Little Doors

by Paul Di Filippo

  Logically, I realized I was chasing the faintest of ghosts, attempting to track down the living model for a kitschy artifact from another era. I rode now in search of a woman who might no longer even exist, and who, if she still walked this earth, certainly did so on two human legs, not atop a squelching, bent, slab-muscled fish tail. (And would encountering the desired woman and finding her merely mortal from the waist down produce the same sensations in my gut as the undismissable notion of meeting the depicted mermaid?)

  My current course was plotted on the thinnest of clues, equivalent to a dying pirate’s mumbled death-mutterings: a line of tiny print on the otherwise blank obverse of my postcard that read “Distributed by Book & Tackle Shop, P.O. Box 1462, Westerly, RI 02891.”

  And what real excuse, I continued to belabor myself, did I have for dragging my fantasies into action in the real world? That I was a fifty-two-year-old bachelor, retired prematurely from teaching, with nothing better to do with my small sufficiency of time and money? That I was simply extending, from the library and internet into the nonvirtual world, the research that had long satisfied my collector’s soul? Or perhaps I could nobly cast my motives in terms of another person. The mermaid, despite her undeniable elan and vitality, seemed also to exude a kind of world-weariness, a certain weighty sadness or mortal angst. And why not? Would this not be exactly the expression such a chimera would wear, forever suspended between two worlds, neither of which she comfortably fit into, yet neither of which she could happily relinquish?

  And surely, I must have crazily thought at the time, I could help her be happier, as if melding our two sorrows would birth one joy.

  I stopped after the first hundred and fifty miles for breakfast at a roadside McDonald’s. Getting out of the car, I was forced to favor my stiffened lame left leg more than usual. Limping to the restaurant, I fancied myself some wooden-legged sailor just off his whaler.

  The posters inside the McDonald’s coincidentally touted a recently reissued Disney animated film whose heroine synchronized so ironically with the object of my quest that I felt compelled, after using the toilet and ordering, to take my breakfast meal out to my cramped car, rather than eat it under that mockingly tawdry cartoon gaze.

  Having begun my drive before dawn, I crossed the state line into Rhode Island not long after one o’clock in the afternoon.

  Westerly was a border town, lying hard on the coast, and its exit came up quickly. Driving into the town’s compact center, I immediately felt more at ease. The small well-tended community evinced a quaint charm, an old-fashioned grace. Mammoth old stone civic buildings flanked a village green where the grass was still defiantly verdant in the face of impending winter. With the exception of a Starbucks (whose ironic cartoon logo I pointedly ignored), all the stores were non-franchised and exhibited a commercial well-being; the few citizens out strolling on this Wednesday afternoon appeared easygoing and happy. Far from being a clichéd hoary Lovecraftian sump, this town radiated normalcy. Everything appeared prosaic, rational, without the smallest trace of oddness or superstition. This reassuring environment where I hoped to discover—at the very least—more information regarding my mermaid served to remove my delusions from febrile inner twilight into commonsensical sunlight, rendering them simply whimsical.

  Without leaving downtown, I parked outside a diner, heaved my reluctant limbs out of the car, and limped inside. The warm, peopled interior immediately fogged my glasses and filled my nostrils with a wealth of odors: bacon, coffee, wet wool, maple syrup, frying hamburger meat, tobacco. I stopped, removed my glasses, polished them, then found a seat at the counter.

  A white-haired, ruddy-cheeked, apron-clad man immediately approached with steaming glass coffeepot in hand, righted a cup that had been inverted in its saucer before me, and self-assuredly poured me a mug of dark brew.

  “What’ll it be, chief?”

  I picked an item off a hand-lettered placard. “The roast beef dinner sounds good.”

  “Got that right.”

  He turned to leave, but I detained him with a tentatively phrased question.

  “I’m looking for a certain book and tackle shop …?”

  “That’d be Ryecroft’s place, in Watch Hill.”

  “Watch Hill?”

  “Part of the town right on the shore. Just head east on Sulky Street.”

  “Thanks.”

