The Eastern Shore

by Ward Just

  Leatrice Grant had no idea of her husband’s wretched past. He had told her he had been in the navy, hence the scars on his face. Not a childhood accident at all but the result of a mission on navy business. She must never speak of it. The mission was highly classified. That evening was an evening like any other, except that William was unusually quiet. He put the children to bed and read them a story amid squeals of laughter. He and Leatrice watched television until ten, then went to bed themselves. Leatrice had the idea they might fool around a little, her demure reference to sex. But William was reluctant. He was, as he said, bushed, a refusal most unlike him. But he came around as he always did, a little rough at the end but Leatrice with her rangy body liked that. He fell asleep at once while she lingered for a while. The next morning, Leatrice woke late. Her husband had left the bedroom early, had showered and shaved, and returned to kiss his wife goodbye and said softly that he loved her very much, what he always said when he left the house to go to work. Leatrice smiled and slept on. She herself had a hair appointment at ten. William would see to the children.

  When Leatrice opened the garage door she saw her husband hanging in the shadows of the top rafter, naked except for undershorts. His face was bloated, eyes wide open in a death stare, and for the briefest moment she did not recognize him. Then she took a step back, unwilling to believe what was in front of her eyes. Then she screamed, a long, loud wail of anguish and horror. She pitched to the floor of the garage and there she remained until the neighbors, alarmed at what they heard through the open garage door, came slowly to the driveway to find Leatrice and then William. For the longest time no one moved, the neighbors stricken, frozen in place in a kind of pantomime. It took a minute or two before someone called the police. Who would volunteer to collect David and Eugene at school? Their grandfather, of course. He must be told at once, and a doctor to see to poor Leatrice. Several of the women gathered up Leatrice and helped her inside the house. She had lost control of her limbs and did not speak. Her eyes were closed.

  The note was soon discovered and handed discreetly to Leatrice’s father when he arrived. The note said, Fuck You All. There was no signature. Howard Elias put the note in his pocket without reading it and did not appear to understand what it was. At last a friend told him that the boys should be picked up at school and volunteered to drive Howard the few blocks. Howard agreed, but only after he had seen his daughter. He stepped inside the house and closed the door. By that time the early edition of the Press-Gazette was on the street, the distinctive green trucks all over downtown Herman. “A Second Life” was displayed on page one, above the fold. No one could miss it. Later that day, Howard Elias read Grant’s note and tore it to pieces.

  The weeks following William Grant’s death were an ordeal. Reporters from as far away as Los Angeles and London arrived to cover the story, so dense with nuance and irony, and mystery also. The out-of-town reporters were brash and soon learned that Leatrice and her boys were staying with relatives in Chicago, and so a part of the pack sped north, laying siege to a brownstone near the Edgewater Beach Hotel, said to be the family’s place of refuge. However, the siege failed: Leatrice refused to show her face, and indeed some doubted that she and the boys were in Chicago at all, and so in time the reporters returned to Herman.

  In two weeks, Leatrice and her boys returned to Herman for the delayed burial of William Grant, held at a late hour and lasting a bare fifteen minutes. There were no eulogies, only the reading of a single psalm followed by ten minutes of silence. The press was kept at a distance, cordoned off from the ceremony until the family had departed. Ned Ayres found himself surrounded, asked to identify the mourners, and Ned obliged, pointing out the mayor and the city treasurer, the police chief and the principal of the high school, all in dark suits. Ned omitted mention of his father the judge, who was in a foul mood that day. Ned thought it a charade, his impromptu briefing, a session with the most senior correspondents flown in for the occasion, including three television newsreaders with their impedimenta, cameramen and soundmen with their heavy cameras and glaring lights; it was early days in the television trade, the newsreaders ill at ease owing to the nature of the story, its grisly aspect, its pathos. Children might be listening in. The townspeople looked on aghast. Couldn’t these outsiders wait a decent interval? Everyone was moving now, the mourners holding umbrellas in the light rain that had just begun to fall, the reporters attempting interviews, most of the attempts unsuccessful. The mourners were both appalled and mystified by the hostile army that had insinuated itself into their private grief. Uncle Ralph had stood a little apart, but now he turned and pointed his umbrella at the assembled press. We know who you are! he cried. You are welcome to join us, you and your men, he said, nodding at a British correspondent, the tall one in a trench coat, the one with military bearing. In different circumstances Judge Ayres would have restrained his brother, but on this occasion he did nothing. When the cameras turned toward him, Uncle Ralph appeared to have a fit, his arms flailing, spittle flying from his mouth. The judge moved to put his arms around his brother but Uncle Ralph broke free and soon enough was on the ground entangled in the umbrella. The cameras moved elsewhere, searching for the widow and her children. But Leatrice and the boys had slipped away quietly, surrounded by friends. In the end all that remained was the freshly dug grave with its naked cross, the name and the name’s dates yet to be carved. Ned remained there a while, the press having moved off in a pack, the mourners dispersing, the rain continuing to fall.

