The Emperor of Any Place

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  “Oh, wow! The Constitution,” she says.

  “Yeah. Sorry it took so long to get it.”

  She makes a quizzical expression, and he realizes that she might not have even known what happened the other day when he balked and left her standing in the garden waiting. “Anyway,” he says. “It’s yours.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Do I look like I’m kidding?”

  She smiles and, with his prompting, takes the bottle from him, carefully, in two hands. That’s when he sees just the tiniest glimmer of something like disappointment in her eyes. Really? “Don’t you want it?” he asks.

  She looks surprised — caught out. “Oh, yeah, it’s great,” she says.

  “Whoa, that wasn’t very convincing.” Now she looks embarrassed. “Come on, level with me,” he says.

  “There was this other ship,” she says. “The Bounty?” He nods. “Well, it was my favorite because it’s a way better story, and your dad let me paint it — the hull, anyway.”

  “You’re kidding me.” She shakes her head. “Then, give me back the USS Constitution and let’s go get the Bounty.”

  “Honest?”

  “Honest.”

  Then Lexie Jane hands him the boat and yells back into the house. “I’m going over to Clifford’s,” she shouts. Then she looks at Evan and her face darkens.

  “It’s okay,” he says. “Go on. You know where it is.”

  Evan and Griff build a fishpond for Clifford on Saturday.

  Rollo comes over to help with the heavy lifting. Griff actually just sits in a deck chair on the newly mown lawn, in charge of the lemonade and dispensing advice. Helpful stuff like: “That rock won’t move itself.” Or: “Do not — either one of you — even think about a career in garden maintenance. I mean it.”

  Rollo loves it.

  “You two’ve got to be the most hapless pair of shit-for-brains ever!”

  “That’s what we’ll call the band,” says Evan.

  “Shit-for-Brains,” says Rollo. “Got a good ring to it.”

  “What is this? Break time again?”

  Evan’s father kept a book about his garden, what he’d planted where, when things came up, what to do with different pests. He’d drawn a good plan of how the fishpond was supposed to look, and all the supplies were there. They spread his ashes in the hole before they lay down the rubber liner.

  The three of them stand there, and Evan wonders if he should say something. Then he looks sideways at Griff, expectantly. But no, it’s too late for him. Any words he might have said died long ago.

  The pause is a long, respectful one, and into it floods another wave of anger. Evan isn’t done with it yet, he realizes. The anger. But now is not the time for it. Now is the time to do what his father never got the chance to do.

  “Rest easy, Dad,” Evan says.

  Then something hits him. An idea. Rollo is already reaching for the shovel. “Wait a sec,” says Evan, and takes off toward the house. In the Dockyard he scours the shelves until he finds it. The USS Chesapeake. He carries it out to where Rollo and Griff are waiting at graveside. He shows it to Griff. “Was this the one?” he says. Griff takes it, looks it over. Nods. The ship his father sent Griff: the one with the sketchy history. The boat Griff sent back. On his knees, Evan places the boat in the grave. Then he stands up and rubs the dirt off his knees. He can’t look at his grandfather, but he feels him looking at him. Then they fill in the hole.

  Rollo can’t stay for supper. “I’d love to get some more abuse,” he says to Griff, “but I’ve got a date.” He turns to Evan. “Oh, yeah. It’s with Bree. Is that her name?”

  Evan punches him in the arm.

  “I’m out of here,” says Rollo.

  “Shiftless bastard,” says Griff, and Rollo howls with laughter. He walks to his car with his fist in the air.

  “Yes!” he says triumphantly. “Shiftless bastards rule the world!”

  So Griff and Evan grill hamburgers on the barbeque, and Griff makes a potato salad, southern style. “Got to have the sweet relish,” he says. “Any fool knows that.”

  They move indoors for dessert, a store-bought pecan pie. And when they’re sitting down to it, ice cream on the side for Evan, none for Griff (“A desecration, if you ask me”), he says, “I contacted Leonardo Kraft.”

  Evan looks up. Waits. They haven’t talked about the book since Tuesday night. Evan found it on his desk the next day, but with no note of explanation.

