The allowance continued to come at regular intervals, and he found new excuses to prolong his sojourn in the Far East. He studied woodblock printing, and engaged a tutor to instruct him in Japanese. His accent never progressed beyond absurd, but he found that he could understand the language, if the speaker wanted him to. He collected folktales, and visited shrines, with vague thoughts of writing a book someday about his experiences in Japan.
One day in a Kyoto antique market he found a painted Kutani platter with a gold-leaf picture of a robed man astride a giant turtle. When he asked the significance of the design, earnest but incomprehensible explanations followed. Between the fulsome gestures of the merchant and the carefully phrased Japanese of his companions, Henry pieced together the tale of Urashima Taro, which he recognized as a parable of his own life.
“What is the matter with that turtle?” he had asked the dapper little man who was his guide at the marketplace. Henry pointed to the porcelain picture of the man and the pony-sized turtle with a long feathery tail trailing behind its back legs.
His guide smiled as he sifted through foreign words in his mind. “Magic turtle,” he said after a moment’s hesitation. “Very old. Stories say that when a turtle lives for centuries, he gets long tail as mark of honor.”
The stallholder pointed to the imperious man astride the painted turtle. “Urashima Taro!” he said with a little bow, as if that explained everything.
It took another few minutes and gestures worthy of pantomime to convey the essence of the tale past Henry’s rudimentary language skills in Japanese, but at last he grasped the pattern of the universal story of the man outside time. It echoed through many cultures—Ossian, Rip Van Winkle, Thomas the Rhymer—and when he saw the pattern, comprehension came easily.
Urashima Taro had been a simple village fisherman in ancient times. One day he rescued a sea turtle tormented by children on the beach, and the next day as he was fishing, the turtle appeared next to his boat and offered to take him to a magic undersea kingdom as a token of thanks for his kindness. Urashima Taro found himself welcomed as a hero by the sea king, and at once he married the sea king’s beautiful daughter. After a few blissful days in the underwater kingdom, though, he began to feel uneasy about his abrupt disappearance from home. He wanted to go back to his village and tell his parents about his good fortune. Reluctantly, the princess allowed him to leave, but she gave him a box to take with him, telling him that he must not open it. When Urashima Taro reached the shore of his fishing village, he found everything greatly changed. He knew no one there, and there were many buildings that he did not recognize. Finally, upon hearing Urashima’s name, someone told him that there was a village legend of a fisherman with that name who had disappeared centuries before, and he realized that a day in the sea kingdom equaled a century among mortals. In his shock and sorrow, Urashima Taro opened the box that the sea princess had given him. It had contained his youth, but now that its essence was released, he aged centuries within seconds, and crumbled to dust.
As he finished the story, the guide smiled up at him. “But you must not worry, Henry-san. Time is the same in America as here. You can go home.”
Henry nodded in agreement, because his Japanese was not equal to explaining that the world of his youth had passed away just as surely as that of Urashima Taro, and he was equally marooned from his home.
Henry stayed in the somnolent exile of a lotus-eater for five years, until September 1923, when circumstances in Japan became more terrible than anything he would have faced in Philadelphia.
ROSE SET HER WRISTWATCH down on the nightstand. It was too late now to call Danny. She had retired to her room, to rinse out her underwear with the water jug and basin, and to slather her face with night cream. Now, bundled into her brown flannel wrapper and wooly bed socks, she was nearly ready to turn in, blissfully alone in her shabby night attire. They kept her warm and comfortable, but she had not quite given up all traces of feminine pride: she would have died before she’d have let anyone see her in such unfashionable ruin. If the hotel caught fire, she would probably burn up trying to make herself presentable before seeking an exit.
Rose sat at the writing table under the window, her head bent in the circle of lamplight, composing a letter on the Martha Washington Inn notepaper she found in the drawer. She knew that writing it was more for her benefit than for his. Danny was careless in his affections, not given to flowery declarations or loving gestures.
