’ll testify to that. The whole time we were double dating he was trying to work a way to get me into the sack too. But that was a lot of effort for nothing.”

         “You said they were lovebirds.
         “They were. And to the best of my knowledge, they are still happily married to this day.”

         “So, where’s the connection?”

         “If you would be quiet, I’ll tell you.”

         I objected, “You set a bad example on that score. You’re always asking questions.”

         “You’re right. So, keep asking questions. I deserve it…But the connection is this. By the time he came home for good, she had a kid.”

         “How does that connect?”

         “It wasn’t his kid.”

         I was a little lost. “And that was what you had in mind at the start of The Plow and Stars?”

         “Yes and no. A little more. I knew who the father was! He had gone on one of our double dates. I didn’t date him twice, but he did not give up on her when she got married.”

         Was that it then? The love birds were both being unfaithful?”

         “No. Not exactly. She knew I knew who the father was. She broke up our friendship over that. She was afraid I would say something or use it against her somehow. And Bob, her husband, he was happy about that too. He was afraid I would tell her that he had been hitting on me. And Cheryl never told him it wasn’t his baby. He probably doesn’t know to this day. The kid must be in his thirties now.”

         “Well, I’m still not sure I understand how all that double dealing inspired you.”

         Her voice had an edge to it now. “You will. That will be pretty clear soon enough.”

         But she wasn’t done with me.

         “You know, I was thinking the other day, what are they going to do on Mars when they’re confronted with gene editing? … More to the point, when they are confronted with designer humans who’ve been altered, the way a machine is configured, to do a particular job. The ‘comprachicos’ of the twenty-first century?”

         “The what?”

         “Victor Hugo’s nightmare in The Man Who Laughs. The remanufactured humans. The ‘comprachicos.’ They will undoubtedly be educated with artificial intelligence, whatever that is. The physical reality is that they will be sub-human. A’ la, Aldous Huxley. And without social norms, but they will be out there. No police force will be able to monitor it all. Computers are expensive. A human being can be manufactured by a few moments of gratification. They will be raised to be slaves. They will be used for what a normal human being would refuse to do…Does your Mars have a plan to deal with that?…You know I just read that some human monster has grown a human hand in the belly of a mouse—in a lab. He actually cut off the portion of the gene sequence for a human hand from a unborn child and grew it in the belly of a mouse…I was just wondering, what laws are going to apply to them? Will they be held responsible for only doing what they have been designed to do?”

         This was unfair, but I deserved it. I should not have been poking at the bear.

***

40. Ecclesiastes again

         At least I had continued to write ‘Elysium Mons. This was not a given. There were interruptions. Too many of those. But my game then became, to use some of those very same disturbances in my story. To write them into the story instead of just trying to ignore them. It made it easier to continue. My hero, as my heroes often were, was just some better version of myself. I even had him fall in love, despite misgivings. Such things happen. Even to a monk on Mars.

         But I knew I was still writing much of the same story I had written before, under a new pretense. My Mars was no more or less disguised than Tolkien’s Middle Earth is from the Earth we know today. We still have our dragons. The spiro on Mars were just as fierce. I did not believe that artificial intelligence was going to somehow purify itself and somehow eliminate or overcome the faults of its maker, much less take away the same motivations that so often destroy us here. The robots were no smarter than we could be, even if they held more data. The data would not tell them what was true, only what was frequent. The point was not to pretend anything else, but to deal with the things we knew to be.

         We have tens of thousands of years of human history in the rubble beneath our feet. We are haunted by billions of souls. The idea of starting new, on Mars, was simply a way of avoiding the ghosts of that past. I admitted that from the start. The protagonist says as much. I simply wanted to imagine an answer to a question: what do we do now? I didn’t want to reimagine the past. I wanted to catch a glimpse of the future.

         My pursuit of human ignorance had been successful. I had encountered plenty of it. And with it, the hubris of science by the numbers.

         But suddenly, it was done. Ben had reduced the spiro to tungstean and dust. The group mind of the gen had retreated to its seams and crevices. Cera was triumphant over her pursuers. She might now see Ben for who he really was, and not just another predator. And Ben could be certain that she was not a fabrication of the gen meant only to seduce him.

         I had editing to do, but I would have to think about Julia’s ‘comprachicos,’ at another time. I had never even heard of them until yesterday. Perhaps that might fit in another Mars novel.

         When I finish something, what I want to do in my moment of euphoria is to share it…This is always a mistake. The manuscript is almost certainly rife and riven with the consequences of my own stupidity. But continuing to work on it suddenly reaches a point of psychic exhaustion. Tinkering doesn’t make it better. I can put it away for a few months and I will likely see new flaws in the writing that I’d missed before, but just as likely I’ll find new things to say, and that process can go on forever, or until the EMP finally wipes my artificial memory away, and I have to start again from scratch, so to speak, quill in hand.

