Sinai Tapestry (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 1)

by Edward Whittemore

  He didn’t talk about his illness, but we did agree that I would read his novel when it was done. He was very pleased. And so we fell back into the role of editor and writer, but of course we were something else, too, after all of this time. Time makes friendship in a way that no single action possibly can. That, after all, is what Ted’s novels are about—time, friendship, and history, the real history.

  At one point, but only once, Ted asked me about the events in Dorset, and afterwards, and how I had stopped being in touch. I didn’t have much to say about it.

  “Bad timing,” I said. He nodded.

  That summer Ted and Annie went to Italy, and I saw Ted again in the Fall. I had dinner with him and Annie, but before, he and I took a walk. That’s when he told me.

  He sat me down on a park bench, over by the wading pool where children sail their boats. It was November and getting cold. We were warm enough, though, in hats and scarves and gloves. He had something to tell me, and spoke very clearly and simply and straight. He had cancer and it could not be cured or permanently halted. He was in remission thanks to heavy doses of hormones; they had left him impotent, but that was better than being dead.

  “The trouble is, that I can go out of remission at any time,” Ted told me. “And the docs say that if that happens, I can go in as fast as three weeks.” He paused. “It changes how you view things. Some things, like politics and what’s in the newspaper, become utterly unimportant. And things like friends, family, especially friends, become the most important things in the world.”

  Ted looked at me. He reached for my hand, and held it fast. “So you see, having you come back into my life, now, all of a sudden, well it couldn’t make me happier.”

  I wrapped myself around him. My arms and also one leg hooked over his lap—actually we probably looked fairly ludicrous there on the bench—but it was a moment where it didn’t matter how we looked or what we were doing with our bodies. Ted held on tight. Nothing could change what was, the bad or the good. I said I loved him and then we said no more, just held on.

  As we walked back to the house, and Annie, and dinner, we talked. He wanted very much to finish the draft of the novel, the last book he would ever write. I wanted very much to read it.

  When Ted was still in remission, it seemed to me there were some things going on that were suspicious. Ted had always had a bad back, but it had gotten worse, why he wasn’t sure. My assumption was that this was the cancer, he just didn’t want to dignify it with the name. That would be giving it too much ground.

  I called him one Sunday, from my apartment in Washington. Annie said he was out and she didn’t know why he hadn’t returned. Several hours later, Ted called and told me the story.

  “The most amazing thing happened,” he said.

  He had gone to a hotel to meet a man who was going to do his taxes; the place was way over west on 58th Street, practically in the river. He walked down the hall to meet the man and heard some music coming out from behind a door; the hotel rented larger halls as well as rooms for people who had business to transact. After getting the tax stuff taken care of, he passed by the door again.

  This time it was open. And he could hear the music more clearly. It was gospel. There was plenty of gospel, Ted had explained to me, in the book he was working on, but he had never actually been to a live service. A woman standing by the door saw his interest, and pulled him in. He sat in the rear.

  “The music was wonderful,” he said, “just what I’d imagined. So full of feeling and passion and emotion and all the good things of being human. The sound just rolled over me. Everyone was singing and the sound was immense.” It went on for a long time, and then there was quiet. A small woman came to the front of the room. Several people stood up, in no apparent pattern.

  Ted’s back was hurting him, so he stood up, too.

  He hadn’t understood. All of the people who had stood up were brought to the front of the room.

  The woman prayed over them. She prayed for strength and health. Calls of reassurance and encouragement came from all corners of the room. She prayed in front of Ted. And then she knocked him down.

  “I could see what was going to happen, because it happened with the other people,” Ted told me. “She stood in front of you, and behind you stood this immense black guy, and she knocked you down, and you had to fall right back. Where the man would catch you. You had to trust her, you see. You had to let yourself go, just completely.”

  “And did you?” I asked.

  “I did,” said Ted. “I can’t tell you how marvelous I feel.”

  Ted finished the novel in March 1995. I was working for the federal government at the time. It arrived in my office on Monday and I took the day off on Thursday and edited it and had it back to him on Saturday.

  “Don’t rush,” he had said, wanting not to inconvenience me. “Take your time.”

  But I knew we had no time. I read it once, all the way through. I could see the shape. The first time through, I began to understand who the people were. I read it again, slowly, and edited it, page by page, I listened to its sounds, word by word.

  I was not young, not then. I was no longer a confused and anxious assistant editor at a New York publishing house. I was no longer a damaged woman who did not know her own heart. I had no questions about who Ted Whittemore was to me; I understood in many ways what was important about his work. I concentrated.

  This book was not about espionage. It was about a healer. Ted began the book three months before he got his diagnosis, but still the book was about a healer. And, also, for the first time, Whittemore’s main character was female. Her name was Sister Sally and she was unlike any of his other characters; the man with whom she has a brief love affair, Billy the Kid, however, resembled characters in the earlier books and also resembled Ted.

