by John Dunning
The older son remembered her less harshly. He knew why she’d done what she’d done, and he wished she would write him from wherever she’d gone so that he might answer her and tell her he understood. He and his father were locked in their own battle of wills, and when he thought of his mother, there was sympathy in his heart.
In the summer of his seventeenth year, young Grayson escaped to the Carolina coast. There he lived on a sea island, thinking about life and supporting himself by working in a Beaufort garage. But in the fall he was back in Georgia, doing battle with his father in the determined effort to become his own man. Women became an ever-larger part of his life. Cecile Thomas had been lovely but temporary: now there was Laura Warner, older and more experienced, twice married, widowed and divorced, cerebral, moneyed, and addicted to genius. She saw herself as Mrs. von Meek to Grayson’s Tchaikovsky, one of their literary friends suggested, but Grayson was having none of that. They parted amicably after a short but intense friendship. She moved to Birmingham and, in 1939, sailed from Miami to London, where her trail petered out.
But Grayson’s life was rich with women like that. A biographer trying to dig up his footprints forty years later could still find some of them eager to talk and have their memories mined. Others had been swallowed by time. A line had to be drawn on the hunt for old girlfriends and the book brought back to its dual focus. So Trish Aandahl let Laura Warner slip away into wartime London while she worked her narrative around and brought Richard again into the picture.
There are people in Atlanta today who remember Darryl and Richard Grayson and believe that a strong streak of real hatred existed between them. But there are others who tell a different story. They remember the hazing Richard took from a pack of bullies when he first started high school. The leader of the gang was one Jock Wheeler, a mean little bastard as remembered by the Marietta shipping clerk who had known them all. Today Jock Wheeler is an elderly mechanic in an Atlanta garage. He’s a quiet man who lives alone and bothers no one. Ask Jock Wheeler about the Grayson boys, said the shipping clerk to Trish Aandahl. Ask him about that night in the midthirties, when he was ambushed on a dark country road by two men he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, identify and beaten so badly he almost died. Wheeler had nothing to say, but the rumor mill persisted that one of the assailants was little more than a boy, twelve or fourteen years old. The sheriff floated the Grayson boys as the leading candidates, but Wheelers said no,‘t’wasn’t them. The rumor mill churned. The more thoughtful of their contemporaries pointed to it as a strange quirk of human nature. Probably on some level the Graysons truly did hate each other, but blood is thicker than water. That’s the thing about cliches, you know. They are usually true.
29
I woke to a gray dawn, certain I’d heard a noise off my left elbow. It went click-click, like the sound a lockpick makes when someone is trying to open a door. But I had been dreaming about a raven, its talons clicking as it walked across the table to peck my eyes out.
Both sounds stopped as I came awake and sat up in the bed.
It was Sunday, the day of rest.
Television promised more rain, followed by bad weather. The weather clown played with his million-dollar toys, swirling clouds over a map and grinning with all thirty-two as he did his dance. But this was a floor show next to the competition. Evil, two-faced evangelists pranced about, talked of Jesus and money in the same foul breath, and sheared their glass-eyed flock. Praise the lord, suckers.
The radio was fixed to an oldies station, with something called a salute to the British Invasion already in progress. I got “Eleanor Rigby” as a curtain call to my shave-and-shower, and I stood in the buff anticipating every beat and lyric, for all the good it did me.
The clock was pushing nine, and my departure seemed somehow less urgent than it had at midnight, Nothing was open yet. Check-in at the Hilton wasn’t till three o’clock. The library, another of my scheduled stops, informed by recorded message that its Sunday hours were one to five p.m. I had time on my hands.
I sat on the bed and started my phone checks. It was ten o’clock in Taos.
I punched out the number and heard it ring.
“Hello?”
“Jonelle Jeffords?”
“Who are you?”
It didn’t seem to matter so I told her my real name, then began to improvise. “I’m a friend of the court. The judge in Seattle gave me the job of getting Miss Rigby back to New Mexico in the burglary of your house. I need to ask you a few questions.”