  “I told him I was making you my legal executor.”

  Evan lowers his fork. “Are you kidding?”

  “Yes, of course I am. You think I’d want you as my executor? Anyway, it’ll be years before I need anyone signing things for me. Brain like a steel trap,” he says, tapping on his noggin with his finger.

  “Okay,” says Evan. “Got it.” He’s not sure what he’s got, but he’s had enough of arguing with this coot.

  “As far as this comic book business goes, I’ll sign some kind of affidavit or whatever saying you can speak for me.”

  Evan eats a mouthful of pie with too much ice cream and immediately suffers glacier-grade brain-freeze. He grabs the edge of the table and concentrates on melting the iceberg in his mouth.

  “You going to die on me?” says Griff dispassionately.

  Evan gives him the finger, and Griff actually laughs. “You are brash, son,” he says, and Evan nods.

  Finally he can talk again. “When you say ‘speak for you,’ does that mean I’m doing what you direct me to do or what I think you should do?”

  Griff puts down his fork with a clatter. “For God’s sake, son, if I wanted you to do what I want, I’d just do it myself.”

  “Right,” says Evan. Griff rolls his eyes, then attends to his pie. Evan gives it a minute. “Okay,” he says, “so I can give them the green light?”

  Griff finishes his mouthful. “You really think this Yamada character is any good?”

  Evan nods. “Really good! Didn’t you look at the drawings on his website?”

  “I did not. They weren’t supposed to be there at all. But I’ll overlook that.”

  “So did you tell Leo the real ending?”

  Griff looks as if Evan just drizzled dog urine on his pie. He puts his fork down again and curls his hands into fists on either side of his plate. “I guess I did not make myself clear,” he says. “I don’t want to have anything to do with this project. You will be my representative and have contact with Leo and the artist and the publishers. Got that? Is it totally comprehensible?”

  “Yes, sir. Loud and comprehensible.” Evan is about to salute, but doesn’t want to stretch his luck.

  Griff goes back to eating, mumbling something about the pie not being a real pecan pie, but Evan’s mind is elsewhere.

  “I know you don’t want to talk about this, but I may want to bug you for more details,” he says.

  “So be it,” says Griff. “But when I’m back at Hopeless Manor, I want to hear as little about any of it as possible.”

  “Hopeless Manor?”

  “It is called ‘Hope Manor,’ which seems to me to be about as bad a name for a senior residence as is possible.”

  “So why’d you move there?”

  “Because I had to go somewhere and, well, I’ll grant the place this: it’s a good location. A bluff overlooking the Cape Fear River.”

  “Cape Fear? Like in the movie with Robert De Niro?”

  Griff makes another of his sour faces. “No, like in the movie with Robert Mitchum. But yes, that’s the place.”

  Evan gets this grin on his face. “I am so going to visit you.”

  “Like hell you are.”

  “I’m doing it.”

  “As soon as I get back on that plane, you’re going to come to your senses and realize you’ve seen about as much of this old soldier as you can stand. Mark my words.”

  Evan stares at him as the old man breaks off a little corner of pie and brings it to his mouth. There was so much
bundled-up loneliness in what he said. It was as if he was going out of his way to keep people at bay. But why? Evan sits back in his chair and something comes to him. Something he’d meant to ask but had forgotten about in all the excitement. Something else he doesn’t understand.

  “Griff?” he says. Griff looks up. “In my dream of being on the island, there was this girl ghost.” He waits.

  Griff just looks at him matter-of-factly. “It was a dream, Evan.”

  “I know.”

  “Maybe you’re just lonely. Did you think of that?”

  Evan nods. “I sure haven’t had any good company around here.”

  Griff smirks, looks down at his plate. But as if he can feel Evan’s gaze on him, he looks up again. He puts down his fork, gently this time, and stares out the window — always staring out the window, thinks Evan, as if houses are something he’s never figured out. It’s dusk. All the neighbots of Any Place are turning off their water sprinklers and heading indoors to a night of unbridled television watching.