         I also knew that there was only one other person that I wanted to read it.

         It wasn’t as if I believed she would like it. I suspected she wouldn’t.

         So, I printed it out. It took the last of the ink in one cartridge and a deal of the ink in another. It was most of a ream of paper. Three hundred and sixty-four pages. Eighty-one thousand words. I heard Julia’s voice in my head and saw her frown again. That was another problem of technology. Too much information. I envied her ability to shut that sort of data out of her mind.

 However, I wrote in pen across the top margin, ‘Yes! We have no comprachicos. Maybe the next one.’

         Then I waited until our regular day was done to take it out of the grocery bag. She had eyed that bag several times after I came in but said nothing. I just put it there on the kitchen table when Maya was already gone upstairs with the baby, and said, “This is for you, if you get a chance. You don’t have to read it. I’d like you to, but I understand.”

         She already had her bourbon in hand and didn’t say a word. I think I surprised her. At least there was that.

         And then she read it in one night. She’s not a speed reader, so it must be that she never slept. But I could see that she wasn’t happy as soon as I came in the door the next afternoon. She was standing by the counter and my manuscript was on the table where her own pages would normally be.

         And I was suddenly angry.

         This reaction was inexplicable. It was irrational. What did I expect?

         “What do you think? You don’t like my ‘science fiction’ future. I know that. You’d rather live in the past. But this is where the past has got us. I think. We’re there now…Or we’re here. But we’ve arrived. Not just in this green corner of paradise. In this world! Do we just go on with the slaughter? We can destroy ourselves now. Is that the end? Is that the only cycle?”

         She appeared subdued. Perhaps by the lack of sleep. She had her coffee in hand now, instead of her bourbon. Instead of the enclosure of dark beyond the windows, cloud blinkered sunlight played on and off any surface it could find.

         She finally said, “There’s an old saying, too often ignored as old things often are, that there is nothing new under the sun. The Bible says it in Ecclesiastes. ‘What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.’

         She looked at me directly so that I would pay better attention. “Each of us can really only see what’s in front of us. Everything else is imagined. I think you fully understand all that. You know that’s especially true of what we see on television, or in the movies, or on the internet. All of that is only what someone else imagined, and we either adopt it as our own, or not. But how much of it is true, is another problem. Hell, how much of what we see with our own eyes, or hear with our own ears, or feel with our own touch, is actual or imagined?” She shrugged. “That problem alone can keep us quite busy without even considering what we encounter through any artificial means such as the internet. And any of those misperceptions are then compounded all the more by our understanding and misunderstandings of words. But, without words, we can comprehend nothing—we are just biological matter and quickly become food for the worms.

         She had been standing at the counter when I came in, but she sat then and looked up at me where I first stood after coming in the door. I hadn’t moved. I felt rooted there to the floor.

         She said, “Not being particularly brave, but wanting more, I settled early on into that problematic and fantastic realm of words, rather than face the mundane usage, like everyone else. I ran away.”

“From what?”

“My actions—making use of the words I found to be useful, could be dangerous and had to be done with deliberation—to be considered in advance with as many other words as possible for cover. For camouflage, perhaps—like a forest for the trees. A novel, perhaps, when the poetry failed me. That’s the reason I am even yet in awe of a Yeats, or a Shakespeare—their weapon is of a unique caliber. They make love to me with words until I am exhausted…I enjoy reading the words of mere geniuses, even more than making love. Their level of perception is so much higher than my own. They have climbed mountains I will never climb, so I listened and tried to catch a glimpse of what they could see from there from above. They are a sort of Genii. Of that higher order that’s otherwise only found in mythology…And as some jinni might be, I imagined that they had been summoned by someone to help us find our way…But that is another matter.”

         She waved a hand at the air to bat away a thought and took a breath.

         I said, “Does this mean you liked it?”

         She closed her eyes on that and started in again, “Technology, and the use of machines, happens to be our current thing. I understand that, and that it’s the means by which we interpret our universe today. But, it’s not the only way. There have been such jinn as Shakespeare before, interpreting the universe of man through other means. In that particular age alone there was also Bernini, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and da Vinci. The universe they saw, and made their fellows aware of, transported the mind of man from a world of mud and stone all the way to St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

         I say, “I’ve told you before, I’m not assuming I’m right. I’m just trying to ask the right questions.”

         She shakes her head at me again. “But genius does not come unbidden, nor is it unburdened. The genie remains in the bottle unless it’s summoned. Our age must ask for this. If we deny the chance to reach for the stars and try to turn back instead to the safety of some imagined past, which is just as unreal now as any chance to walk on Mars might be, we will have to live with the consequence for generations. That was never my aim.”

