The Man in the Tree

by Damon Knight

  "Irma, I forgot to ask you where to put these letters when I'm done -- back in the office?"

  "Oh. I never told you, did I. Come on, I might as well give you the fifty-cent tour while I'm at it. Pongo, you going to be here for a while?"

  "Sure, go ahead."

  In the hallway, Irma gestured toward the stairway with its wrought-iron railing that led up to the back of the house. "Here's where you go upstairs, if you don't like ramps. It brings you out on the balcony up there, but we'll go the other way." They walked through the living room to the corridor and passed Margaret's office. Irma opened the next door. "Library."

  It was a big room paneled in walnut, with a fireplace, a long table in the center with a few stacks of books on it, and empty shelves all around. "Books haven't come yet," Irma said. "That'll be a job." She closed the door. "The rest of these rooms down here are empty."

  Next came a ramp, like the one in the living room but much narrower. As they started up, Margaret was thinking with respect of the architect who had designed this house. He had had an impossible problem and had solved it beautifully: the sunken areas in the kitchen and living room that made it possible for Anderson to talk face to face with normal people; the ramps, because he couldn't use an ordinary staircase. To Anderson, she thought, this must be like living in a house built partly for dolls. "Munchkins," she said aloud.

  "What?"

  "I was just thinking. The Munchkins -- you know, the little people in 'The Wizard of Oz.'"

  "Oh."

  The door at the end of the balcony opened onto a study. All the furniture here was scaled to Anderson's dimensions, the desk, drawing table, couch, chairs, coffee table. The room was almost as big as the kitchen, but it looked much smaller because of the ramp that rose around two sides.

  "This part is all Gene's," said Irma. "This is his study, or den, or whatever you want to call it, and in there is his sitting room." Through the open doorway Margaret could see a huge cushioned Morris chair with a shelf on either side, on which books and papers were stacked, and a sort of tilted lapboard on a swivel which held an open dictionary. "What he likes is for you to come when he's not here, put the letters on the desk for him to sign, pick up anything in his out basket. When he's here, he hates to be disturbed, so always make sure before you go up. You can go in the sitting room, too, if you have a reason. Up there is his bedroom, and that's out of bounds. He even cleans it himself."

  "That sounds awfully lonely," Margaret said after a moment.

  "Maybe so." Irma led her back to the balcony and through a doorway into a long passage that ran the width of the house. "Most of these rooms are empty," she said. "Here's mine. Come in and sit down awhile -- Pongo will mind the store."

  They were in a cheerful living room with floral covers on the furniture, flowers in a vase, a huge TV screen. In one corner, over a little desk, was a duplicate of the intercom system in the kitchen. "Excuse me a minute," Irma said. She went to the intercom, pushed a putton. "Pongo ?"

  "Yeah."

  "We're in my room. If you want to go somewhere before we get back, push the slave button."

  "Okay."

  Irma sat down opposite Margaret and put her feet up on a hassock. "Now let's talk," she said. "Anything you're wondering about -- any questions?"

  "I don't understand why he doesn't hire more people. You work so hard, and Pongo -- does he do all the cooking?"

  "And the marketing, and goes to the post office every day, and so on. I know what you're saying. Gene could have a staff of servants in here, security guards and all that, but he can't bear having anybody around that he doesn't know. He's spooky about intruders -- you saw that. There isn't even a fire escape to his apartment up there. Building code says you have to have one, so he had it built, waited till after inspection, then tore it down and hauled it away."

  "Doesn't he have any family, or friends, I mean besides you and Pongo?"

  "He knows a few people here. He was out of the country for twenty years; when he got back he put a little ad in 'Amusement Business,' but I was the only one that answered it. All the people he used to know in the carnival are dead and gone, or else scattered who knows where."

  "You were in the carnival?"

  "Carnival, and then in the circus. My husband and I had a juggling act -- the Amazing Raimondis. Ray left me a little money when he died. I didn't have anything else to do, so I came down here to work for Gene."

  "Ray was your husband?"

  "My second. He died on Christmas Day, nineteen seventy-six. Heart attack."

  "I'm sorry."

  "That's all right. He was a real bastard. Speaking of Christmas," Irma said, "we have a rule here that you don't give anybody anything made by a machine. If you can make your own presents, Gene would like that, or if you can't, find something that was hand made by some one person."

  "I see."

  Irma gave her a bright glance. "Do you? Look, if you give him something that anybody can buy in a store, even if it costs five hundred dollars, that's like giving him money. He wants something he hasn't got." She lifted a heap of material from a workbasket beside her chair. "Like, I'm making him this quilt. The damn thing is ten feet long. Pongo will probably make him a belt or something -- he does leatherwork."

  Margaret bent to examine the unfinished quilt, diamonds and stars of pale rose, blue, white, corn yellow. "Oh, this is beautiful. But I couldn't do anything like that."

  "You never know till you try," Irma said. She stood up. "Let's go on back -- Pongo will be wanting to make his post-office run. Are you through for the day?"

