But suddenly she felt as though destiny had taken a hand and she had been given the opportunity she was so desperate for. It seemed like the answer to her prayers. She grabbed a pencil stub out of her pocket, and a little wisp of paper she found with it, and jotted down the name and address of the publisher. She was sure this was a sign from heaven, sent by her mother to help her. She was going to send them her book. She lay the book down on the bench and went back to the main building, seeking Mr. Lattimer, and found him in his office. He was startled when he saw her hesitating in the doorway.
“May I come in?” she asked politely, and he nodded and gazed into her eyes. Her glance was honest and direct, and she was shy but not frightened. He was just unfamiliar to her, as she saw so few English in her life. Mostly county officials who came to see the elders, for the census or other things. And she had seen quite a lot of them, press and police, after the shooting, but none since, until now.
“What can I do for you, Lillibet?” He had remembered her name. It would have been hard to forget her, even if she didn’t look like his boyhood love.
“If I give you a package, will you mail it for me? To New York?” It seemed like another planet to her, although she had read so much about it.
“Of course. That’s not a problem. We send packages out every day.” He tried to sound matter-of-fact about it and didn’t question her about what she was sending and why.
“I have no money to pay you,” she said, looking embarrassed. She knew her father had a bank account, and the dairy deposited money into it to pay him, but she had no right to invade it and didn’t want to.
Joe Lattimer smiled broadly as he stood up and towered over her. “I think we can pay for a package to New York, as long as you’re not planning to send a horse or a piano.” She laughed at what he said.
“Just some notebooks. I can bring them tomorrow,” she said, with an excited look. Her eyes were blazing, which made her even more beautiful.
“Just bring them in. We’ll take care of it for you. And give my best to your father,” he said, and walked her outside. The two boys had just put her father’s cheese in the buggy. Lilli knew it was wonderful goat cheese they made at the dairy from her father’s goat milk. Her father always said it sold very well. The English liked it. “See you tomorrow, then.” Joe Lattimer waved and went back to his office, as Lillibet got back into her father’s buggy, tapped the horse with the reins, and took off back down the road she had come. The horse was in a hurry to get home and trotted on the way back, as Lillibet sat beaming.
And in his office, Joe Lattimer sat lost in thought for a moment, remembering the girl he had loved so long ago.
And all Lillibet could think of on her way home was that she had found a way. It was fate for certain. Her book was going to New York!
Lillibet’s brothers were just as sick the next day. In fact, the twins were worse, and Margarethe promised to come over and visit them that afternoon. They didn’t need a doctor, it was only chicken pox, but they were feeling very sorry for themselves, and so was Willy, although he had a few less spots than the twins.
Lillibet milked the cows, as she always did, that morning, and two of her nephews came to help her, her oldest brother’s sons. They were the same age as the twins. And they lifted the heavy cans into the buggy, along with the goat’s milk she had promised to bring them. They brought the goat’s milk on certain days, not every day like the cow’s milk. And she set off toward Lattimer’s Dairy after lunch. Just before she left, she had gone up to her room, taken the twelve notebooks from their hiding place under her mattress, and wrapped them in one of her aprons. And then at the last minute, she picked a different apron. She chose one of the fine ones in pale dove-gray linen that her mother had made her before she died. Lillibet kept them all out of sentiment, although some were frayed and worn now, but she selected one of the nicest ones, and bundled the notebooks carefully, and then pinned them into the linen. She thought the apron from her mother might bring her luck.
Carrying the bundle like schoolbooks in her arms, she ran lightly down the stairs and put it on the floor of the buggy, hopped in, and picked up the reins. No one had been watching, as she took off at a slow trot, and arrived at the dairy twenty minutes later after an uneventful trip. But all she could think of on the way were the notebooks she was bringing for Joe Lattimer to send to New York for her. It felt like the most exciting day of her life. She was sending her book out into the world. And little waves of terror seized her on the way. What if it got lost? If they hated it? If it was awful? If they laughed at her or said she couldn’t write? But whatever happened now, she knew she had to take the chance. She had come this far and wasn’t going to turn back. Providence had put that book in her path with the publisher’s address. Now she had to send them her book and see what happened. And her mother’s apron would protect it.
The farmhands took the canisters of milk out of the buggy for her, and she picked up her neatly wrapped bundle and walked into Joe Lattimer’s office. He was working on his computer and looked up at her with a smile. She had never seen a computer before, but she could guess what it was. Some of the investigators who had come to talk to them after the shooting had used laptops. But she had never seen as large a computer as this one. He immediately saw the linen-wrapped notebooks in her arms.
“Is that the package you want me to send to New York?” She nodded, breathless with excitement and her eyes alight. “That doesn’t look very difficult to me. I’ll send it out for you tomorrow, first thing.” She handed him the slip of paper with the name of the publishing house and the address in New York, in her neat lacy handwriting. “What address would you like me to use for the sender?” he asked her, suspecting what her answer would be. If she wanted to use her own, she would have asked her father to send it for her. Clearly, this was something she wanted to do herself, without her father’s knowledge. It seemed harmless to him.
“Would you mind using the dairy as the return address?” Lillibet asked cautiously.