         “What can I do to make it better?. What didn’t I ask for?”

But she is on a jag now. It’s like a train. It doesn’t stop easily.

“I don’t believe that our past, or our behavior then, offers any new hope for my children or their children’s children. That’s simply who we were, and are, and what we’ve done. And I wanted to know what that was, at least. If we lose that, we’ll just have to do it all over again. But we must still look for genius to save us from our worst mistakes while we bicker over the words to define it. Allowing for the limits of our perception, and the limits of the words we use to understand that awareness, and remembering that ‘there’s nothing new under the sun’ does not deny innovation. That’s in the mix as well. That’s part of it. It’s a recognition of the fact that we did not see that truth before. We didn’t see it coming, after all. It’s still to be discovered. That we never described the molecular composition of a particular matter before, does not mean it didn’t exist. Just that we had not yet found the words to describe it. It is an acceptance of genius as part of our inheritance.”

         She nodded at me, and tapped the manuscript on the table with her fingers, “I do suspect the future might very likely be a reflection of the past. But Mars has always been under the same sun. Technology may be ingenious, but the laws of physics have not been altered to suit anyone. We must still summon the future. I simply believe the future is not what we think it is. It’s only what you want it to be.”

         She smiled. Not a big smile, but enough, “We must still summon the future. If this book is what you want it to be, so be it…It’s not so bad. At least there is room in it for my grandchildren…and you can put the comprachicos in the next one.”

***

41. Being Jumpy

         On one of her visits, with her boys rampaging about that small house on a rainy day, Jesse told me a story.

         “Once, when I was twelve, we lived for a while in Ireland. Mom was doing research, or so she told everyone. Actually, she was just trying to get away from Dad. They were divorced then but he wouldn’t leave her alone. He would come up here to the farm and he wouldn’t leave. She even called the sheriff on him once…Did you know they had sheriffs up here in New Hampshire? They do. And this was a fellow who had seen it all and was unsurprised by anything. I think mom called him ‘stolid.’ Mr. Stolid, she said. I just remember him as bald. In any case he stood right there in the yard and listened to Mom and then just told Dad to leave and he did. You don’t need the details. Just that Mom had her reasons to take us to Ireland. Mom gave all the chickens away to a family down the road and she asked the family where Packer had been born if they would look after him again for awhile—I don’t know how much that must have cost—and we just went. I think it all happened in less than a month. When you are a kid, that is cataclysmic.

         “A travel agent in Boston found us a cottage near Sligo. Mom loves Yeats so that was an easy choice. But the agent didn’t even have a picture. It had just come available and been placed for rent and the note said: ‘needs work’. Whatever that meant, we didn’t know. But the key to it for mom was that it had been built in 1740. That would be about the time of the story she was writing, so that was enough. Four rooms, with indoor plumbing on the inside wall, a kitchen and a shed. And a well. And a hand pump on the well. Mom read it all out-loud to us a dozen times. She was thrilled. We were devastated. There was gnashing of teeth and wailing as only young girls can do. We loved the farm here. We loved the chickens. Going to Ireland was incomprehensible. But we were children and still very adaptable. For us, the key was that we would be coming back. We were not moving again as we did from New York. We were just going on ‘vacation.’ Which was absurd, of course, because we already thought everyday here was a vacation.

         “We flew, and that was a thrill too. And then Mom rented a car…The Cottage was on a small road to Lough Gill that local fishermen used and Mom talked to them every day. That’s the way she does her research. She gave them tea. They loved her. She was the ‘American Lady.’  There wasn’t much land with the cottage but there were farms on both sides. Mom had rented the car but once we were there, we didn’t need it much. Sligo is an ugly little town. At least for a kid. And it smells. Very picturesque from some angles, I suppose. It looks like something in the Midwest with the mismatch of things from different periods. I suppose that’s the way it is in all ports.…Once we were in a bookshop there on one of the few sunny days and the shop owner had the door open for the fresh air and there was nothing fresh about it. But the countryside around there is beautiful. And once our books arrived from home, and we could study again, we had plenty to do. All she wanted was a few hours in the morning to do her own work and the rest of the day was ours. Mom took us to a ‘Children’s theater’ once and it was pretty lame, so she took us to a regular theatre when they put on something she thought we could deal with. What I remember is there was a great deal of spitting and our seats were very close. Irish actors are very emphatic.

         “We went out for walks whenever it was sunny and sometimes when it wasn’t. It drizzles a lot there…. There was a farmer’s market near the main road. A wonderful place of connected sheds and incredible smells. The vegetables were ridiculously large. Not like a supermarket…But now I’ll tell you why I thought you’d be interested.