He loved his plane. Beyond that, the depth of his feelings was anybody’s guess.
Although he was invariably cheerful and seemingly glad to see people, he seldom troubled to seek out anyone. He was content to let weeks or months pass without contacting his friends, yet such lapses never seemed to change his feelings. Rose could not decide if that meant that he cared little about people, or that, if once committed, Danny trusted his friendships so much that he considered their bonds unbreakable. Either way, such a casual attitude was beyond her comprehension. Rose, who didn’t trust anybody, thought that “out of sight, out of mind” was a warning as well as a fact.
She had met Danny in an airplane hangar, because an airfield or a saloon were almost the only places you’d ever find him. Her editor had assigned her a meringue of a story about a girl flyer who wanted to be a pilot for the U.S. mail service—no doubt envisioning a coy headline like: Flygirl Yearns to Be Mail Pilot. That afternoon Rose and a photographer headed out to the flying field on Long Island, in hopes of landing a nice feature with a three-column photo, but the flygirl had looked like a buzzard, so Rose gathered enough material for a one-column item, and sent the photographer home.
While she was wandering around the hangars, looking for some other way to salvage the afternoon, she found Danny leaning into the engine of a plane, and, as an excuse to talk to him, she asked him about flying. His face lit up with a happy smile, and he talked nonstop for ten minutes, but even at the time Rose did not retain a word of it.
If her face was “unfortunate Irish,” his was the countenance of a Celtic saint: blue eyes that shone like stained glass, and the graceful, fine-boned body of a dancer. She caught her breath when she first saw him. Encounters with celebrities left her unmoved, but this jackleg pilot reduced her to stammering idiocy.
Danny was beautiful. He didn’t intend to be, didn’t work at it. It’s just that he had been born with some complex arrangement of lines and planes that converged in his features to make a perfect symmetry, so that to look at him was like viewing a cathedral or a well-designed formal garden. Or perhaps it was just that his particular combination of jawline, eye color, and profile happened to match some ideal from Rose’s childhood: the image of a prince in a child’s storybook, perhaps, or a genetic memory of the ultimate Irish warrior. He embodied the image that artists and moviemakers evoked to personify goodness and honor and trustworthiness. You looked at Danny and you built him a soul.
She thought he could have gone to Hollywood to make it in pictures, but Danny wasn’t interested in posing or in memorizing other people’s words.
Danny wanted to fly. He loved aviation and any person or idea or object that could help him achieve his goal. So, as an excuse to talk to him, she interviewed him, and, because he thought that, being a journalist, maybe she could help him, he talked volubly with his full wattage of charm. The interview continued over beer and plates of corned beef and cabbage at a tavern near the flying field, and they talked until well after dark, mostly about planes and about Danny’s dreams of flying. A couple of days later she went back to the hangar to take him a couple of copies of the newspaper with her story about him, and he had hugged her with all the abandon of a child.
Before then it might have occurred to Rose that the light in those stained glass eyes was the sun shining through the back of his head, but after that embrace, where Danny was concerned, she was lost to thought at all. She would have died for him.
Ever since then Rose had managed to see him as often as she could, and when her j
ob took her away from the city, she kept in touch, gestures which Danny accepted with an easy grace.
She wrote him clever, funny little letters using her wit to disguise her anxiety and her longing. When she telephoned, she was always ready with an entertaining tale of her latest adventures on the road, so that he would look forward to her calls and the laughter that they brought. There were never any awkward questions from her, nor any pleas for reassurance. Only a bright little chat, as if she only wanted an audience for her clever story, not that she missed him desperately, filtering most of the day’s experiences through thoughts of him. No, certainly not. She would never let anyone see that. There was nothing more ridiculous than a plain woman besotted with love.
She didn’t think Danny ever saw the purpose behind her seemingly inconsequential messages. He never looked below the surface of anything, unless it had a motor in it. Rose was careful to be lightly amusing and much less trouble than she was worth. She considered it the tax she paid for not being beautiful.