  "I guess so, there's nothing more on my desk. Oh, I forgot to look in his out basket."

  "That's all right, I did. You go on home and relax."

  The next day there were paintings hanging all along the balcony wall; Anderson was putting one up in the living room when she arrived. She found a disk in his out-basket upstairs, and several letters marked in his meticulous handwriting, "Tell him no." After some hesitation, she translated this into: "Mr. Anderson has asked me to acknowledge your letter of and to tell you how sorry he is that under present circumstances he does not feel able to accept your interesting proposal." She signed these letters; "Margaret W. Morrow, Secretary to Mr. Anderson."

  "I thought it would be better, more of a polite brushoff, if these came from me," she explained at lunch. "And it's less work for you; is that all right?"

  "Fine, Maggie. A little more polite than I would have been, but okay."

  Pongo served another incredible meal: lemon soup, turtle steak, shrimp in mustard sauce, and a huge Greek salad with anchovies, black olives, and feta cheese, all in addition to Anderson's porterhouse. Margaret began to wonder what Pongo's dinners were like; if this kept on, she would have to start thinking about a diet.

  After lunch Anderson went back to his picture hanging, refusing Margaret's offer of help. "You're not dressed for it," he said, "and anyhow it's a one-man job." Margaret typed two more letters, left them in Anderson's in-basket, tidied her desk.

  On her way out she asked Irma, "Would it be all right if I walk around outside a little before I go home7"

  "Sure it would. You'd better wear a hat, though. That sun is fierce, and you're burned already."

  Margaret put on her dark glasses and went out into the glare. She got her wide-brimmed hat from the car, then strolled up past the garage and the storeroom. Above her the hill began, planted in ferns and flowering shrubs. On a tree with pale bark and narrow boat-shaped leaves she saw a brown lizard with a startling orange throat-pouch. The pouch swelled like a balloon, disappeared; the lizard bobbed its narrow head three times, then the pouch swelled again. It seemed to pay no attention to her until she was almost near enough to touch it; then it whirled and flicked out of sight around the branch.

  The driveway curved off to the left and disappeared around the shoulder of the hill. Beyond it, a winding path covered with bark mulch led upward between waist-high shrubs. When she had climbed a few yards, she
turned for a better view of the house. It was U-shaped around the garden, thirty feet tall except at the far end, where a sort of tower rose another twenty feet. The roofs were all of Spanish tile, and the house looked vaguely Spanish, with its wrought-iron balconies, except for the modern gleam of the glass doors that opened into the living room.

  She went on into the cool shadow of the trees. First they were birches and maples, then young oaks, then pines of an unfamiliar variety, and some other trees that she could not identify. Moss and ferns grew thickly between the trunks; the bark-mulch was gone now and she was walking on a narrow dirt path; she might have been in a northern forest, except that everything was too perfect, too beautifully cared for.

  Around the next bend she came upon an old man on his knees beside a wheelbarrow full of bulbs. He had been digging with a trowel near the trunk of a maple; he looked up alertly under the brim of his shapeless hat. "Afternoon."

  "Hello," Margaret said.

  "Visiting, are you?".

  "No, I'm Mr. Anderson's new secretary. Margaret Morrow."

  "Glen Hoke is my name. I put in all this here." He waved the trowel vaguely at the forest around them.

  "You mean, the ferns, and flowers?"

  "No, I mean the whole thing. Been working here a year. He's a crazy man. He built this hill, you know."

  "He built the hill?"

  "Sure. There's no hill like this in Florida. Brought in crushed rock and bulldozers, then topsoil. Must of been near ten thousand yards of topsoil. Then trees, and all the rest of it. You know what it cost him for this one tree?" He slapped the trunk of the maple beside him. "Seven hundred dollars. That's one tree."

  "I didn't even know you could transplant a tree that big."

  "You can, if you want to pay for it. The brook over there, have you seen that?"

  "No."

  "Drilled six hundred feet, put in a pump, dug a channel and lined it with rock. There's your brook. Seems like you could build a house where there was a brook."

  "You don't really mean you did all this by yourself, do you, Mr. Hoke?"

  "No, no." He looked impatient. "I had a whole crew in here, twenty men at one time. I'm a contractor, but hell, he pays me enough, and I take an interest."

  "You say the brook is over that way?"

  "Just follow the path. Nice meeting you, Miss."

  The trail forked, and forked again; Margaret took the downhill branch both times, and presently found herself descending into a ravine cool with willows. She heard the brook before she saw it: it ran bright and transparent over red stones. It was narrow enough, almost, to jump over, but a little farther down there was a little Japanese footbridge, sunbleached and sturdy, looking as if it had been there forever.