         Jesse looked to make sure of her mother who had gone out to feed the chickens. And then she lowered her voice. Had I been one of her boys, I would have immediately assumed something was being said that I should want to hear, but they were noisily busy upstairs.

         “You once said that mom is very seductive. I understand that. She has her way. And I appreciate your not taking advantage of that. I think most guys would. Not that she wouldn’t knock your head off if she thought you were hitting on her. Everything has to be on her own terms…I’ll tell you, that’s what drove Dad away…I think grandmother was like that too. And Felix even says that about me. But I don’t think I’m so bad. Felix is just a baby.

         “Anyway. There was this farmer. When we were living in Ireland. A big burley fellow. He wore a little cap and always smelled of manure. Nearly always. But I remember once, he didn’t. He came to talk with mom—but that’s another story. What I wanted to tell you about was the time we were out on a picnic. Not far from the cottage. But the sun came out for the first time in days and mom didn’t want to miss the chance. And this farmer was out on his tractor cutting the hay. Just like Mr. Copple does here.

         “We were all under this little tree, a pear tree I believe, and we were all telling stories. Mom always insisted we tell stories. Make them up on the spot, if we had to. It was one of her things. That’s her whole narrative idea. You’ve heard about that. She said it was the stories that made a people and a culture. It wasn’t the blood. And Elena was telling us about her three-legged dog, Jumpy. He was a regular go-to subject for her. She could tell stories about that dog forever. We still had Packer at home then and Elena missed him terribly and her three-legged dog, Jumpy was his stand-in…I have no idea why he only had three legs. I can’t remember. But it was a feature. And Mom was asking Elena questions, the way she does. And Elena was coming up with answers on the spot and it had us all laughing. Why did he get stuck in the bramble bush? Because he was wearing a coat. Why was he wearing a coat. Because he was cold. But why did he go into the bramble bush? Because he was cutting brambles to burn in a fire to stay warm…That sort of thing. But watching Elena invent all this was hilarious—at the time. You had to be there. She has always been an actress. Always animated…But, suddenly, there is a shadow over the sun—just as dramatic as that—there is that great big burly farmer just standing there. His tractor is still out in the middle of the field, sputtering, and he had walked over. He’s wearing muddy boots and the flannel is rolled up on both arms and he had three days growth of beard. He looks angry. And he says, ‘What are you doing?’ And mom says, ‘Having a picnic.’ and he says, ‘You’re in the way,’ and she says, ‘You’re way over there. If you need us to move, we will.’ And then he says, ‘Why are you laughing?’ For some reason, he thought we were laughing about him. Gods knows why. I don’t know how he heard it over the sputtering of that tractor. Maybe it was the sight of us. And Elena says, ‘I was telling them about my dog, Jumpy.’ And Maya says, ‘Jumpy only has three legs. That’s why he’s jumpy.’ And the man, that great big man, standing there against the sun, suddenly laughed so loud it shocked us. And Mom offered him some of our lemon water. And he thanked us and went back to his tractor.

         “Well, we saw him again, after that. He was our neighbor and he actually owned the cottage. His name was Mr. Mack…In fact, one evening, he showed up at the door with a bottle of milk and some eggs. He had cows and chickens, too. And he didn’t smell like manure. He smelled like cologne. And he had shaved. And he had a jacket on. And Mom had him in to the kitchen table and he told us a few stories and asked us about where we lived and the usual small talk. I know he asked, and she told him, that she was divorced. I think he had said something like, ‘Why are you here alone? Is your husband dead?’

         But there were a million stories about that neighborhood there, and he had a few of them. And then he asked about Jumpy again. He was concerned about Jumpy because we were away. And Mom explained all that to him…He laughed again at that…But he was totally infatuated with her. I could see that he was seduced. If she had responded, he would have asked her to marry him right then and there. On the spot.”

***

42. Derek is from Queens

         This was a funny conversation.

         Derek is from Queens. He’ll tell you that himself. As in, ‘You can’t get away with that around me. I’m from Queens.’ Or, ‘I’m from Queens. I don’t do that sort of thing.’  I have no idea if this is just him, or if this is a thing and an expression that’s common in New York. But he pulled it out again in a conversation at dinner. Maya was asking him what he was going to do, now that he was getting a divorce from his new wife—Point blank. That’s the way she always said it, ‘Your new wife’, and his company was bankrupt, and he’d lost his condo—actually he’d given it to his ex-wife.

         Maya said, “Why don’t you write a novel about all that. It’s a story.”

         He said, “I’m from Queens. We don’t write about our personal lives that way.”

         “You don’t have to make it personal. You can fabricate a little.”

         “I don’t think so. I did all that before. Nobody gives a damn about all that.”