  I wrote that I was going to push him very hard. “I think you have a bit further to travel with Sally and Billy. So let’s go.” I started by telling him that I didn’t think the verb in his first sentence was in the right tense. This was a brutal and ridiculous way to start an editorial letter, but I had no choice. I had to be thorough. I told my dear friend what my thoughts were as I read. I tried to remember where everything was and to see when things worked together and when they did not. I commented, I queried words, I flirted with him, I reminded him of old successes and other moments we’d both loved in other Whittemore books, I cheered, I wondered out loud about the characters so he would see how they appeared to someone else, I suggested, I doubted, I applauded, I reflected, I pushed and pushed and pushed.

  Ted told me the letter was helpful. Very helpful. He was excited about getting back to work. I sent a copy of the editorial letter to Tom, who had become Ted’s agent. Tom called me up. He thought my comments were good.

  And, in his old-fashioned manner, Tom said, “You know, the letter you wrote—it’s a love letter, in a way.”

  A real writer puts his heart and soul and all his intelligence on the page. Any book can be the last one. Every one of the writers words, every small motive, counts. The editor must attend as though nothing else matters.

  Ted went out of remission a few weeks after he completed the draft. Although his levels of pain increased and increased in the weeks and months that followed, he was able to do some revisions.

  I told him that his revisions were more than I could have hoped for. I came to New York from Washington several times, working on the pages and leaving notes with him, telling him every doubt, but most of all I told him how wonderful the book was, and how each revision made me more convinced that the book was complete and perfect inside of him and our only task was to ask the right questions and bring it all to light.

  I called Ted every other day, sometimes every day, until that became too difficult. He told me things about himself, so that in those last months I was allowed to understand more about him and how he’d lived his life.

  Combined with my love for Ted was a certain brutality which I tried to keep in
check. I tried not to push him too hard. I tried not to let my disappointment show on the phone when he said he was just too tired from the pain, too sick from the drugs, to be able to write.

  There was one section in the book that I really wanted him to revise. It was the scene where Sally and Billy fall in love. The woman in this novel was nothing like the women he’d written about before, who quite frankly had always struck me as a little pale. Sally was a real powerhouse, a force, a tragic mess. One day he called me at the office and told me he’d spent three hours writing the day before, and he felt like hell but he’d revised that scene, which was central to the love story, the scene I was sure he had inside him. He told me—but I did not see the pages. I did not see the fix.

  Of course, it is dangerous when an editor has a favorite fix. It’s not your book.

  Because there was so little time, however, I let myself want it. In part, I just wanted what I wanted, and used the drama of death to cover up my presumptuousness and greed—but in part, I felt unconsciously that my desire for the fix would encourage Ted to fight harder, to slow down the illness for the sake of the writing.

  Underneath this I must have believed that writing was more important to Ted than everything else, that he had no more powerful motive for staying alive. Was I crazy?

  Meanwhile, he was in and out of the hospital. Annie left to go to Italy, alone, to get some time away from cancer, on a holiday Ted told her she needed to take. Carol came to take care of Ted.

  Years back, Carol had been with Ted, longer than anyone else. She had ridden motorcycles all around Crete with Ted. She had been with him the day when, discouraged about ever writing anything worthwhile, he spotted a scarab in a dusty British glass case in the British Museum and the whole idea of the Quartet was born. Carol showed up when things took a turn for the worse. From early until late, she moved hospital beds and nurses in and out of Annie’s house, not sleeping much if at all.

  One night, when I hadn’t been able to talk to Ted for ten days—I had been out of the country—I called him from my younger brother’s house, where I was visiting.

  Ted told me that he felt, suddenly, he had enough energy to really finish the book. Carol would read it, too, and Ted would mark places to cut, which I would then execute, leaving him the time to write the revisions he wanted to do.

  My brother came into his bedroom where I was using the phone. So did my sister-in-law, so I moved out to the unfinished porch out their bedroom, carrying the portable phone, which was taped together with gaffer’s tape from the results of abuse by children. As my brother and his wife lay together, sleeping, preparing for another day of work and family, I stood on the deck in the black night and schemed with Ted.

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes you can do it. Yes,” I said. “We’ve had some great breaks already. You finished the draft before you went out of remission. Remember? Now we have another big break.”

  The night was wide. “This is what you can fix,” I said. “With the time left. I’ll come to New York. We’ll talk about the cuts.”

  “Isn’t it marvelous,” said Ted to Carol, “that just when we need her, just like magic, Miss Judy appears. I hadn’t heard from her. Wondered where she was. And here she appears. Stage Left. Enter Miss Judy.”

  “Yes,” agreed Carol, wanly. “It’s a good sign.” I could hear the humoring in her tone, although I did not know, I could not see what she could see.

  Instead, I egged him on. One more piece of luck, I said. One more good break. When so much has gone badly, one more piece of good luck. It’s a wonder I didn’t ask him to sit down at the desk then and there and write me a scene.

  I never knew whether I was important to him for anything but the books. And I never knew if he would have been important to me if it weren’t for the books. That was where we connected.