  Another fellow, younger and wiry, turned from a seat further down. “You might not find Ryecroft in his shop. After Labor Day, he keeps it open pretty much only as he pleases. But anyone in Watch Hill can point you to his house.”

  “Thank you. You’re very considerate.”

  “No problem.”

  I had always disliked that modern substitute for “you’re welcome,” but I chose not to let this lapse of etiquette irk me. I felt both queasy and confident, somehow certain that I had not come so far merely to hit a dead end, yet leery of what I might discover about my dream maiden.

  The old man returned shortly with my meal.

  “Noticed you’ve got a bum leg. That stool comfortable enough?”

  “Sure.”

  “Hard to get old. I got plenty of aches myself.”

  “I’m used to it. My leg’s been bad since I was a child. Touch of polio, just before the vaccine came into use.”

  “Lucky enough then.”

  “I suppose so.”

  The tender gravied meat and homemade mashed potatoes and canned carrots went down pleasantly enough, although once in my car again, I couldn’t recall ever tasting them at all.

  * * *

  Past fine homes and lesser ones, motels closed for the season and ice cream and produce stands shuttered tight, beyond an elementary school noisy with recess-rampant children, the queerly named Sulky Street carried me toward the sea. Cresting a rise, I caught sight of the brooding Atlantic, laminated in aluminum. Hard by the water, a small collation of stores defined the neighborhood nucleus of Watch Hill, and I saw that I could drive no further, the road looping back on itself in a circular cul-de-sac.

  I parked in a legal spot on the curve, with no competition for spaces, as my car was the only one present. I stepped out into a bracing breeze, heavy with marine scents and a peppering of fine sand from the beach beginning only a few yards away. A small weather-boarded carousel hunkered down between sidewalk and strand, the ghost of its summertime tinny music almost audible, like a lonely dowager humming to herself. Like all summer resorts beset by winter, Watch Hill radiated a melancholy somnolence, as bracing in its own way as a dignified old age. Most of the stores, all visibly catering to tourists, were closed. Almost immediately, I spotted the Book & Tackle sign on a weathered building, and crossed the empty street directly for it. My heart was thumping uncommonly fast, but I attributed it to the diner’s strong coffee.

  A creaky wooden porch held a dangerously canting bookcase whose sloping boards exactly matched the pitch of the shabby porch roof. The case was stuffed with cheap paperbacks and hardcovers. A sign advised any patron to take what he wanted and stuff the appropriate money through the mailslot. Dusty windows half-obscured with piled material showed only darkness.

  Disheartened, convinced by these tokens that the store was closed, I nonetheless tried the doorknob. Much to my surprise, it yielded, and I stepped quickly inside, out of the cold wind.

  The familiar musty smell of old books congregating enveloped me. I moved a few paces down a narrow aisle hedged by haphazard stacks of books, and into the unheated twilight interior of the store, careful not to dislodge any of the precariously heaped volumes. I turned a corner, and confronted across the width of the store a flyspecked display case filled with fishing lures—their chrome gone rusty in spots—and spools of monofilament line: the “tackle” portion of the shop. Behind the jumbled counter sat a wizened, grizzled elderly fellow wearing a green plastic eyeshade and a tattered archaic lumberman’s plaid jacket.

  “Help you?”

  “No thank you, just browsing.”

/>   I had noted the wire spinner rack full of postcards next to the owner’s—Ryecroft’s—perch, but decided to avoid it for the moment. I turned at random to the nearest shelf, and found myself facing the poetry section. My eye fell on a Faber edition of Eliot, and I took it down. The price penciled inside was much too high, but it was an edition I didn’t own, and so I retained the book as I moved about the cramped store.

  After what I supposed was enough time spent playing the idle customer, I approached the counter and laid my find down. Within Ryecroft’s personal space, I could smell whiskey and pipe tobacco and unwashed hair. “I’ll take this one, please.”

  Gnomishly intent, Ryecroft picked up the book. “Hmph. Not too popular anymore, this oldster.”

  “I’ve always had a fondness for his Prufrock.”

  The bookseller brightened at the prospect of some literary banter. “Dry wearisome codger, that one. ‘Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think they will sing to me.’”