IT WAS JUST AS WELL that she hadn’t been able to call him tonight. The train trip had exhausted her. She didn’t feel up to inventing funny stories tonight. It was easier to be spritely on paper. You could take your time, and no one could see how tired you were and how hard you were trying. She considered writing about their evening excursion to the Bristol radio show, but Danny didn’t seem very interested in music—or in anything at all other than flying—and it would take a great many words to set the whole scene for him in order to make an amusing tale of it. She yawned and rubbed her eyes. It was too late for that much effort. She ought to get some sleep in preparation for more travel to come. Just a few lines, then, to keep her memory green for him.
She supposed that she ought to be thinking about an angle to the story she’d begin covering tomorrow, but it was hard to choose one when she had so little information.
Why would a pretty girl kill her father?
Of course, it was nearly inevitable that her angle would be that the girl had done no such thing. Whether they were reading newspapers or fairy tales (which were not so dissimilar, after all) “beautiful” and “good” were inextricably entwined in people’s minds. It would be no work at all to champion the beauty’s innocence. People wanted to believe it. What was odd about this case was: why didn’t her friends and neighbors believe it? She’d lived all twenty years of her apparently blameless life in that one mountain hamlet, probably cousin to half the community. And yet she had been charged with murder. Not manslaughter, self-defense, accidental homicide, but first-degree murder. The townspeople had not risen up to protest this callous treatment of one of their own. In fact, there was some story about the local citizens threatening to lynch her at the old man’s funeral. Now that was a puzzling turn of events.
Rose wondered what that little village knew that no one else did. No, she really wondered which version would make the better story splashed across the front pages of her newspaper: Erma Morton, the beautiful, persecuted innocent, or Erma Morton, the scheming Jezebel. People didn’t really want the truth, anyhow. They only wanted the story to make sense. Real life didn’t always make sense, though; sometimes you had to help it along.
Stifling a yawn, Rose turned her attention back to the sheet of notepaper.
Dear Danny,
Greetings from nowhere-in-particular, U.SA., where I am currently ensconced in the House of Usher, praying that “possum” will not be featured on the breakfast menu. The train ride wasn’t so bad, but there’s a lot of nowhere to get through before you get to the middle of it. Actually, this hotel is fancy enough to make me glad I have an expense account. I even got to wear my blue silk to dinner: the one that matches your eyes.
Tomorrow will be a different story, though. That’s when we get to the little burg where the trial is taking place. I’m sure the trip will be a nightmare over washboard roads, and you don’t know how much I wish there was a certain handsome pilot here to fly me over these mountains in one short hop, but on the other hand, I’m not sure that the prospect of flying over steep mountains fills me with delight, either.
I hope I’ll be back in a week or so, Danny, and then we can talk about that book you want me to write about your exploits in flying. I think you’re right—if you get famous enough, all sorts of opportunities would open up for you in aviation. I’ve been thinking about how to go about it. We’ll talk it over when I return from—the back of beyond.
As ever, (That was a nice touch, she thought.)
Rose
IN ACCOMMODATIONS MORE MODEST than the Martha Washington Inn, Luster Swann’s mind was not on the upcoming trial, either, nor did he have any desire to pen letters to someone back home. There was no one back home to write to, and, strictly speaking, no “back home” for him at all. Swann lived in a cold-water walk-up in a lower East Side neighborhood: a modern version of the Tower of Babel, where no two tenants spoke the same language. Since Swann never talked to any of them, he rather preferred it that way, because it gave him an excuse to keep to himself. Whenever possible he avoided rudeness, not out of concern for the feelings of others, but because hostility was a form of interaction, and he wanted to be left alone. If he could have been granted one wish, he would have chosen invisibility.