  Ted had his own brutality. He had his ambition, which resulted in modest living and ruthlessness. He told me once that women were simply more generous than men, that they were better people, and although I never doubted that Ted had deeply loved the women in his life, and made them feel deeply loved, I wondered if that was an excuse for his bad behavior. He had two daughters, who didn’t speak to him for years, although they visited him during his final illness. He said he had been a very bad husband, and a very selfish man. He knew what he was and he knew that as a result of how he had behaved, he had lost his daughters. But he had written his books. Ted had two granddaughters; one is named after his sister, as though his family got his children, but he didn’t.

  Six days after I returned from my brother’s house to Washington, at 6:20 on a Sunday morning, my phone rang.

  “Judy. It’s Ted. Listen,” he said, speaking urgently, “I’m in terrible trouble and you have to help me.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “I don’t know where I am. And you have to come and find me.”

  “Of course,” I replied. I paused.

  Ted didn’t know where he was, but I knew. He was lying in a hospital bed in his bedroom. He was too sick to be anywhere else. He was there, he just didn’t know he was there. So I had to get him to bring himself back.

  Suddenly my bedroom seemed very big and empty and the telephone cord a slender tie to the voice at the other end.

  “Can you tell me where you might be, Ted?” I asked. “Can you tell me where you think you are?”

  “Certainly,” said Ted, practical, sure of himself. “I seem to be somewhere near Annie’s. So you can start looking there.”

  We talked for a while, and got into a conversation about other things that were going on where he was. Some things confused him, like the workmen who were lifting big sections of pipe onto the roof of a nearby building (they might have been there or might not have been there). When we talked about it, he thought of some reasons why they were there and seemed to grow easier in his mind. And so we said goodbye.

  One or two minutes later, the phone rang again.

  “Judy, it’s Ted.” He seemed in a hurry. Or anxious. It was hard to tell.

  “I just looked at the clock. It’s six thirty in the morning. You must think I’m crazy.” He sounded a little frightened.

  “No,” I answered honestly. “I don’t think you’re crazy. I just think you’re on a lot of drugs, Ted. You’re probably on a lot of morphine. That can mess you up. Besides,” I added, looking out at the pale summer morning sky, “it’s already light here. You probably looked out the window and saw how light it was and figured it was okay to call. Is it light where you are?”

  Ted was reassured, and again we talked for a few minutes before he became tired and distracted. I couldn’t go back to sleep after we hung up the phone, so I made some coffee and tried to read the Sunday papers. But he was much on my mind.

  That evening, I came home around nine thirty or ten from a family picnic at the house of one of my older brothers, in Baltimore. I was afraid for the blinking light on my answering machine. My machine tells callers to wait for the famous beep. Ted had waited and left this message. I listened.

  “Judy. It’s Ted.” He spoke very fast, slurring one or two words. “Calling on your famous number that you can’t make a call since you’re waiting for my beep.

  “Judy. I’ve got some great news from you today. For you today. With you today. And the news is: is that I’m no longer mad! And don’t you think that it would be nice to know that Ted Whittemore is no longer mad? Wouldn’t that be fun! I hope it would be! Nice for a change anyway.

  “Your number is still the change. Change. Still hasn’t changed. My number hasn’t either. What changed is that I’m no longer crazy!

  “So listen. If you could call me sometime. At that number you know all about. And we could talk on that number.

  “There are a lot of things…that are going to become clear—which never were!”

  At this moment, Ted’s voice, rising in excitement and joy, is abruptly cut off As though he simply went spinning off the face of the world. I
think I knew then that I would never talk to him again, never hear his voice again.

  Of course he did not go, spinning. It was not that simple, that easy, or that much fun. He continued for another month, increasingly disoriented, consumed by pain, pumped with drugs. He soon had nurses around the clock at home, he went in and out of the hospital, and finally went into a hospice. Several years earlier, I had helped to care for someone through the end of a terminal illness, so when my phone calls to New York were not returned by family and by the two women who, at different times, had shared his life and now had the honor and burden of seeing him through his final passage, I knew what this meant. They had too much on their hands to bother calling back concerned but peripheral friends. They were doing the hard work, and the least I could do was stay out of the way.

  When it was all over, I knew, I would be handed the manuscript, for Tom was one of the literary executors and he would vouch for me. I would see if Ted had revised that love scene. I would make sure that all the changes in his hand were faithfully entered. I would see if any of the cuts we’d discussed were possible, but be cautious in my acts, just cleaning things up.

  Then I would pass the pages to Tom and he would try to sell the story. Tom, however, never was able to make that sale. The novel felt unfinished.

  The family held a memorial service in Dorset on August 12th. I flew to Hartford, rented a car, and drove north.

  The day alternated between brilliant sun and showers. Dorset, in rain or shine, was as beautiful as ever. Tom spoke at the service. He said that Ted had compartmentalized his life, that different parts of Ted’s life didn’t touch. The parts that were represented in Dorset—his family, his true and good friends from Yale, who had supported him during his illness, who spoke of the powerful love they had felt from Ted during that time—were strangers to me.