  “I suppose you should know this,” he mutters. Evan hears him but doesn’t bother to respond. He can hear Mr. Gupta, next door, calling his dog, Rudolph. Rudolph barks. Then the Guptas’ door closes. Griff seems to be waiting for the quiet to close in on them. In a bit, it does. He gets up, wipes his lips on his paper napkin, and leaves the room. Just like that. Evan smiles to himself, shakes his head, and returns to his dessert, although there’s only a pool of melted ice cream left. Then Griff reenters the room with the remainder of the bottle of scotch and a tumbler. He sits, rests his hands on the tabletop.

  “I might need this,” he says. He stares at the bottle but doesn’t pour a glass. Then he begins.

  “I was only . . .” He stops, looks down at the few crumbs on his plate. Evan watches the old man gather his strength together as if there were some wall he had to climb and he’d forgotten how. “I was only ever once in love,” he says. “In my whole life, only once. Sadly, it was not with your grandmother.” He looks up. And Evan wonders what it might have been like for a kid to hear this confession if the kid had known his grandmother. Awful. But it’s not awful to him. Grandmother is just a tiny black-and-white picture of a young woman with a big twist of hair in a locket.

  “My first deployment in the war was to Iceland.”

  “World War II?”

  “World War II. But America wasn’t in it when we got shipped up there. It was July of ’41. The Brits and the Canadians were guarding Iceland. Churchill . . .” He stops and levels his gaze at Evan. “Tell me you’ve heard of Churchill?”

  “I’ve heard of him,” Evan lies, knowing he can Google it later.

  “Churchill was afraid the Germans might take Iceland, which would give them control over the North Atlantic and would make a good place to prepare for an invasion of North America, if that’s what they had up their sleeve. So, as I was saying, the Brits and —”

  “Wait! Should I be taking notes? Is this going to be a history lesson?” Griff ’s eyes flash. He is not used to being crossed. “It’s just that if it is,” says Evan, “then maybe I’ll need some of that scotch, too.”

  The surliness on his grandfather’s face withers. “Are you telling me to cut to the chase?”

  “Not exactly telling.”

  “Oh, good. I’m not partial to being told what to do.” He lets that sink in, and Evan suppresses a smile.

  “Her name was Snaedis Hillgrimsson.” Griff ’s eyes light up. “You know, I don’t think I’ve said her name out loud for over seventy years. Strange, how someone can be on your mind your whole life, and yet you don’t ever utter her name.” He clears his throat. His eyes look anywhere but at Evan. “At the risk of annoying you with further historical detail, let me bring up one more significant date: December 7, 1941. Does that mean anything to you?”

  Evan shakes his head and knows somehow he’s in trouble.

  “What exactly do they teach you in school?” Griff asks, but does not wait for an answer. “The attack on Pearl Harbor,” he says, grumpy as all get-out.

  “Oh,” says Evan. “When America finally decided to join the war, right?”

  Griff rubs his jaw. “I forgot you were a Canadian,” he says.

  “Griff. I’m dying here. Get on with it, okay?”

  It’s then that Griff ’s pretense of being upset evaporates. “It’s not easy to talk about,” he says. “By January of ’42, I was on a troop carrier heading back stateside. I wrote her — Snaedis — every single day of that journey home. I’ve never been much for writing, so I just told her everything that was happening, every little thing that came into my head. What I saw, what anyone said as long as it was amusing and as long as it was halfway clean and respectable. Every day. Fourteen thick letters I was going to send the minute I was free to do so.”

  “You mean when you landed?” says Evan. And then sees something in Griff ’s eye and says, “Not when you landed.”

  Griff shakes his head. “The way I saw it, I would not be free to send those love letters to Snaedis until I had formally broken off with Mary.”

  “You were married?”

  Griff looks exasperated. “No, son, I was not married. Nor was I engaged. Mary and I . . . well, I guess there were expectations on her part, and until I’d severed those ties, I could not bring myself to pursue any other option.”

  Evan thinks of the locket in his bedside table. Those two people locked in the darkness of that narrow little silver heart.

  “So, what happened? Wait, let me guess.” Evan smacks the table with both palms. “She was pregnant.” Griff closes his eyes. “Sorry,” says Evan. “I will now totally shut up.”