“Not at all. It’s not a problem.” And as he said it, he reached a hand out to take her package, and she handed it to him as though the Hope Diamond were hidden in it. “That must be a very important package,” he said, teasing her a little, but he could see it was to her. She barely looked able to part with it and kept her eyes on her notebooks once he held the package. “We’ll take good care of it for you, I promise.”
“Thank you,” she said breathlessly, and left his office again. She left the dairy a little while later, and she could feel her heart pounding all the way home. She felt as though she had put her baby in a box to be sent into outer space somewhere, with no idea when she would see it again, or if it would be well received. Sending her notebooks to New York was the most frightening thing she’d ever done. But she knew she had to. Her mother would have wanted her to do it. And would have been proud of her once she did, whatever happened next. It was almost too much to hope that her manuscript would be turned into a book one day, but perhaps with luck, if the gods smiled on her, it would. And for now, her book was on its way.
Chapter 14
Bob Bellagio swore when he saw that the elevator in his office building was out of order again. It had been shut down every other day for the past week. There was a heat wave in New York that had caused a brownout to occur. And the publishing house he had founded was in an ancient building in Tribeca on the fifth floor, just high enough to make you truly miserable on a hot day if you had to walk up the stairs. And it had been the hottest July on record so far in New York. His air conditioner had gone out that day too, and the fax machine. It was hardly worth coming to work, but he always did. He trudged up the five floors, and shoved open the fire door, into the offices he’d established five years before, when he was thirty-one.
Like everything else in his life, it had been a struggle to start the business and keep it afloat. They had published some very good young authors, some of them a little too edgy, but talented, he thought. The crit
ics agreed, but the public didn’t. They had had two moderate successes in the last two years, enough to keep their doors open and give him hope. Now they needed a major hit. He and his editors were always on the lookout for the book that was going to be their big breakthrough and put them on the map.
Sometimes he worried that the editors he’d hired were too smart and too literary to pick the right book that could appeal to the average reader. His staff included two Harvard graduates, one from Yale, another from Princeton, and a genius who had gone to a state school and was smarter than everyone else. All of them were offbeat and nontraditional and had brilliant ideas. But what Bob wanted was a big fat commercial success that was going to knock everyone off their feet, not a stroke of literary genius that would get brilliant reviews and sell a thousand copies to intellectuals at a Princeton reunion. He had explained that to his staff again and again. And he worried at times that their lofty ideals, or even his own, would put them out of business. They were hanging on by a thread. Their last two successes had given them a slightly better grip but not enough for him to relax yet. He was looking for that one book that would take off like a rocket, but so was everyone else. Every publisher in the business wanted the same thing he did. The competition was stiff. Strong commercial fiction usually went to bigger publishing houses. He was a small independent with high ideals but less cash to pay his authors.
He was breathless in the heat by the time he got upstairs. The weather was oppressive, and it would have been a relief if it rained. The building was baking, and his office was stifling. He had been invited to the Hamptons for the weekend but had decided to stay home and work instead. He had a new manuscript to read from one of their best authors, whom he’d been grooming for three years. And he wanted to look over some expense cuts he wanted to make. This publishing house was his baby, and he spent every moment he could nurturing it. He was determined to make it a big success and prove he could do it. He had gone to Harvard and to business school at Columbia; he had worked in the publishing business as an editor at Knopf for three years, and he’d decided to take the leap. Starting the business had been the most exciting decision in his life. Now he had to keep it alive until it became a resounding success. He knew he’d get there. He had just had lunch with an agent, trying to shake the trees and see what would fall out. He enjoyed what he was doing and had frequent meetings with his editors to try and come up with new ideas.
As he headed toward his office, he walked past Patrick Riley’s desk. Pat was one of their Harvard graduates, had graduated summa cum laude in the English department, was twenty-nine years old, and was writing a book himself, on the decadent philosophies of ancient Greece and their impact on society today. Bob hadn’t agreed to publish it, and he knew it would sell to Pat’s mother, grandmother, eighteen cousins, Harvard lit professor, and no one else. Pat Riley was smart as hell, just a little too out there to be headed for commercial success, with his own book anyway. But he had found some very decent books so far for Bellagio Press. They hadn’t set the world on fire, but they had done well. He was the junior editor and had worked for Bob for two years, after getting a master’s in Renaissance literature. He was a brain. And as Bob’s mother would have said, he looked like an unmade bed.
Pat had wild, curly, tangled, unkempt hair that wanted to become dreads but had never quite gotten there and looked like it hadn’t been brushed in years, and possibly hadn’t. He wore torn jeans to work every day that disintegrated before he bought new ones, and a collection of torn, faded sweatshirts he wore in winter, and equally disreputable T-shirts for the summer that he said were “vintage” band shirts, some of them actually previously owned by rock stars, or so he claimed, and Converse sneakers that were in shreds. He said he hadn’t owned a pair of socks since high school. Bob believed him, he came to work every day looking like he’d been shipwrecked. He had lunch with agents looking that way. No one seemed to mind except Bob himself. Pat was so funny and so smart and so incisive and good at what he did that no one gave a damn how he looked. He had hired him for his talent and his mind, not for his wardrobe, and when Bob suggested he might want to dress up a little occasionally, Pat just looked at him blankly and shook his head.