  That night the judge said to his son, You’re in a nasty business. Corrupt at its heart. A jury of voyeurs. Don’t you think?

  They’re people doing a job, Ned said, and left the room.

  Ned Ayres’s curiosity was focused on the pencil press, the inquiring faces and piercing eyes, a notebook always near to hand. They carried themselves with authority, most of them, a necessary part of the democratic process, meaning any event with national reach. They were especially interested in the lore and legends of Herman. What made Herman tick? What did people do for amusement? The most dogged was a Boston reporter named Finn, barely five and a half feet tall, tousled hair, freckles, always laughing—when he was not at the ball diamond, the tennis court, the golf course, the pool table, or the pool, a scratch player in all sports. He resembled one of Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post mischievous kids and therefore not highly valued by the other reporters. A rascal. Not serious. Drank sparingly. Finn happily spent time with Ned, urging him not to remain an editor. A terrible idea. Don’t do it. Don’t be an inside man, the road to nowhere. A mouse in training to become a rat.

  At night the press corps gathered at a bar in Mill City. They were motley, some dressed like safari guides, others like bankers. Among them were the indisputably senior men and a few women of wide experience, their work dating back to the Battle of the Somme and the Coolidge administration, Omaha Beach and the McCarthy hysteria. One of them had interviewed F. Scott Fitzgerald in Paris. Ned Ayres was enthralled by their adventures, always well told; they were wonderful raconteurs, especially the two who had been at the Somme. They were now in their seventies, trim men who wore bow ties and fedoras, their scotch taken neat. To them the Herman story was a rollover, signifying nothing much beyond misfortune. Most everyone agreed that they would not be long in Indiana because the Grant story did not have legs. It was a story good for a month, perhaps two months. In time the widow would be found and interrogated. She would wish to tell her story. That would be the definitive end of the saga, if saga it was. Well, saga would be the wrong word. Tragedy, too, seemed lofty. The Grant story was easily told, a man who wanted another identity, one that would allow him to live like an ordinary person. The revanchist Fred put an end to it—and there you had it. Fred plus a naïve provincial editor was a toxic mix. But that did not add up to legs. It added up to Mr. Nobody from Nowhere, a man who, push came to shove, could not take the heat. His dream was all he had, and when the dream collapsed, so did the haberdasher. A
nd so the reporters drifted away from Herman, and in three weeks they were all gone.

  Ned Ayres missed their company. They were resilient. They knew the world or at least that part of it deemed famous or notorious or anyhow humanly interesting. They knew the man who bit the dog, the pigeon who lived among the cats. They were good company, people you’d want around the dinner table. Never a dull moment, and the truth of the matter was that accidental victims slipped out of the news as easily as they slipped into it, and in that way the caravan moved on. Of course the reporters were bored in Herman. And Herman was fed up with them. However, the story did not die as neatly as predicted. It nagged at people like a loose tooth. It had legs after all.

  In Indianapolis and later in Muncie and finally in Detroit, Leatrice found time to change her name and the names of her children from Grant to Kelly. Twice she returned to Herman for the funerals of her parents. At those times she visited the grave of her husband, standing alone in midafternoon, once in November, four years later in October, both days bright with sunlight. She was so heavily veiled it was impossible to inspect her face. In the event, the cemetery was deserted except for two gravediggers leaning on their shovels some distance away. If Leatrice noticed the litter near her husband’s grave, she said nothing about it.