         She says, “So what do you think you’ll do.”

         “I don’t know yet…Maybe I should move up here someplace. Get away from all that. It’s not my world down there anymore.”

         “What would you do up here?”
         “I don’t know. Maybe work in real estate.”

         Julia sat through this line of conversation without saying a word. But her quiet was enough to draw attention. Derek slowed down as he spoke to keep an eye on her.

         She had made fried chicken again. This was a little messy but Derek was into it with both hands. And I was fully occupied with it myself. Sometimes, I find it difficult to concentrate when I’m eating.

         Maya had the baby in a pouch in front of her and had to sit sideways from the table enough to leave room for Alma’s hands. The baby wanted the chicken as well and kept getting a hand free into the space between. But this required some coordination to keep Alma out of reach while she connected with a piece of it herself. Derek took the chance to turn the table on his daughter’s pursuit.

         “What are you going to do?”

         Maya shrugged. “I think I’ll be staying around here.”

         Derek’s eyes went to me. I kept my mouth about as full as I could to avoid getting involved. This made Julia smile but still didn’t get her to say anything.

         He says, “Is there enough room here?”

         Maya says, “Sure…But I’m thinking about building a house.”

         This made her father stop eating and stare.

         “What do you know about building houses?”

         “Nothing. I’m going to learn.”

         “Just like that?”

         “I’ll be getting some help.”

         Derek’s eyes went to me more directly. I had decided to follow Julia’s lead and not get involved.

         He says, “Where? Where are you gonna build it?”

         “Here! … Well, up on the rise there.” She flicked a hand to the west, with no window there to offer visual support.

         “Can you afford that?”

         “No. That’s why I’ll have to learn to do it myself—with a little help.”

         “It will still cost money.”

         “Mom is going to finance that through the bank.”

         Derek had started to take another bite, but stopped again. He thought about this answer for at least half a minute, a chicken wing poised in the air in front of him, his eyes going first to Julia and then to me and then back again.

         Finally, with his eye on me, he squinted just enough to make it seem serious, “Do you have any money?”

         I said, “Not enough to make a difference. I think my part will pretty much all be sweat equity.”

         “Have you built anything before?”

         “No really.”

         “That’s crazy.”

         I said, “It’s been done before.”

         “In the old days, maybe. But people don’t do that kind of thing anymore. There are State codes to keep people like you out of the way.”

         I said, “Maybe in Queens. But people still do it up here.”

         Derek was evidently staying ‘with friends’ in New York, but he stayed that night in Maya’s old bedroom. Maya and the baby were sleeping in Elena’s old bedroom, because it was slightly larger. I retreated to the barn and read a little. It was pretty late—New York hours we used to called it—when Derek showed up at the barn.

         He says, “Maybe I can help you with your project.”

         But I already knew my script. “I don’t think that would be a good idea. Lots of reasons. But think of it as an adventure for us. We have a lot to learn. It’ll be fun.”

         “Are you going to get married first?”

         “When Maya is ready…I think she’s more worried about you right now.”

         “Me? Why me?”

         “Because, now that you’ve screwed everything up that you can screw up, she’s afraid you’ll take it personally. She’s afraid you might get depressed.”

         A smile flits across his face that is exaggerated by the lack of light.

         “Me? I don’t get depressed. I’m from Queens. It’s not in my DNA. What good is getting depressed. It doesn’t make you any smarter.”

         Derek went away the next day. His Cadillac needs a new muffler, so you know when he moves about.

         This was followed just about a week later with a visit from Jesse and her kids. At first that worried me. Felix hadn’t been around for some weeks. But it seems he had been busy.

         Jesse says, with a near smile on her face. “He’s selling his business.”

         I ask, “What are you going to do?”

         “Felix is talking to the Manchester Diocese. He has his eye on that piece of property across the street.”

         That was stunning. I had heard nothing about this development.

         “Does Julia know?”

         “It was her idea. Felix told her he wanted to get us out of the city. And she had it all figured out. Right on the spot, she said, “Why don’t you buy that rock pile across the road. You don’t want to farm, but you could build a nice house right there.”

         I said, “For a history buff, Julia spends a lot of time imagining what could be. I’m surprised she doesn’t write science fiction.”

         The next time I see Derek he is sitting on the front porch, where almost no one sits unless it is very hot and then it’s the coolest place in the house because it catches the breeze off the hill. And that is how hot it is.

         I spot him there as I came back down the road from checking out the wrinkle, just looking over the space where I think the house should be. So, real estate is on my mind, and seeing Derek fits that narrative. I step up on the porch with no particular idea, otherwise.

         Derek says, “What do you think about that piece of property across the street there?”

         Not exactly reading my mind, but coming close.