She expelled her breath like a hot radiator.
“Goddammit, can’t you people leave us alone?”
This was a strange attitude for a victim, but I already knew she was not the run of the mill victim. I put an official tone in my voice and said, “Most people who’ve been burglarized cooperate. I find your attitude a little unusual. Is there a reason for that?”
She hung there a moment, surprised, then said, “My husband is very upset by all this. It’s going to be bad enough having to go to court when they finally do bring that crazy girl back here. What can I tell you that hasn’t already been asked and answered fifty times?”
“I’m sure you’re tired of answering questions. But I’m in Seattle, I don’t have access to the files they’ve built in Taos, and I need to know more about what she stole from you. Otherwise I don’t know how you expect to get your property back.”
“I don’t want it back. I should’ve burned it years ago.”
“Burned what?”
“That book.”
“It was mainly a book, then, that she took from you?”
“If I’d just given it to her when she first came here, maybe she’d‘ve just gone away. Then none of this would’ve happened.”
“Where did you get the book?”
“I don’t see what that has to do with anything. It’s personal business, very old business. It doesn’t have any bearing on this.”
“It might, if we have to determine who owns it.”
“What are you saying, that I stole the book?”
“I’m just asking a few questions, Mrs. Jeffords. If I seem to be going in a way you don’t like, it’s your attitude that’s leading me there. You’re going to have to answer these questions, you know, sooner or later.”
“Listen to me, sir, and understand what I’m telling you. My husband is extremely upset by all this. He’s outside now on the deck, he’ll be in here any minute, and the last thing I need is for him to find me talking to you about that crazy girl. It hasn’t been easy coping with this. She could’ve killed us. Charlie gets a little crazy himself just thinking about it. If you call here again, you’ll cause me a lot of trouble.”
“Can you describe the book?”
“No! Can’t I make you understand English? I haven’t even looked at it in twenty years.”
“Are you familiar with the names Slater or Pruitt?”
“No. Should I be?”
“Slater says you hired him to find your book.”
“He’s lying. I never heard of the man.”
“What about Pruitt?”
Her voice dropped off to a whisper. “Charlie’s coming. Charlie’s here. Go away, don’t call me again.”
She banged the phone down.
What a strange woman. I could just see her, scurry-ing across the room to distance herself from the telephone. Smoothing her dress, sitting primly, trying to look like a poster from Fascinating Womanhood as her big old bear came home from the hill.
Trying her damnedest to give away a book others would kill for.
I hadn’t gotten to the hard questions yet. Who really fired that gun, Mrs. Jeffords? What’s the link between you and the Rigby girl, and why do I get the feeling that it’s personal?
I knew, though, that I’d had my one shot at her. She was far away and she wouldn’t be picking up the telephone again without letting that recording screen it first.
I tried Trish and got nothing.
Decided to put Allan
Huggins on hold for the moment.
Checked out of the motel and went looking for breakfast.
At eleven o’clock, I parked on the street outside the library and passed the time reading.
30
Suddenly it’s 1963. Gaston Rigby stands in North Bend at the dawn of his life, ready and waiting to be molded by the genius Darryl Grayson. Who would think that Grayson might hire him, even to sweep out the shop? Now there are days when every green kid with a yen to publish turns up on Grayson’s doorstep, hat in hand, begging for a chance to work for nothing. The mystique is in full bloom, and Grayson is still well on the sunny side of fifty. What is it that separates Rigby from the others?…How does he get to Grayson on that primal level, that place where the genius lives? Grayson leaves no clue. He is not one to talk of such things. The hunt for verbal profundity makes him uneasy and, if he’s pushed too hard, cross. Speaking of Rigby, Grayson will say only that he’s a good one. He’s willing to let it go at that, as if trying to isolate and define everything that goes into making a good one is beyond him. And this is Archie he’s talking to, and Archie knows a good one as well as he does.