  The eyes open again, filled with warning. Evan zippers up his mouth.

  “She was not pregnant. Had she been, it would not have been my child, and so that would have been . . . how do I put this . . . very convenient. But Mary was not one for making things convenient. Unbeknownst to me, she’d moved in with my parents.”

  “Whoa!”

  “My father had become quite ill and Mother Griffin was always fragile, so Mary took the opportunity to get her foot in the door under the guise of being helpful. That will no doubt sound cold to you, but you never knew your grandmother.”

  “So the letters?”

  “Burned them.”

  “But you wrote her — the Icelandic woman — you told her?”

  Griff shook his head. “I was home for a one-week furlough before heading off to San Diego and then New Zealand for training, and then the Pacific Theater. I didn’t know what to do. I thought maybe when I finally did make it home, things would have changed. Hell, there was every chance in the world I’d be dead. So, I did nothing.”

  Griff looks at his watch. “The long and short of it, Evan, is that I never again communicated with Snaedis Hillgrimsson.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes, that about sums it up.”

  “But wait. The girl in my dream. The ghost girl,” says Evan. And then he says, “Oh,” again. “Snaedis got —”

  “Yes,” says Griff. “That would be correct.”

  He looks beat. It is, to Evan, as if Griff had locked up the past in a steel vault for so long that the door rusted shut and this attempt to enter it required an inhuman effort.

  “But if you never communicated with her again —”

  “Her daughter. My daughter. Our daughter . . .”

  “She got in touch with you?”

  “She did. She did more than that. She came to the States to go to school. By then — this is about 1960 — America had strong ties with Iceland. There was the big air force base there for one thing. There were also scholarships. Eyja was a smart girl. She enrolled at Georgia Tech on a full scholarship. And then went about tracking me down.”

  “Eyja,” says Evan, savoring the name. “Was that as bad as you’re making it sound?”

  Griff looks surprised. “No. No. I wondered, when I first heard from her, what she had in mind, but all she wanted to do was me
et me. We met a few times. Beautiful girl. Beautiful.” He pauses, scrunches up his mouth. “But I . . . I guess I found it too painful. Just couldn’t do it. So I asked her to stop.”

  Evan is thinking hard. “So my father had this half sister,” he says. “Eyja?” Griff nods. “Did Dad know?” Griff looks at Evan solemnly and shakes his head. Evan is filled with rage. Oh, it is there. So much of it. But he punches it back down. He looks away. “So I have an aunt and maybe cousins.”

  Griff nods. “I thought about that, after what you said. Your dream. That girl . . . the ghost you saw; she couldn’t have been Eyja. I mean if this crazy business of a child being born out of the island and into the real world . . .” He stops, unable to say it; unable to believe he is talking in such terms. But Evan knows where he was going.

  “Eyja wouldn’t have been on Kokoro-Jima in September of 1945. Is that what you mean?” Griff nods. “She’d have been born, like, in —”

  “Nineteen forty-two. August.”

  “So the girl I met”— he laughs at the lunacy of that verb —“She would have had to be a daughter of Eyja.”

  “Something like that,” mutters Griff. And Evan thinks how nothing in Griff ’s handbook on being a marine would have prepared him for any of this.

  The room floods with silence — a deluge of it. A tsunami of silence.

  Then Griff speaks. “I couldn’t do it, Evan. I don’t expect you to understand. I’m not sure at this late date that I understand it myself.”

  “And so you shut out everybody. You never loved Mary. You said so yourself. So it sort of makes sense why you never loved my father, either.” He doesn’t mean to sound so bitter, but he can’t help it.

  “That would be a fair summary,” says Griff. He stares at the bottle of scotch, seems about to reach for it, but changes his mind. He leans back in his chair; his hands fall to his lap. His shoulders are hunched, and then he recalls himself and sits up straighter. “You have every right to your judgments,” he says.

  “Forget it,” says Evan. He’s not about to forgive the man. Right now, he can’t even make eye contact with him. Won’t. He gets up from the table and gathers their plates and forks and heads out to the kitchen.