  Ryecroft finished his recitation proudly, but I was too distressed by his accidentally apposite allusion to properly applaud him. Instead, as if suddenly noticing the postcards, I turned to the rack. Spinning it creakily, I instantly spotted my card, a thick stack of dozens. The sight of my familiar mermaid duplicated for the uncaring and undeserving masses raised a feeling of disorientation in me. I plucked a lone, sun-bleached sample of the card and dropped it atop the book.

  “As long as you’ve raised the subject of mermaids, I may as well take this too. I can use it as a bookmark. Rather striking image, isn’t it?”

  Ryecroft glowed. “Ain’t it, though? Big seller, that one. I had that card done up personally.”

  “Really?” I felt on the verge of fainting as I asked my next question. “Who was the model? Someone local?”

  Ryecroft scratched his dandruffy scalp through the ring of his eyeshade. “Lord, I can’t rightly recall. That there photo’s thirty, thirty-five years old, you know.”

  My heart convulsed at the confirmation of my worst suspicions. “Oh. So your mermaid would be at least my age by now.”

  “Yup.”

  Desperation urged words out of my constricted throat. “What about the photographer? Might he still be around?”

  “Nils Standeven? Sure, he’s getting on, like all of us. But he still keeps his studio going. I bet he’d remember the gal he used for this shot.” Ryecroft winked luridly and tapped the postcard with a dirty fingernail. “Probably had good reason to, if half of what I hear about the young Nils and his models is true.”

  I wanted to choke the old man for his vile insinuations, but restrained myself and simply asked, “How much do I owe you?”

  We settled up, and then, as if voicing an afterthought, I said, “Whereabouts is Standeven’s establishment? I might look him up.”

  Without any apparent further interest in my motives, Ryecroft gave me the directions I needed. (Standeven’s place was only a few miles away.) Turning to leave, I noted the westering sun outside—it was past three—and suddenly felt the full weight of my long day. My investigations would have to wait till tomorrow.

  “Is there a nearby motel open at this time of the year?”

  “Not rightly a motel, but there’s a bed-and-breakfast out on Route One, the Mirror and Comb.”

  After learning the way to the B&B, I left Ryecroft’s.

  The owners of the Mirror and Comb, Pete and Nicky Crow, were also Watch Hill’s doctor and druggist. Mr. Crow was responding to a mother in labor, but I caught his pharmacist wife just as she was heading out to open up her store for an emergency prescription. She kindly paused long enough to get me registered and settled.

  Stretched out on the comfortable bed with a cup of tea and some biscuits, I picked up Eliot’s poems, but found myself unable to focus my mental powers sufficiently to read them. Instead, I switched on the television to a random channel, and caught the opening minutes of a Jim Carrey movie, half-recognizing it as a remake of some older film starring Don Knotts. After only minutes, my mind revolving a hundred jumbled thoughts, I fell deeply asleep, shoeless but still dressed, lying atop the coverlet, and didn’t wake till eight the next morning.

  * * *

  Standeven Studios—”Portraits a Speciality”—occupied a small converted church in a mixed residential and business zone. Unpruned bare trees clustered closely around the building, and overgrown evergreen shrubbery encroached on the walkway to the front double doors. The clapboards of the steeple were practically bare of paint, while the lower reaches of the building—about as high as a man on a step- ladder might reach—were hued a rich blue that seemed to sublime at its edges into today’s bright sky.

  The hour was eleven. I had lingered over a good breakfast at the Mirror and Comb, reading a local newspaper that induced a foreigner’s disorientation with its obscure issues and personages, while subliminally puzzling over my emotions. I realized that playing the detective yesterday with Ryecroft had left me feeling foolish. What was I doing here, haunting this faded resort town like a restless ghost? I almost set out for home, then. But in the end, although I did check out of the B&B, thanking the Crows for their service, I drove not south but merely a mile or so west to Standeven’s.

  Knocking on the church doors, I tried to imagine the scene—confrontational or pleasant—that might follow. But nothing prepared me for the sight that met my eyes as the left door swung open under someone’s hand.