  The fascination with the death of William Grant went on for some time, turning naturally to the responsibilities of the Press-Gazette. Had the ethics of journalism been violated? And by the way, what precisely were those ethics? There were symposia aplenty in journalism schools around the country and, as might be expected, in the nation’s newsrooms. One of the newsmagazines put the story on its cover, breaking tradition to assign the piece to a much-admired British novelist. The piece was elegantly done, observing that error was inherent in any human activity, no exceptions. But the problem was not factual error. Should the story have been published at all? Did the dead have rights? Did a family have rights? Conundrums all. In the end there was a sort of consensus: whatever the faults, feints, and missteps of the nation’s press in general and the Herman newspaper in particular, William Grant had supervised his own fate, wrote the note, strung the noose. Certainly there was tremendous sympathy for the survivors, his wife and his sons. What had they done to deserve this? A fresh expression of military origin found its way into the vocabulary of the newspapers: “collateral damage.” Leatrice, David, and Eugene were collateral damage. “Deserve” didn’t come into it. An icy formulation, Ned Ayres thought, responsibility as an afterthought, including a gap in the agreed-upon version of events. No one knew what William Grant thought or did between the time he slipped from his bedroom and, then or later, found himself in his garage with a length of rope in his hand, paper and pencil nearby. What was in his mind was unknown. A note was known to exist, but no one had read it. Its whereabouts were unknown. So the thing was a mystery. Without the note there would always be an unanswered question. Suicide was so often an act of defiance. The British polymath brought chaos theory into play. A hateful father, a prison term, a badly wired conscience, and years later a suicide in Herman.

  Two seasons later polls showed that the reading public had lost interest. William Grant was deemed a loser. The story moved from page one to the inside, articles of a few hundred words, and then to the news briefs, and finally—silence. The newspapers were deprived of facts. There was nothing new. Ned was reminded of the cuspidor that rested beside the obit desk, a droll comment on the last curtain call. It had been there for many years. It was thought that the tap of a shoe on the cuspidor would bring luck. Ding! Ned Ayres wondered if William Grant was the toe or the cuspidor and concluded he was both. But then, in his most private thoughts, Ned deemed himself to have a hard heart. He thought that the news business forced that, the discovering of secrets with little attention paid to the consequences. Ned Ayres remembered also the old adage. The first version was always wrong, if only slightly.

  After his rendezvous with Michael Ardmore those many years ago, Ned remembered his long trek down Michigan Avenue ending at the roiling waters of the Chicago River. The time was near midnight. His eyelids were frozen from the cold. He had been so deep in his memory that he had forgotten where he was. This was long after William Grant’s death. He had been drinking with Michael at his club, Michael so torn apart by his daughter’s death that he had to excuse himself. He had lost his composure, and when he returned they talked about the news business, to no grand conclusion. Michael was a skeptic. His heart was not in it. Well, he too was gone now. He seemed not to have had the will to find his daughter’s grave, assuming the grave could be located. Probably it could. Ned Ayres remembered thinking that it was good to be a loner in the news business. The business had a way of taking over. Nothing was so dire that a wisecrack couldn’t loosen it, make it visible, bring it home, whatever it was. Always one had to be scrupulous as to time and place, the facts. Suppositions were verboten. Take nothing for granted. When Kennedy was killed, schoolchildren in Dallas cheered.

