by Auster, Paul
I had no idea what I was saying. The words tumbled out of me in a mad rush, an unstoppable deluge of nonsense and overcooked emotions, and when I came to the end of my ridiculous speech, I saw that Rachel was smiling, smiling for the first time since she had walked into the restaurant. Perhaps that was all I could hope to accomplish. To let her know that I was with her, that I believed in her, and that the situation probably wasn’t as dark as she thought it was. If nothing else, the smile told me that she was beginning to calm down, and as I kept on talking, I slowly steered her away from the subject at hand, knowing that the best medicine would be to make her forget Terrence for a while, to stop her from dwelling on the problem that had been obsessing her for weeks. Chapter by chapter, I filled her in on all the things that had happened to me since we’d last been together. Essentially, it was a truncated version of everything I’ve set down in this book so far. No, not quite everything – since I edited out the story of Marina and the other necklace (too sad, too humiliating), said nothing about my ugly telephone conversation with the unmentionable one, and spared her the painful details of the Scarlet Letter hoax. But nearly all the other elements were accounted for: The Book of Human Folly, cousin Tom, Harry Brightman, little Lucy, the trip to Vermont, Tom’s fling with Honey Chowder, the contents of Harry’s will, Tina Hott mouthing the words of “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man.” Rachel listened closely, doing her best to absorb so much startling information as she swallowed her food and drank her wine. As for me, the more I talked, the more I enjoyed myself. I had slipped into the role of ancient mariner, and I could have gone on spinning my tales until the end of the night. Rachel was especially eager to meet Lucy, and so we arranged for her to visit my apartment the following Sunday – with or without her husband, as she preferred. She was also looking forward to seeing Tom, she said, and then she asked the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, “What about Honey? Do you think anything is going to happen?”
“I doubt it,” I said. “Tom left his number with her father and asked him to give it to her, but she hasn’t called. And as far as I know, Tom hasn’t called her. If I were a betting man, I’d say we’ve seen the last of Honey. Too bad, but the case appears to be closed.”
As usual, I was wrong. Exactly two weeks after my dinner with Rachel, on the last Friday of the month, Honey Chowder came striding into the bookstore wearing a white summer dress and a large straw hat with a floppy brim. It was five o’clock in the afternoon. Tom was sitting behind the front counter, reading an old softcover edition of The Federalist Papers. I had already picked up Lucy at camp, and she and I were in the back of the store, rearranging books in the History section. Not a single customer had been in for the past two hours, and the only sound to be heard was the muffled whir of an electric fan.
Lucy’s face brightened when she saw Honey walk in. She was about to go running toward her, but I put my hand on her arm and whispered, “Not yet, Lucy. Give them a chance to talk first.” Honey, whose eyes were fixed on Tom, hadn’t noticed we were there. Like two secret agents, our girl and yours truly hid behind one of the bookcases and observed the following exchange.
“Hey there, Tom,” Honey said, plopping her purse down on the counter. Then she removed her hat and shook out her long, opulent hair. “How’s life?”
Tom glanced up from his book and said, “Good Lord, Honey. What are you doing here?”
“We’ll get to that later. First, I want to know how you are.”
“Not bad. Busy, a bit stressed out, but not bad. A lot has happened since I last saw you. My boss died, and it seems that I’ve inherited this store. I’m still trying to figure out what to do with it.”
“I’m not talking about business. I’m talking about you. The inner workings of your heart.”
“My heart? It’s still beating. Seventy-two times a minute.”
“Which means you’re still alone, doesn’t it? If you’d fallen in love with someone, it would beat much faster than that.”
“Love? What are you talking about?”
“You haven’t met anyone in the past month, have you?”
“No. Of course not. I’ve been much too busy.”
“Do you remember Vermont?”
“How could I forget it?”
“And the last night you were there. Do you remember that?”
“Yes. I remember that night.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“What do you see when you look at me, Tom?”
“I don’t know, Honey. I see you. Honey Chowder. A woman with an impossible name. An impossible woman with an impossible name.”
“Do you know what I see when I look at you, Tom?”
“I’m not sure I want to know.”
“I see a great man, that’s what I see. I see the finest person I’ve ever met.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, oh. And because that’s what I see when I look at you, I’ve chucked everything and come down to Brooklyn to be part of your life.”
“Chucked everything?”
“That’s right. The school year ended two days ago, and I gave them notice. I’m free as a bird.”
“But Honey, I’m not in love with you. I hardly even know you.”
“You will.”
“Will what?”
“First, you’ll get to know me. And then you’ll start to love me.”
“Just like that.”
“Yes. Just like that.” She paused for a moment and smiled. “How’s Lucy, by the way?”
“Lucy’s fine. She’s living with Nathan on First Street.”
“Poor Nathan. He’s not up to all that work. The girl needs a mother. From now on, she’ll live with us.”
“You’re awfully damn sure of yourself, aren’t you?”
“I have to be, Tom. If I wasn’t sure of myself, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t have all my bags waiting outside in the car. I wouldn’t know that you were the man of my life.”
At that point, I figured they had said enough to each other, and I let Lucy come out of hiding. She rushed across the room, heading straight for Honey.