Moon looks back at it many years later. At times he thinks Rigby took the place of the younger brother— almost but not quite. He thinks Grayson and Rigby were, almost but not quite, like father and son. That spiritual bond can be difficult to understand when you stand outside it: it goes deeper than anything Moon has ever seen between men of solidly heterosexual persuasion. He insists he felt no jealousy: he is secure in his own importance to Grayson, and if Rigby mattered as much on another level, why should it worry him? He was still Grayson’s best friend in life. They grew up together, they swam buck naked as kids, tramped woods and fields, hunted deer and birds, chased women as young hell-raisers, drank, dreamed and shared the same calling. When Grayson left the South after the war and wrote that he had found a promised land, Moon came along to see for himself. Moon still remembers the first words he spoke as he got off the train in Snoqualmie. What the hell is this little burg gonna do with two goddamn printers, for Christ’s sake ?
But Moon is a mechanic and Grayson is an artist. They coexist perfectly, perhaps the only friends in history—to hear Moon tell it—who never had a disparaging word between them. Moon does worry, especially in the beginning, that Grayson is chasing an impossible dream. Nobody ever made money doing small-press books. Put that in caps and say it again. NObody. If you can do it for twenty-five years and not lose your pants, you can call yourself blessed. Grayson never made a dime. His entire operation was bankrolled with family money. Eventually the boys came into hundreds of acres of prime Georgia planting land—peaches, corn, just about anything a man wanted to grow. But Darryl and Richard Grayson were not farmers. They sold the land and Grayson took his half and did what he did with it. His books made enough to keep most of his principal intact, and that’s all they ever made in his lifetime.
What is it about the book business anyway, Moon wonders. Sometimes it seems like nobody on any level of it makes any money. Maybe if you’re Random House and you can figure out how to publish nobody but James A. Michener, you can make a little money. Everybody else picks up peanuts.
Why do they do it? he wonders. But he knows why.
Now it’s 1963 and Rigby arrives, joining Grayson in the quest for the perfect book. Look at you, Darryl , Moon says over beer in the town bar, you’re launching a life . Grayson just nods in his cups. What has never been said—what Moon tells Trish Aandahl years after Grayson’s death—is how much influence Rigby had on Grayson. Rigby was truly remarkable for a kid: damn, he had the greatest hands , Moon says, he’da been a great doctor, delivering babies, coaxing ‘em into the world…he could coax butter out of a witch’s heart and his instincts for binding and design were almost as fine and fully formed as Grayson’s. Rigby offers his opinions timidly at first—a kid does not come in and tell a genius how to run his business— but he soon learns that Grayson has no ego in the heat of the work. Grayson will listen to the man in the moon if the guy can give him an idea, and Gaston Rigby is a fountain of ideas. Do you think, Darryl, that the center of the page is too dense?…Not by much, maybe, but listen to what the words are saying and look at it again . Grayson studies it. He walks away and looks from afar. More often than not, he decides that Rigby is right. Their talk runs nonstop through the day, every word germane to the work at hand. There is never a joke between them or a comment on the outside world or a reflection on womanhood. There are no calendar-girl pinups, no radios or newspapers, nothing that would take away Grayson’s concentration even for a moment. There are no clocks. Grayson comes down to the shop in the morning and Rigby is already there. They work until some inner clock tells Grayson that the day is done. In Grayson’s shop, time stands still. He alone knows when the work is through and he walks away, leaving Rigby to wash the press and tidy up the workbench and put everything back where it goes.
Rigby’s responsibilities grow along with his salary. By his second year he seems indispensable. His eye is uncanny: he catches things that might even escape the master in various stages of trial and error. Broken serifs, hairline cracks, typos: he spots them instantly. He checks each impression for indentation, uniformity of punch, blackness of ink (“needs a little more color here, Darryl”). His eye is so good that Grayson comes to depend on him in those final stages when the books are inspected and shipped. This gives him a sense of family, something he’s never known. Rigby lives upstairs, in the loft over the shop. He stands in darkness now, staring off through the black woods at the lights of the big house. He knows that sometimes the brother brings whores over from Seattle, but this too he sees as part of the process. If Grayson can be relaxed and made ready for tomorrow by the services of a whore, let him do it. They come and go, harmless fluff. Only near the end does the one called Nola Jean take on a major negative importance. She screws with Grayson’s head and is not good.