         “I suppose that depends on my mood. If I’m in a good mood, I think it looks fantastic, like one of those Hudson River type painting from the 19th century. Wild and romantic. If I’m in a bad mood, I think it looks like a desolate and rocky wreck of a place—like the one Heathcliff must still be haunting.”

         He says, “It is a wreck. I wonder how much they’ll take for it?”

         “Is it for sale?”

         “Everything is for sale… Except Julia, of course. But what does the Diocese want with it now? They can’t do anything with that now. They don’t build churches with stone the way they used to. It’s all precut stuff these days. Mostly facade. They couldn’t afford to heat a church made out of stone like that anymore.”

         “What would you do with it?”

         I asked this point blank. He didn’t even turn his head.

         “Nothing. I was just wondering.”

         I had the Adirondack chair that was set up with springs and I just rocked for a minute, still wondering what he was wondering about. The sound of that chair was pretty good in a bad sort of way. Like a child wanting attention.

         Derek says, “What does your dad do?”

         “He calls himself a mechanic, so that’s what he does, I guess.”

         “Does he like his work?”

         “Hates it.”

         “Hates it? Why?”

         “Because he’s not a mechanic anymore. He’s a ‘technician.’ He says that as if it’s a dirty word. He attaches meters and plus to things and then follows the instructions in a manual. But he used to be a mechanic. He loved that.”

         “Can’t he still work on old cars?”

         “There’s not enough work in that to pay the bills. The old cars are mostly owned by old guys who are trying to get rid of them before they kick the bucket. And old guys are cheap when it comes to repairs.”

         “That’s a problem.”

         “Yeah. He says, he was born a generation too late.”

         “I think I agree with your dad.”

         “I think I do too, so long as my mom would have been born then to. I like being here, but I think I would have liked being born thirty years before.”

         Derek appeared to think about this convolution for a minute.

         “Those springs need some grease.”

         “I’ll put some Vaseline on’em when I get the chance.”

         But then he adds, “I don’t know… It was pretty good back then. I was there for a little bit of it. It was pretty good. I think maybe we all would have been happier if we were born a generation earlier.”

         The voice in the springs was low and unhappy at the thought.

         “It would have been pretty crowded.”

         He was already smiling by the time I turned to look.

         And this was followed a week after that by Julia looking rather upset when I came into the house at four. She wasn’t cooking. Maya was cooking. That alone had me worried.    

         Julia is sitting at the small table, one eye on her daughter, while holding the baby.

         She says, “What do you know about your friend Larry Regan?”

         My worry got the best of me. I got cute. “He doesn’t play chess very well.”

         “I thought you said he was teaching you.”

         “That’s how I know. I still don’t play chess very well either … Why is it you want to know about Larry?”

         “Is he honest?”

         “He was honest with me.”

         “It seems that Derek has talked Larry into letting him handle the sale of that campground property.”

“I thought that was sold.”

“I guess it fell through. Derek saw that big sign up on the road again when he was leaving the other day and he just stopped. Right there.”

         My first thought then was to be worried about the peepers.

***

43. Olivia

         The boxes of Julia’s mother’s things were collecting dust, and bits of hay. Some creature, perhaps just a bird, but I imagined a bat, defecated on them from on high. I spread out a couple of old blue plastic tarps over the pile and whatever it was then defecated on that. I mentioned this to Julia and she said she was preparing to take care of it. My sense was that this preparation might require additional bourbon, but when she finally settled into the job, she was very sober.

         She appeared one rainy afternoon instead of going on her walk, carrying a roll of plastic garbage bags, and set a chair up at the edge of the pile and went to work. Anything that might be donated, she put back into an empty banker’s box. That included old clothes and costume jewelry. Most of the letters and old bills—my guess was that most of the paper was just old bills—went into the garbage bags. All the wonderful ephemera from the night clubs and passing events went into garbage bags as well. I did not interfere, at first. I knew that she did not want to think about saving anything that might have contributed to the cold reality of her parents’ lives. I watched from my desk and because she was looking grim, I didn’t add much by way of comment. She hardly spoke. She made sounds.

         But finally, there was a hoot! This was more of a “Who-what!” But the ‘what’ was repeated this several times, loudly. My curiosity begged at me. So, I wandered over.

         I said, “Sounds interesting.”

         She shook her head and held up a thick ream of almost loose paper held together at one corner with a brass clip.

         “This is it! This is really it! … I had never actually seen it. But this is it!”

         “What?”

         I waited. She was paging through the pages, but then a hand went into the same box and pulled out another copy. This one she handed to me.