“There you are, my little munchkin,” the ex-schoolteacher said, wrapping our girl in her arms and lifting her off the ground. When she finally put her down again, she asked, “Did you hear what Tom and I were saying?”
Lucy nodded.
“And what do you think?”
“I think it’s a nice plan,” Lucy said. “If I live with you and Uncle Tom, I won’t have to eat in restaurants anymore. You’ll stuff me with all that tasty food you cook. And Uncle Nat can eat with us whenever he likes. And when you and Uncle Tom go out on the town, he can be my babysitter.”
Honey grinned. “And you’re going to be a good girl, aren’t you? The best girl in the world.”
“No, ma’am,” Lucy said, looking back at her with the deadest of deadpan faces. “I’m gonna be bad. I’m gonna be the baddest, meanest, cussingest little girl in the whole of God’s creation.”
HAWTHORN STREET OR HAWTHORNE STREET?
Months passed. By the middle of October, the lawyers had finished their work on Harry’s estate, and Tom and Rufus had become the legitimate owners of Brightman’s Attic and the building it was housed in. Tom and Honey were already married by then, and Lucy, silent as ever on the subject of her mother’s whereabouts, was enrolled as a fifth grader at the local public school, P.S. 321. Rachel was still with Terrence. One week after the Wood-Chowder wedding, she called to tell me that she was two months pregnant.
I continued to work in the bookstore, but after Honey’s dramatic appearance at the end of June, we began sharing the job, which meant that I had to be there only half the time. On my days off I continued jotting down anecdotes for The Book of Human Folly, and just as Lucy had suggested, I filled in as babysitter whenever Tom and Honey went out at night. In their first months together, that proved to be a common occurrence. Honey had felt starved in the provinces, and now that she had landed in New York, she wanted t
o take advantage of everything the city had to offer: plays, movies, concerts, dance performances, poetry readings, moonlight jaunts on the Staten Island ferry. It did me good to see how the slothful, bovine Tom flourished under the energetic influence of his newfound wife. Within days of Honey’s arrival, he ceased dithering about what to do with the inheritance and decided to put the building on the market. With their half of the money from the sale, they would have more than enough to buy a two-or three-bedroom apartment in the neighborhood, along with something left over to carry them until they found regular jobs – most likely as teachers in a private school for the next academic year. Months passed, and by mid-October Tom had lost close to twenty pounds, which brought him halfway back to resembling the young Dr. Thumb of yore. Home cooking obviously agreed with him, and in spite of his predictions to the contrary, Honey didn’t wear him out or beat him down or crush his spirit. Day by day, she slowly turned him into the man he was always destined to become.
With so many positive developments in the love department, the reader might be lulled into thinking that universal happiness reigned over our little patch of Brooklyn. Alas, not all marriages are destined to survive. Everyone knows that, but who among us would have guessed that the least happy person in the neighborhood during those months was Tom’s former flame, the Beautiful Perfect Mother? It was true that her husband had made a bad impression on me in the woods of Prospect Park, but not in a hundred years would I have supposed he was dumb enough to take a wife like his for granted. The Nancy Mazzucchellis of this world are few and far between, and if a man should be lucky enough to win a Mazzucchelli heart, his job from that point on is to do everything in his power not to lose it. But men (as I have amply demonstrated in earlier chapters of this book) are stupid creatures, and pretty boy James Joyce turned out to be stupider than most. Because Nancy’s mother and I struck up a friendship that summer (more about that later), I was a frequent dinner guest of the family, and it was within the precincts of their house on Carroll Street that I learned about Jimmy’s past transgressions and saw his marriage to Nancy burst asunder. The tomfoolery had started even before there was such a person as the B.P.M. – a good six years back, when Nancy was pregnant with her first child, Devon. When she learned about her husband’s affair with a Tribeca barmaid, she temporarily threw him out of the house, but once the baby was born, she didn’t have the strength to resist his tearful promises that it would never happen again. But words count for little in such matters, and who knows how many secret liaisons followed? By Joyce’s estimate, there were no less than seven or eight, counting one-night stands and quick fucks in the back stairwell at work. Nancy, ever generous and forgiving, tended to discount the rumors. But then Jim fell for fellow Foley walker Martha Ives, and that was that. He said he was in love, and on August 11, 2000, two months after I first saw him at Harry’s funeral service, he packed up his bags and left.
Twelve days later, my oncologist told me that my lungs were still clean.
A scant four days after that, Rachel, in cahoots with Tom and Honey, hatched a devilish plot to trick me into thinking I was about to attend a ball game at Shea Stadium – when in fact it was a surprise party for my sixtieth birthday. The plan was for me to pick up Tom at his apartment, but the moment I walked through the door, a dozen people mobbed me with hugs, kisses, and slaps on the back, not to mention an outburst of wild shouting and singing. I was so unprepared for this assault of good will, I nearly threw up from the shock it gave to my system. The festivities lasted well into the night, and at one point I was prevailed upon to stand up and deliver a speech. The champagne had long since gone to my head, and I think I rambled for some time, spouting gibberish and incoherent jokes as my half-potted audience struggled to follow what I was saying. About the only thing that comes back to me from that screwy discourse is a brief aside on the linguistic acumen of Casey Stengel. If memory serves me right, I think I even ended my talk with a quotation from the master himself. “They didn’t call him the Old Professor for nothing,” I said. “Not only was he the first manager of our beloved Mets, but, even more essential to the general good of mankind, he was the author of numerous sentences that have reshaped our understanding of the English language. Before I sit down, allow me to leave you with this priceless, unforgettable pearl, which sums up my own experience more accurately than any statement I’ve come across in the sixty years I’ve dwelled inside this flesh: ‘There comes a time in every man’s life, and I’ve had plenty of them.’”
