Which “Some more coffee, sir?” almost was, bringing with it a reminder of the regal boxes of Havana cigars he had seen in the lobby, and while the waiter cleared the dishes from the chair arm he found and lit a Larranaga cetro such as he hadn’t luxuriated in for decades, returned to the chair, put his feet on the banister American style and pulled out the manuscript from the envelope—to read the usual first three pages, a middle three, perhaps the last three, depending on the others (never able to approach a new manuscript without hearing the rusty quip of, probably, a white-waistcoated editor of The Atlantic that “One needn’t eat the whole egg to know that it’s bad”).
“AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A BABE IN ARMS”—Well? Hhm. Maybe yes, maybe no (Carbon copy. Holding back the original? Or having already sent it to New York? Multiple submission, even in one so young? A fast learner.)
Call me Penelope, Penny, if you like. A weaver. I also answer to Augusta named for the month I began.…
And after a scoop of fading pages (carbon paper wearing thin, new sheet—a firmer voice):
… stopping the car and leading her to the bank of a rushing mountain river at a place he seemed to know about (from other times, perhaps?) and giving her a hand down a sloping bank to a leafy shelf, talking all the while as if to cover his designs, or hoping to. Shoes off, socks into shoes with a fussy neatness, cotton pants rolled up over legs with the hair worn off on the backs like the haunches of a moldy deer in a small-town zoo, cringing from the cold water as he waded in, this man she hardly knew, turning round, begging, “Come on, come on.”
“I’m not coming in.”
“Come on, you’ll like it.”
Goosebumps on her calves, the backs of her knees, her thighs as she bunched up her skirt and waded in, the water off a snow peak or seeming so, a glacier, wading in a step or two, searching for a good excuse to leave, escape, without seeming priggish to this persistent all-but-stranger. Refusing his held-out hand, pushing it away, when she slipped on the slime of an underwater rock, both of them turning to look downstream at a sound or something moving and seeing a stout fisherman emerging at a bend in glistening boots, casting, reeling in, looping his line and casting again, absorbed, as if the world depended on where it fell, and both of them splashing to the bank and up to the shelf behind the limbs and lying there still as puzzled squirrels.…
Hair trying to stand on end, shoes thumping down off the banister, two-inch cultivated ash lost off the cigar, his “Just a minute now!” meant for himself but tumbling out strong enough to bring a “Yes sir?” from the boy who had delivered the pages, or his double. Ray waving him off with the pages themselves, mumbling to himself that stranger things had happened (and trying to think of one), arguing it was not so strange after all for her to imagine two people wading in a stream on a hot day, even hiding on the bank from an intrusive fisherman; there were such mountain streams, such days, such fishermen on the Island at her doorstep.—Glad he was able to revive the cigar, the aroma itself reassuring.
Another scoop of pages, fading out then black (new carbon), and:
… she told him not to wait, please not to wait, there under the four-sided moon-clock creeping up on midnight and train time, this man who had followed her to New York—inventing all sorts of odd reasons, not telling her he was coming then phoning he was there “on business”; this man whose invitations she had refused all week suddenly walking up beside her as she handed her ticket to the fatherly man in blue at the table by the gate. “I can manage, John. Please don’t wait.”
“You’ve been avoiding me.”
“Avoiding you, what do you mean?” smiling a thank-you to the blue-coated man returning what was left of her ticket—smiling to show she could smile if she cared to—putting the ticket-stub away in her handbag and closing the catch with a firm snap that she meant as dismissal to this insistent reappearing John Somebody.
“I mean avoiding me.”
“Good-by, John. Please don’t wait, I can manage—what are you doing!” as he laid a green ticket on the table.
“I happen to be on this train too.”
“You what!” surprise going into anger, into something close to fury.
“Doctor’s appointment in Baltimore tomorrow.”
Wordless, and holding herself rigid to draw a deep breath into her chest then expel it with, “You don’t look sick,” and as he handed a porter the check for his luggage and some money and pointed at the checkroom, “You don’t act sick either,” voice as stinging as she could make it.
“Oh I’m not. Just routine.”
She studying him a minute in the dozing hum of the midnight station that floated down like snow, then turning away and hurrying through the gate and down the steps to the black train.…
Throwing the cigar over the banister at the 22 Taxis Facing West, crossing the porch at a stumble until he remembered to take off his glasses, scribbling, “Emergency call from home office. Thanks for showing this to me. Will write” on a hotel pad at the desk and sliding it in with the manuscript. “My bill, please. And please hand this to Mrs. Tyner when she calls.”
“Leaving, sir? Anything wrong, sir?”
Assuring the clerk of the hotel’s excellence and asking about planes for the United States, the clerk running his finger down a schedule by the letter boxes and reporting a non-stop flight to Miami at “thirteen thirty-seven,” both of them glancing at the clock over the boxes showing five minutes to eleven.
“Would you send somebody for my bags? And please get me a taxi,” (not No. 17, please God),—a long wait at the terminal, but rather that than being at the hotel when she came for the manuscript, pushing the envelope across the counter with the tips of his fingers as if it might explode, hadn’t exploded.
“Very good, sir. Have nice fly.”
“Thank you,” turning away, then facing back. “Tell me, you know Mrs. Tyner, do you happen to know Mrs. Tyner’s name before she married?”
“Oh, sorry, sir,” with a little smile at the impropriety of such a question, then indulgently, “Perhaps our Social Director—but she doesn’t come on until noon.”
But there were other questions that haunted him as he waited in his bolted-down chair before the two-way mirror-window—shining white planes beyond it slanting past with the soft hum of muted cellos, slanting up, slanting down, slicing through the travelers at his back, the hatted and the hatless, the restless and the patient, through a barefoot boy with a dog on a leash, through the hand luggage, the carry-on, through the dancers turning on the powdered earth, the chanting, the resurrected old man (old men!), through the questions pounding in his head like the drums: who was this woman, this girl? calling herself Augusta, “named for the month I began,” counting back from a birthday and coming to his month in the mountains? Or told by her mother she “began” in the month of August? Her embittered mother?
Or was it all just fiction, just a putting together of stories she had heard, fancies she had dreamed, like any other of those strange people at their writing machines? She might never have heard the name, Claudia Motlow—
The mirror-window becoming all window, the bowed trunks of the two palms sliced off by the waiting-room ceiling, the herringbone path between the sprinklers filled with passengers out of the sky, with welcomes that reached from restrained to exuberant, from handshakes to open arms, and in the midst of the animated parade to the waiting room and his bolted-down chair Janet in white and yellow arm-in-arm with a woman his age (nearly), black hair now a well-kept gray, well-made navy blue linen skirt and jacket with the, for him, indefinable something that said taste, if not hers then some knowing saleswoman’s in a costly shop. If he moved he would draw their attention, after a moment would be hearing, “Mother” (probably, “Mum,” or, “Mom”), “this is Edward—what did you say your name was? King?” “Ray. Edward Ray. Aren’t you confusing me with Oedipus the King?…”
If he held his breath, pulled in his shoulders, turned his face slowly, very slowly, away to watch the barefo
ot boy behind him and the dog, sat as still as a puzzled squirrel—
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1986 by Berry Fleming
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0984-3
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The Bookman's Tale Page 9