As head of the company, Bob tried to look respectable when he came to work, as though someone important might come to see him at the office. They never did, but he still felt obliged to show up wearing khakis in the summer, pressed jeans or gray flannels in the winter, or maybe cords and a decent shirt, and he always had a blazer or a sport jacket lying around somewhere, and a tie in his pocket just in case. Pat liked to tell him he was hopelessly bourgeois, and the fact that he himself didn’t care how he looked showed he was a true intellectual. Bob no longer argued the point with him.
Bob came from a traditional family of overachievers, and all of them had done well. His father was a neurosurgeon, his mother was a partner in a major Wall Street law firm, and his brother worked for Morgan Stanley, handling investments. Everyone had a respectable job. Only Bob had had the guts to try and start his own business, and he was trying to prove valiantly to himself that he could do it and make it a success. Some days he wondered, but he was willing to go down in flames trying. They had enough money in the bank to hold out for the next two years, if they were careful, and no one got a raise, and by then Bob hoped that they’d be off and running with some major hits. The business had become his baby, his girlfriend, his passion, his whole life since he started it. He had given up romance, relationships, sports, travel, and nearly sex to be there all the time and work most weekends. No woman wanted to put up with it, and lately he didn’t care. The kind of women he’d been meeting for the last few years didn’t make his heart pound, but his business always did. And the women he got fixed up with bored him. His brother gave him a hard time about it. Paul was married to a woman who was a lawyer like their mother, and had two kids. And Bob had gone from one woman to another, or sometimes none at all, for the past ten years.
“If it’s meant to happen, it will,” Bob always said to his brother whenever they had lunch.
“Not unless you make it happen,” Paul reminded him. “Some sexy hot babe is not going to fall out of the sky and land on you as you walk through Tribeca. You’ve got to get out there and date.” He felt that Bob should be married and have kids too. And at thirty-six, Paul thought he was late. He had gone beyond late bloomer to difficult and solitary and even reclusive in recent years.
“I don’t have time to date. I’m too busy getting my business off the ground,” Bob explained with a grin. He didn’t really care.
“That’s bullshit, you’re just lazy,” Paul insisted, and Bob laughed.
“Yeah, maybe I am,” he admitted. “What’s the point of going out with women I don’t care about, and know in the first five minutes I never want to see again? Why bother?”
“Because you have to go out with ninety-nine duds before you meet the right one. That’s the way it works.”
“Wake me up at ninety-nine,” Bob said, and changed the subject. He preferred talking business with his brother, and getting his advice about his investments, not his dating life. Besides, almost no one he had gone to school with had gotten married. Some had children, but few had wives. His brother was behind the times. And Bob took pride in saying he’d never been in love. He was in love with his business, and he hadn’t met a woman yet who could make his heart race the way starting his own business had. He was a born entrepreneur. His brother was five years older, part of another generation, loved having a wife, two children, living in Connecticut, and commuting to work every day on the train. Bob said he would have died of boredom if he had to live that way. He had a loft in Tribeca, three blocks from his business, and he worked late at night and on weekends.
He stopped at Pat Riley’s desk on his way to his office and nearly shuddered at the mess he saw there. It looked like Pat hadn’t cleared his desk in years. Bob wondered how he could find anything on it. There were stacks of papers all over the pl
ace, notes, phone messages, business cards, empty Starbucks cups, and three stacks of manuscripts sitting on the edge.
“What is all that?” Bob asked, frowning. He had dark hair and brown eyes and was almost handsome in a crisp blue shirt and khaki slacks and loafers. And today he hadn’t worn socks either in the heat, but on him it looked all right.
“It’s the slush pile,” Pat said vaguely, digging for something on his desk. He looked like a cat searching for a mouse. He was referring to unsolicited manuscripts that came in from people without an agent. They were usually pretty bad. An agent provided a screening process so you knew you were getting decent material. These were mostly from untalented people who thought they could write. “I’ve been meaning to send them back. I just haven’t gotten around to it.”
“Do you read them?” Bob asked him. He would have been surprised if he did.
“Never,” Pat said honestly. “I don’t have time. I get enough stuff from agents to keep me busy for the next ten years. And nothing worthwhile ever comes in the unsolicited stuff. I used to try to read them, but I just can’t.” Bob nodded. He didn’t disagree with him, but for some reason he started flipping through them and noticed a fat bundle halfway down the second stack, wrapped in a piece of fabric. He stopped and looked at it, surprised. The submissions he used to get at Knopf were in manila envelopes or boxes, not wrapped in fabric.
“What do they do? Wrap them up in their boxers before they send them to us?” How could you take something seriously from someone who wrapped a manuscript up in their clothes? Bob was mesmerized by that one.
“Yeah, I know, pathetic,” Pat commented, and noticed what Bob was looking at. “She sent it in a blouse or something. Some farm girl in Iowa. I forget. I’ve got to send it back.”
Until the End of Time: A Novel Page 17