The Subway Series came and went; the weather turned cool; Gore was running against Bush. To my mind, the outcome was never in doubt. Even with Nader gumming up the works, it seemed impossible that the Democrats could be defeated, and wherever I went in the neighborhood, almost everyone I talked to was of the same opinion. Only Tom, the most pessimistic of men when it came to American politics, looked worried. He believed it was too close to call, and if Bush turned out to be the winner, he said, we could forget all that claptrap about “compassionate conservatism.” The man wasn’t a conservative. He was an ideologue of the extreme right, and the instant he was sworn into office, the government would be controlled by lunatics.
Just one week before the election, Aurora finally surfaced – only to vanish again within thirty seconds. Contact came in the form of a telephone call to Tom, but no one was in the apartment that morning, and therefore we had nothing to go on but a truncated message left on the answering machine. I don’t know how many times I listened to that message with Tom and Honey, but we rewound the tape often enough for me to have memorized every sentence of it. Each time I heard her voice, she sounded a little more despairing, a little more on edge, a little more afraid. She spoke softly, barely rising above a whisper from start to finish, but her words were so deadly, they carried all the impact of a scream.
Tom. It’s me, Rory. I’m calling from a pay phone and I don’t have much time. I know you’ve probably had it with me, but I’ve been missing Lucy so much, I just wanted to find out how she is. Don’t think it was fun, Tommy. I thought and thought, but you were the only person I could count on. She couldn’t stay here anymore. It’s all going to pieces. It’s bad news. I’ve been trying to get out myself, but it’s too hard, I’m never alone … Write me a letter, okay? I don’t have a phone, but you can reach me at eighty-seven Hawthorn Street in … Shit. Gotta go. Sorry. Gotta go.
The receiver slammed down on the hook, and the long-awaited call came to a sudden, inconclusive end. Our darkest anxieties had assumed the weight of fact, and still we had no idea where she was. Tom had been through similar moments with his sister in the past, and though he felt every bit as worried about her as I did, his alarm was tempered by exhaustion, by irritation, by years of disappointment and regret. “She’s the most irresponsible person I’ve ever known,” he said. “Lucy’s finally beginning to settle in with us, and now, after how many goddamn months, she calls to say she’s missing her. What kind of mother is that? She wants me to write to her, and then she doesn’t even tell us what town she lives in. It isn’t fair, Nathan. Honey and I are doing all we can to help, and the last thing we need is more confusion, more drama. Enough is enough.”
“It might not be fair,” I said, “but Rory’s in some kind of trouble, and we have to find her. There’s no other choice. Spare me your judgments until later, all right?”
The entire world changed for me after that. The 2000 election disaster was just a few days down the road, but even as Tom and Honey sat horrified in front of their television set for the next five weeks, watching the Republican Party call in their thugs to challenge the Florida returns and then manipulate the Supreme Court into staging a legal coup on their behalf, even as these offenses were committed against the American people and my nephew and his wife marched in demonstrations, sent letters to their congressman, and signed countless protests and petitions, I was preoccupied with only one thing: to hunt down Rory and bring her back to New York.
Eighty-seven Hawthorn Street. Or
maybe it was Hawthorne Street, named after a man instead of a shrub – perhaps even Nathaniel Hawthorne, the long-dead novelist who had inadvertently caused the death of our sad, luckless friend. A bitter conjunction, signifying little or nothing, but spooky for all that, as if the same word appearing in two different contexts established a subterranean link between Harry and Aurora: the one gone forever, the other just beyond reach, both denizens of the invisible. Apart from that single clue, everything was blind guesswork, but because Lucy spoke with a southern accent, and because she had placed her mother in the nonexistent land of Carolina Carolina, I decided to begin my search in the real Carolinas, North and South. The pity was that Aurora and her husband didn’t have a phone. If they had been listed in the book, it would have been possible to call information for every town and city in both states and find them by asking for the number of David Minor at 87 Hawthorn (e) Street. A laborious task, but one that was bound to yield a positive result. Since that option wasn’t available to me, I had no choice but to proceed in reverse. One Sunday, I took the train down to Princeton Junction and spent twelve hours sitting in front of a computer screen with my pregnant daughter and her meek, chastened husband. Terrence might have lacked charm, but he was a technological superhero, and by the time I returned home the next morning, I had a printout that listed every Hawthorn Street and Hawthorne Street in both Carolinas. To my stupefaction, there were several hundred of them. Too many. In order to visit every number 87 on the list, I would have been on the road for six months.