He was stretched out on the narrow bed in his underwear, with a mason jar of whiskey cradled in the crook of his arm. Sleep was only a few swigs away.
Swann had arrived on the same train as the others that afternoon, but he had been careful not to get too close to them, in case they took a notion to invite him to dine with them or to join in some witless excursion in this neck of the woods. He avoided them, because the idea of a social evening with his colleagues made him shudder. They would have expected him to make conversation. They might have asked him questions.
The train ride had been icy and uncomfortable, and his expense allowance would not allow for any improvement in those conditions at his evening’s lodgings. He didn’t care where he stayed, though. There were better ways to spend your money, and it hadn’t taken him long to find them. People called this part of the South “the Bible Belt,” but Luster Swann had assumed correctly that there were still sinners to be found if you put your mind to it. He gravitated to the cheapest-looking hotel within walking distance of the train station, and it only took him three minutes to locate an enterprising shoe-shine boy who was a fount of information about local suppliers of booze and female companionship. As he suspected, he need not stir from the hotel to acquire either one. Swann decided to forego the latter, because he did not feel up to even minimal conversation. Around here the whores all spoke English, after a fashion, and that was too bad. Much better to crawl into a jar of Washington County bourbon and forget his troubles until morning.
Luster Swann was immune to the charms of music, or art, or literature. Not for him the concert or the improving book. He had not been raised to culture, and he did not feel the lack of it. His old schoolmates might be bemused to think of “Lack-Luster” Swann making his living as a writer, but, since he doubted that any of them ever read a newspaper, they probably never knew about it. Anyhow, reporting was a job, and, thanks to the stock market crash, employment was hard to come by these days, especially for the ordinary laborers who were as replaceable as nails. He had stumbled into a higher class job, and worked his way up to a byline, so he reckoned he was safe, if anyone was these days. He didn’t find his work difficult. He got to spend a lot of time alone, and that was good.
Reporting was certainly easier work than loading ships on the docks or hauling garbage. He had a curious knack for making pictures with words. He didn’t use any elegant literary references or complex language—he didn’t know any—but somehow in the simplest words and phrases Luster Swann was able to put the reader into the story, enabling him to see and hear what had taken place. He never analyzed this skill, but dimly he did realize that he thought in scenes, like a movie, and not in strings of words. Perhaps that was why he could re-create action so graphically:
he watched the movie in his head and wrote down what he saw.
Swann’s other innate talent was a unique understanding of disordered minds. Whenever there was an occurrence that made people say, “How could he have done such a thing?” or “What was she thinking?” they had only to look to the reporting of Luster Swann for a lucid explanation. Why did the wealthy matron kill her baby? Why did the fussy little shopkeeper poison cats? Somehow Luster Swann always knew, and the way he presented the story made the illogic of twisted minds into a perfectly inevitable course of action: Why of course he did that. What else could he have done?
As long as Swann continued to write plausible and compelling stories that sold newspapers, his editors thought it best not to inquire into the whys and wherefores of his affinity with madness.
Now why would a schoolmarm kill her pa? He could think of three or four reasons, none of them pretty, and one that they wouldn’t let him say straight out in a family newspaper. He liked that particular reason; maybe he could figure out a way to slide it past the censors. But that was a problem for tomorrow.
He held up the mason jar, peering at the room’s bare lightbulb through the clear moonshine. He was about two swallows from sleep, and then it wouldn’t matter anymore.
NORA
Nora Bonesteel set the old carpetbag satchel on the bed, beside a stack of freshly laundered underclothes and her newly darned wool stockings. There was no point in telling anyone yet that she was leaving, but she didn’t see any harm in taking her time with the packing. She set out one of the cakes of the soap she and Grandma Flossie had made last summer: boiled wood ash and lard, scented with lavender water distilled from plants in her garden. Even country people used store-bought soap nowadays, but her grandmother was particular about things, so she still favored homemade over store-bought.
The Devil Amongst the Lawyers Page 11