         “It’s my mother’s book…My mother wrote a book!…She told me she’d written one. She actually bragged to me about it. It was after my first novel was published, and she was quite jealous. So, she wrote her own—but not really a novel. Not a little ‘cosy’ as she derisively called my books. HersHer’s was intended as a sort of roman a’clef. She was going to ‘burn it up!’ she told me and she didn’t mean setting fire to it but scorching the eyes of her readers. But then she couldn’t get any takers. Nobody would publish it…And then I never heard another word about it. But this is it!”

         The copy I held was called, ‘My confession.’ It began on page one with a sex scene.

         “Is it pornography?”

         Julia looked up at me, surprised, and then saw that I had only turned to the first few pages.

         “No, not—no. That’s just her idea of ‘getting the reader’s interest.’ This was written in the 1980’s, remember. But even so…She couldn’t get it published because ‘Vanderbilt,’ the name she used for her first husband, told her he would sue.”

         Julia then disappeared back into the house. I sat back down at my desk and started reading.

         If I took Olivia Morgan at her words—the name under the title was, “Elizabeth Bennett,” which I immediately understood to be some sort of take-off on Pride and Prejudice but set in the New York City of the 1950’s—she had lived a fairly raunchy life.

         It was clear early on why it was rejected. She casually mentioned the names of people who were famous enough even for me to recognize. She was clearly a woman of high ambitions and low morals. And being unscrupulous seemed to be her methodology. Her body was her asset. In her telling, Julia stressed the word ‘asset,’ to get the appropriate meaning out of the syllables. The first-person tone of it reminded me of a cross between Tom Jones and David Copperfield. She was no Moll Flanders, not being given to outright theft, but by her own admission, was adroit at stealing hearts. She was in desperate need of copy-editing but she wrote well. Colorfully.

         When I went in the house for dinner, Julia had a stew on and was already sitting at the small table.

         She looked at me with a wry smile. I had not seen wry so wry before. The corners of her mouth were flat. Her eyes were wide with her thought, eye-brows artfully arched.

         “Extraordinary, isn’t it?”

         “A good safe word, I think.”

         “That’s my mother…Can you believe that is my mother?”

         “How much of it is actually your mother?”

         “Pretty much all of it. My poor dear father had no idea what hit him.”

         Maya was in the living room with the baby, but had clearly looked through the manuscript while her mother was cooking. Her voice was whispered so I assumed the baby was asleep.

         “I don’t believe it!” was what I heard.

         Julia just said, “It’s all true! She took pleasure in her veracity. That’s why Vanderbilt threatened to sue.”

         There were no new pages of Julia’s book typed up so we sat in the dining room and ate while we talked and then just talked.

         Julia was animated but had to keep her voice down. The baby slept through most of it.

         Julia’s eyebrows arched further than I had ever seen before. “My favorite line was, ‘My only child has no love for me. This is a hard burden to bear, but it is mine.’”

         I could only say, “I hadn’t gotten that far.”

         “It’s at the end. I was skipping around…She also says ‘Harold’—that’s what she calls my father instead of Henry—‘Harold was a difficult man. He was staunch. He would not bend. He was always faithful—like a dog. But I never intended to marry a dog. You can’t have sex with a dog.’.”

         I had to ask, “Who is George?”

         “Oh, that’s Vanderbuilt. Her first husband. I’m sure. She hated him. Wait until you get to the part where she describes his anatomy. Lord have mercy! But that’s probably why she never published it…He probably paid her not to.”

         The unspoken thought occurred to me, given her mother’s lack of money, that she had written it in the first place to get something more out of Vanderbilt.

         Julia wanted more time to finish going through her mother’s things, which meant her writing schedule suffered. She refused any help with this, which I was thankful for, and then told me to take Maya to the beach. This was an order. I took it, gladly. But I had been thinking.

         “I know it’s not my business, but I was thinking about all the stuff you are throwing away. Your children—your grand children—might like some of that. That’s the sort of ephemera you normally love. They don’t know the darker parts of all that. The dreams that are lost in all of that. Someone ought to have a chance to reimagine that history for themselves.”

         She sat at the table with her coffee in front of her and stared at it. Maybe a minute.

         “Okay,” was all she said.

         It was a good fine day for it, a little breezy, which is the way I like the beach. Rye Bbeach is small but there is a park and a coast walk and with baby, we were moving slow.

         Maya filled in some other details then.

         “If Olivia had had her way, Alma and I would not be here now. You would not be here, unless you were with someone else. Because my mother would not be here…Olivia wanted an abortion. My mother explained that to all of us, early on. It was by way of a cautionary tale, I think. But it had its effect. Olivia had been so careful for so long, and then her drunken News Year’s celebration with my grandfather had gone awry. This was 1960, you understand, and you couldn’t just go down to the corner and abort any human beings you didn’t want. Olivia wanted to go to Europe to have it done and my grandfather refused. He told her if she did it, he would publicly divorce her for having done it and then he’d cut her off from any money he had, or would ever make, for the rest of his life. He would quit his job if he had to and live as a beach bum. That was the lowest of the low, to him. Guys that didn’t take responsibility for their lives were bums. But Olivia believed him.”