  Ned remembered being chilled all the way through. His office was only a few yards away so he thought to pay it a visit, see if there was anything new on the wires. He used his keys to open the big brass entrance door and the narrower inner door behind it. He had the sensation of going home, a querencia where he would find safety from skeptics. His apartment could be lonely and the newsroom was never lonely, especially when it was empty. It was a refuge. The building’s foyer was a kind of echo chamber, the walls decorated with celebrated front pages. The end of the Second World War. The beginning of the Civil War. The opening of the transcontinental railway and one or two ludicrous ones to show that the management could take a joke. The morning paper had long before been put to bed. He remembered the bottle of scotch in his office credenza. He rode the empty elevator to the empty newsroom, fetched the bottle, and poured a half glass, all the while looking at the empty desks that seemed to go on forever, each identical. The wire machines were chattering but he paid no attention. Instead, he sat in his swivel chair and put his feet on the desk. Ned Ayres sipped whiskey and read an unpublished piece marked for his attention. It was lengthy, fifty inches or more, a botched attempt describing the widow Jacqueline Kennedy’s romantic adventures. The piece was beyond salvage, a farrago of conjecture and magical thinking thinly fortified by anonymous quotations ripe with innuendo. The writer had fashioned a cartoon. Ned wrote a note in the margin ending with “See me.” He straightened the papers on his desk, then put them away in the top drawer and locked the drawer. He straightened the framed photographs on the credenza, his father and mother in their youth, leaning on golf sticks at the Daggett Golf Club, a sunny afternoon in golden October before the Grant troubles. There was a snapshot of Elaine in her black bikini. Next to the snapshot was a marble bust of the ravaged face of Homer, he whose faith in the whims of the gods was near absolute. He liked Homer’s unsentimental view of Achilles: “The most violent man in the world.” Homer was a storyteller, nothing more. He was not a moral conscience. But what a storyteller!

  Ned sipped whiskey, lit a cigarette, and stepped into the newsroom. He had come to love it as if it belonged to him, an old clock that kept perfect time. He knew every desk and every man and woman behind every desk. He thought there was nothing so replete as an abandoned newsroom in the very early morning. Something immaculate about it, its raw potential, a slack tide, the boat adrift, sails close-hauled. God alone knew what mischief awaited. A celebrity dead of an overdose, the skull of a dinosaur discovered in North Dakota, a 250-pound RAF bomb discovered in a Rotterdam sewer, a souvenir of War Two. Ned stood still as a deer in the headlights. He remembered the crush of reporters arriving in Herman after the Grant suicide, asking questions of everyone they met. Herman had never seen anything like it. People did not know how to answer the questions, so brusquely put, questions that demanded answers. What exactly did these out-of-town people want to know? They tried to turn away but the reporters turned with them. How do you feel about all this? This death. What was he like
, this Grant? And so, lacking coherent thoughts of their own, the townspeople, without quite realizing what they were doing, answered the way people did in such circumstances, imitated what they had seen and heard on television. They were a lovely couple. A fine pair of sons. Not active in the community, no. They were—just a family, trying to get on like the rest of us. Ned Ayres was the front man in the absence of Gus Harding, who was undone and had taken a fortnight’s leave. And not too long after that the rumors gathered. The communists were somehow involved, the hanging of William Grant not a hanging at all but a lynching. The paper’s trying to cover it up. The clues were manipulated by the authorities and the ghouls of the Press-Gazette. Ned thought that of those directly involved, Gus Harding was the one with the clearest conscience. His article was entirely straightforward, a professional job, spare sentences, the facts allowed to carry the story. It was not an eloquent piece. In fact it was laconic, almost mundane, free of sentimentality and yet sympathetic. Friends told Harding that if his subject had read it, he would not have taken his own life, never in a million years. But that was not the way Gus saw it. He thought of himself as an accomplice to an avoidable tragedy, his assembly of facts in disarray, without discipline. He couldn’t remember the last time he had a bad conscience but he had one now. He had allowed William Grant to get under his skin. That was Gus’s private worry. He had not probed deeply enough into Grant’s past. He had not given context to the story of the appalling Fred. The one accusation that Gus discarded was Fred’s fairy business, surely false. He told no one of it, not even his wife. He felt good about that, especially the following afternoon when he was obliged to write the second-day story that ran on page one, below the fold this time, half the length of “A Second Life.” Ned Ayres was told to edit, a demanding chore because Gus’s piece was disheveled. It was unprintable until finally Gus gave it up and marched from the newsroom, head down. In the event, the second-day story carried no byline. Gus had insisted on that.