It is now 1968. Rigby is twenty-two. He has been with Grayson five years and life is sweet. He has a woman of his own, a relationship nurtured slowly like a courtship from another time. This is Crystal, Moon’s teenage niece, who ran away from her home in Georgia and now finds work in the North Bend bakery. Crystal loves Rigby’s shyness, his brilliance, his teddy-bear presence. He is the first solid man in her life, always the young gentleman. Rigby has none of the stormy impatience that runs rampant through his generation. Politics bores him: even the Kennedy assassination, he tells her, struck him as little more than another TV show. Crystal marvels at this. She is seventeen, and in love.
31
I reread the last chapter, which told of the fire. The facts rolled out like an epilogue. On the night of October 14, 1969, the shop had caught fire and gone up like a torch. A fire investigator had come out from Seattle, poking through the ashes for days before calling it, officially, an accident. But I knew from my own experience that these things are often vague. At least one hundred thousand fires a year are written off to unknown causes, Aandahl pointed out, and the presumption in law is that these are accidents. Arson must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt: a fireman’s suspicion, however strong, doesn’t cut it. An old-fashioned printshop like Grayson’s was a firebomb waiting to go off.
In the first place, there is paper everywhere. There are rags, often soaked with solvents or ink. The printer must work with fine papers and keep them in pristine condition, but he also works with ink, which gets on his hands, under his fingernails, and on his tools. Everything must be washed, many times a day. A working printer might go through 150 gallons of solvents a year. Kerosene was the stuff of choice for many shops. Grayson liked gasoline because it was harder and faster. He kept it in a fifty-gallon drum behind the shop. The drum sat upright in a wooden frame, with a spigot at the bottom where the squirt guns could be filled.
The fire broke out in the main part of the shop— the fire investigator was able to figure that out by the pattern of the wood charring. It had quickly consumed that room, sp
read up to the loft, then to the little storeroom in back. By the time it was seen from the road, flames had broken through the ceiling and back wall. The gas drum caught on fire and exploded, sending a fireball a hundred feet in the air. The remains of Richard Grayson were found in the shop: he had been drinking and had apparently passed out in a chair. His brother was in the back room. He too was drunk, and the fireman theorized that he had gone back to lie down on a cot that was kept there for just that purpose, when he’d had too much booze to walk himself back up the dark path to the main house.
Gaston Rigby had gone to town. It was for him a rare night out. He had taken his girl, Crystal, to dinner in Seattle and arrived home at midnight to find his world in ruins.
I was standing at the door when the library opened. It didn’t take long to dope out Rodney Scofield. I looked through periodical and newspaper indexes, and in half an hour I had come up with all the applicable buzzwords.
Oilman…manufacturer…eccentric…
Billionaire, with a b .
Recluse. Twenty years ago, when Scofield was in his late forties, he had taken a page from Howard Hughes and disappeared from the public eye. He had been written about but seldom seen since 1970. His business deals were conducted and closed by the battalion of toadies and grunts who worked for him. Nowhere in the general press was his hobby, books, given a line.
I went to AB/Bookman’s Weekly , which publishes its own yearly index.
I found nothing on Scofield, but Leith Kenney was prominent in the magazine’s index of advertisers. He had been a bookseller, with a store in San Francisco.
He had been a notable bookseller, with membership in the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America. This is not an easy group for flakes and fly-by-nights to get into. They nose around in your credit, they check your bank references and take a long look at your stock before admitting you to the club. People who bounce checks and cheat little old ladies get a quick brush-off from ABAA.