  After another few yards she heard the water change its tone, and saw that it fell over a miniature precipice into a thirty-foot pool, deep enough for diving at one end. Beside the pool, in a shaded grassy place, something white hung from a limb. When she came near enough, she saw that it was a towel.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Margaret stayed in the cabin at Site O'Sea until the end of the week, partly because she had paid in advance and partly out of a superstitious feeling that her job was too good to last. On Friday, when Irma handed her a check and said nothing but "Have a good weekend, honey," she began to believe in her luck. She went househunting over the weekend and found a furnished two-room apartment in Madeira Beach, overlooking the bay. She also found time to shop for clothes: modest, well-tailored sundresses, skirts and blouses in unobtrusive pale colors, several pairs of shoes and sandals, and two linen dusters with vast pockets.

  When she came to work on Monday, she knew she had been right to wear a duster when she glanced through the open door of the library and saw Anderson on his knees beside an open carton, pulling books out in handfuls and looking at them. "Moldy," he said to her, holding one up to show her the pale corruption that had spread across the cover. He brushed his hand over it, and when he put it down, by some trick of the light, it looked better. "The whole carton is, not worth the trouble."

  "I could get something from the kitchen and wipe them off."

  "Okay."

  She came back with a rag and a bowl of water in which, on Irma's advice, she had mixed a couple of tablespoons of vinegar.

  "If I put these on the table," Anderson said, "could you make a list of the titles and authors?"

  "Sure." Margaret found a normal-sized chair, pulled it up to the table and sat down. "Where have they been, to get like this?"

  "In storage in Europe, some of them as long as fifteen years." He put a stack of books on the table. "Dirty work."

  "It's okay, I'm dressed for it." She held up the book she was looking at. "This is so beautiful. Is it a book about the Tarot?"

  "Not exactly. It's a novel, but the Italian edition has these tipped-in reproductions of fifteenth-century Tarot cards. They are beautiful, aren't they? Nobody does that kind of work in this country."

  Anderson went back to the cartons, stacked more books, and finally sat back on his haunches with a discouraged expression. After a moment she said, "Moving is awful."

  "It isn't that, but I think I've bitten off more than I can chew. I'm no librarian; I'm going to have to hire somebody."

  "To shelve the books, and catalog them? I could do that."

  He turnedand gave her a skeptical look. "Do you know the Dewey Decimal System?"

  "They don't use that anymore, it's all the Library of Congress System now. No, I don't know either one, but neither do you, so what good would it be? What you want is a system you can understand, so you can find a book when you want it."

  "So?"

  "So, novels in one place, art books in another, biography, science, whatever. I'll put labels on the shelves, and each book will have a sticker to show where it belongs. Books you're through with, that you want reshelved, you can put at one end of the table and I'll take care of them. Yes?"

  "Yes, Maggie. Do it."

  "And, books in foreign languages, I'll put on another part of the table with little slips of paper in them. And you can write on each one what kind of book it is, and then I'll know."

  "Okay."

  Every day, seeing Gene was almost like seeing him for the first time: there was a shock of wrongness, as if someone had come through a magnifying glass. His hands fascinated her; they were tanned, shapely, unscarred, with neatly trimmed nails, and they were twelve inches long from wrist to fingertip. Since the first day, when they shook hands, he had not touched her. She found herself wondering what it would be like.

  Gene's habits were regular. He spent his mornings in the workshop, where he was fitting together an intricate inlaid tabletop. In the afternoon, he read his mail and dictated replies or annotated the letters for Margaret's attention. Most of his mail orders now were for books, some new, some from collector's catalogs.

  Every afternoon Margaret worked on cataloging the books. Gene was impatient to get them on the shelves, but he understood that it would save time to do the cataloging first. When she realized how long a job it was going to be she began working straight through to dinnertime. Pongo's dinners were even more amazing than his lunches: one day it would be turkey mole with guacamole and corn fritters, the next coq au vin and carrot soufflé, the next a Middle Eastern lamb and apricot stew, with chickpeas and olive oil flavored with garlic.

  The first time she went back to the library for another hour's work after dinner, Irma gave her a curious ironic smile.

  The house was even bigger than she had realized. There was a dining room, never used so far, with a table that would seat twenty. Under the back stairway was a room fitted out with a huge reclining chair that could be used for haircuts or dentistry. There was a central music system with outlets all over the house; you could play any record or tape by looking it up in the catalog and punching in the number.

  Books with slips of paper in them began to appear in Gene's out-basket. The slips marked pages on which passages
had been outlined in pencil; some were annotated in Gene's precise tiny hand. Guessing at his intention, Margaret typed the passages single-spaced, one to a page even if it was short, and indented Gene's commentary. All he said was, "Maggie, I forgot to tell you these ought to be punched for a ring binder.' Punch them, will you, and after this use binder paper."

  She could not discern any pattern in the things he was reading. Most were popular works on science or quasi-science; evolutionary theory, genetics, psychology, sociology, history. In one book he had written: "Is the problem that the gene's selfishness is not enlightened?"

  At the end of the second week she made a down payment on a car, a three-year-old red Datsun. On the following Wednesday, after dinner, when Pongo had gone back to his cottage and Anderson had disappeared for the night, Irma said to her, "Gene thinks there's no point in your driving back and forth every day when we've got so much room here. If you want to move into one of the cottages, or upstairs, it's okay."