  I was looking directly into the unpartitioned nave, flooded with sunlight both unfiltered and also tinted from several stained glass windows. But although there were no interior walls, the space was hardly empty. Quite to the contrary, it was jam-packed with hundreds and hundreds of oddball items, arrayed on cabinets and shelves and tables—props no doubt for the photographer’s trade, a cabinet of curios enlarged beyond sane bounds.

  In the span of a few seconds, I registered several stuffed animals (a gull, a raccoon, a fox, a ferret), dozens of vases, old machine parts, a pile of textile bobbins, antique farm tools, old milk bottles, heaps of horseshoe-crab shells—and these were just the nearest items. The unexpected bazaar seemed endless in its variety and extent.

  On the raised dais of the chancel area, an upright Japanese folding screen partially shielded a rumpled bed which stood next to a sloppy-topped bureau.

  The man on the other side of the door spoke. “Can’t say I like this damn cold one bit, and it’s only early December. Don’t just stand there, friend. Come in.”

  I entered, and Nils Standeven shut the door.

  The photographer was barefoot, dressed in beltless loose-fitting jeans and faded flannel shirt. At least ten or twelve years older than I, he nonetheless still flaunted the vestiges of what must have once been a startling square-jawed handsomeness. Like the well-kept ruin of many a Hollywood star—Mitchum, say, or Heston—he exuded a self-confidence tempered only slightly by the ravages of age. Additionally, an insouciant insulation—derived from what I assumed was a lifelong bohemianism—seemed to protect him from the standard indignities of his years.

  Standeven regarded me with neutral blue eyes. “How can I help you? If you want to book my services for a wedding, I have to tell you right off that I’m busy every weekend between now and New Year’s. Lord, these local kids are mating like swans! Even got a couple of dates involving old duffers like us. But it’s never too late for love, right?”

  I opted for a truthful approach. “No, no, it’s not a wedding. I’m interested in a postcard you once did.”

  Presented with the card I had purchased yesterday, Standeven narrowed his eyes. “Should’ve known. Out of all the cards I made up for Ryecroft over four decades, that’s the only one anyone ever asks about. Just my fate to be remembered for a stupid damn cut-and-paste job, rather than all the beautiful work I’ve poured my heart into.”

  Talk of other interested parties worried me,
but I focused instead on the mention of artifice. “Cut-and-paste?”

  Standeven laughed heartily. “Hell, you didn’t figure she was real, did you? Would I be living in goddamn Westerly, Rhode Island, if I had discovered a real mermaid? Her back half’s a trout. I hand-painted the scales where they join her belly.”

  I must have looked crestfallen or disbelieving, because Standeven immediately hustled off to rummage among his disordered props. After a minute of muted grumbling and cursing, he returned with a whole mounted fish whose body, although worse for the years, was plainly identical with the image in the postcard.

  I felt the need to sit down, but no chair presented itself. My gimpy leg trembled, but all I could do was stammer, “And—and the woman? Just some anonymous model clipped from the skin magazines, I suppose?”

  Standeven laid down the trophy and regarded me solemnly. “No sir, she’s real enough. A local gal. Happens I know her quite well.”

  “Could—could you tell me her name?”

  “What’s your interest in her?”

  “Nothing untoward. I’d just like to meet her.”

  “I don’t know—”

  Inspiration struck. “I’m a collector. I’d like both you and her to sign the card. It will increase its value considerably.”

  “Collector, huh? Where was the Teich Company headquarters?”

  “Chicago. Founded 1896, closed 1974. I’ve been to the museum that holds their archives, in Wauconda, Illinois.”

  Standeven remained silent for a long moment, until I was convinced I had lost him. Certain of defeat, I almost failed to comprehend his approval.

  “Her name’s Margot, Margot Tench. She lives just outside the town, on Cliffside Road. Margot don’t see so many people nowadays that I suppose she’d mind a visit from a fan.”

  “Thank you, thank you so much.” I turned to leave, and Standeven stopped me.

  “What about me signing your souvenir?”