         That rang a bell. “Do I qualify for that?”

         “No. I don’t think so. You’re not just screwing around.”

         “I’m glad to hear it.”

         “Mom told us all about this later to keep us from asking questions about why they lived the way they did. Grandpa was always gone. Especially after Mom went off to school. They always had separate bedrooms, and Olivia kept her dalliances ‘off campus’ anyway. That was my mother’s description.”

         But the hundred boxes took more than a couple of days. I took Maya on a drive to Mt. Washington. My truck wasn’t up to the climb, but we took the train with the rest of the tourists. The clouds at the top parted on cue and Alma had her lunch with a view.

         When we got home, I offered to help Julia again, at least with the pile of garbage bags that had accumulated outside the barn. This was accepted. I used Julia’s truck and took three loads to the dump. Julia assigned herself to driving some of the other boxes to the Salvation Army. She had to break that up to different days because they couldn’t handle the entire load at one time. I carried almost a dozen boxes up to the attic that she had set aside. These included additional copies of her mother’s manuscript as well as some of the boxes that were left of her father’s things.

         Olivia Green Morgan was Julia’s mother. Irresponsible and eccentric. Maybe a nymphomaniac. She was a New York socialite who had died at the age of 95 just the year before, but despite her prominence, having been acquainted with or involved with, various celebrities of her age, there were very few notices of her passing. On the internet there were two obituaries that I could find. Both short.

         Henry Morgan, Julia’s father, was an engineer who worked all over the world and died twenty years before at the age of 84. I knew that he used to take Julia with him on his trips when he could, which was why it seemed she had been everywhere. He was a structural engineer who had worked with other specialists of his craft, especially on hydraulic projects, in India, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iraq. He had worked on projects in California, New Mexico, Idaho, and North Dakota. Julia had been to all those places with him. But, his primary legacy to Julia appears to be her tendency to swear.

         I asked her, after a short verbal description of the fellow who told me I should wait until next week to be bringing anything more to the dump. She had questioned his authority and his parentage.

         “Was it your mother who taught you to swear.”

         “No. Mother was full of euphemisms. No. That was Dad. He could swear in five or six languages.”

         But the bottom line was simply that Olivia was unkind to her husband, took advantage of him, and Julia held that against her. They had not spoken since her father’s death.

         Julia didn’t have much more to say about it. “He admitted to me once that he really didn’t like to travel. He actually hated flying. He would take a train whenever he could. He loved boats…But he wanted  to spend more time with me, and I asked him why he didn’t. I knew they had enough money. He did not answer that. But I knew. And over time, I stopped asking…It was to get away from my mother. She disturbed him. He had loved her once and she had betrayed him.”

         Henry Morgan was born in Deluth. I had never been there so I had little idea of what that might have been like. His own father ‘worked with shipping.’ I knew from the lack of detail offered that Julia did not know exactly what he did, but whatever it was, it was sufficient to pay for his son to go to Stanford University.

         She looked at me very pointedly when she said, “Nobody bothered to save any of the ephemera from those lives. More than likely, that would havebeen my father’s doing.”

         Somewhat randomly, one afternoon, after she had mentioned the writing of one of her novels, Stanner, about a tin miner in Devon in the time of King John, she said, “My father disliked it.”

         She should have known I would ask.

         “Why?”

         “He wasn’t one to explain himself…which might have been the matter. In Stanner, I was going on about the origins of the Magna Carta in the Devon Stannary Convocation, but I was using one particular miner, Drew, as a protagonist. I suppose this character must have irritated him—and that’s the joke. I fashioned Drew on my father. It was as nearly him as I could manage. But I didn’t tell him that. It would have made him angry. He wasn’t happy with my writing novels. I think he was afraid that I would write about family matters. He was intensely private, and the very idea that I might use details about our family in my work was unbearable to him.”

         “Why do you think that was?”

         She sat back and looked at me a moment, with thoughts I cannot really imagine, but  all of them were, I am sure, full of doubt. Who was I, to be asking such things?

         But she answered. “I think he had a very difficult childhood. He seldom spoke of it. But emotions were not part of his language. In his world view, we all had feelings, like other body parts, and talking about them was a waste of time because we could not explain them. Everything must be explained or not. There was little in-between. I suppose it must have made him a very good engineer, but a poor husband.”

         That seemed very sad to me.

         “I would have guessed he would have been very proud of you, and your writing.”