by John Dunning
It was one of those moments that only a bookman can appreciate, that instant of discovery when you know without opening that first box that you’ve just walked into something wonderful. Your mouth dries up and your heart beats faster, and the fact that none of it belongs to you or ever will is strangely irrelevant. I walked around the stuff, taking its measure. It was a perfect cube—four high, four deep, four across: sixty-four cartons of Grayson lore.
I stripped back the plastic cover and leaned down for a closer look. I could read the words she had written on the cardboard with a heavy black marker.
Richard/Letters, Poems, Miscellany
Sketches for Christmas Carol/Correspondence with Benton
Tape Recordings/Darryl Grayson and Selena Harper
Worksheets /Logs of Days
Correspondence/1950-55
Ideas for Phase Two
I took down the box marked Richard’s Letters and broke open the seal. It was packed tight with original notes, all of it handwritten on legal pads. Selena Harper had probably done his typing and kept the originals, maybe without the author’s permission or knowledge. I put the box off to one side and opened the one marked Correspondence . It was full of carbon copies, letters Grayson had written and typed himself during the formative years of the Grayson Press. Here was the man’s life and philosophy…you could plunge in almost anywhere and be caught up in whatever had engaged his mind at the time. He wrote impressions of history to old friends in Georgia; he had long discussions on art with a teacher he’d had in high school and wrote rambling letters on almost any topic to people he’d never met. He was a faithful and generous writer. If you wrote to him praising one of his books, he would answer you, even if he’d never heard of you till that moment. He had a Southerner’s sense of chivalry and honor: women would get more consideration than men, warm, chatty greetings to ladies who loved his work. He had a lengthy correspondence of more than five years with a woman in Knoxville: it was a romance of the mind, as they had apparently never met. I picked up a handful of pages, several hundred, and came upon a correspondence with Bruce Rogers that ran through much of 1953. It was hard-core typography, incredible stuff. Grayson had saved all of Rogers’s originals along with copies of his own replies. At one time they had sent drawings through the mail, the old master illustrating his points to the prodigy in that language that only they and others like them could read. This will be published someday, I thought—some university press will bring it out in two volumes, The Letters of Darryl Grayson , with scholarly footnotes and an index, and some expert—maybe Huggins—would write a long introduction setting Grayson in his proper significance. Grayson was an average speller, and the editor would probably apologize for that and leave it alone. In the final analysis, writing and spelling don’t have much to do with each other.
Behind this box was another, Correspondence/ 1956-58 , and behind that was another covering the next year. Grayson liked to write. He seemed to have written at least one letter a day, sometimes more. I thumbed through the year 1957 and saw many letters headed Dear Laura . It was his old friend Laura Warner, who had not, it seemed, been lost in the blitz after all. She had moved to New Orleans after the war and was following his career from afar. In one letter she teasingly called him My Pyotr , to which he angrily replied that, Goddammit, he was not Tchaikovsky and she was not his goddamn patron saint, and she laughed in her next letter and called him my darling boy and said one of the characteristics of genius was temper. Huggins would die to get into this, I thought. So would Trish. How different their books would’ve been.
The box labeled Tape Recordings was just what it said—a dozen reels of fragile-looking recording tape, sandwiched between sheaths of notes. Selena Harper and Darryl Grayson: October 4, 5, 6, 1958 . The master’s voice, if it could be retrieved, was apparently preserved right here. The oldest recordings seemed to be from mid-1953, brown on white, oxide on a paper backing, and the oxide was beginning to flake. I kept digging. It didn’t take long to figure out what Ideas for Phase Two was. The material dated from 1968 and 1969—notes, letters, and lists of possible projects, along with rough sketches of new alphabets. There was a list of artists whose work Grayson had admired, who might have been invited to collaborate on future projects. I remembered something Huggins had said, that Grayson had seen his career enclosed by those two Ravens , like definitive parenthetical statements, but Huggins had only been half-right. Grayson in no way considered his career finished. He was still a young man with much great work to do: a successful Raven would simply write an end to his youth and launch him into his major phase.
I found a box of letter sketches, hundreds of freehand drawings on thin paper. He couldn’t be sitting still, I thought—if he had dead time on his hands, he’d draw letters. Some were signed, some were not. All were originals.
There was too much. I began to skim.
I tore down the block and scattered the center cartons around the room. In the exact middle was the box with the photographs. There were pictures of Grayson’s childhood home, of the high school, of the parents…but again, nothing of the brothers themselves. There were copies of the newspaper that Grayson had worked on in school and pictures of old girlfriends. In a separate folder was the North Bend stuff—Grayson’s shop under construction, his house, the finished shop, the ancient-looking Columbian press with its cast-iron ornamentation—eagle, sea serpent, snakes—alive in the hard light that poured in through the window. Then there was a run of people shots. Rigby and Crystal: she convulsed over some long-forgotten joke, he slightly uncomfortable in coat and tie, politely amused. Moon in his element, hiking in the high country. Moon again, standing at the edge of a mountain cabin with the alpine scenery stretching out behind him. And there she was, the woman who looked like Eleanor Rigby, posed in the woods with a man I had never seen. She had her arm around him and both of them were laughing into the camera, exuding sexuality. In the background was another woman, obviously unhappy. If looks could kill, the woman in the background would kill them both. There were no names, just that faint inscription in Selena’s hand, giving the location and date, always May 1969. But there was something about the two women that drew them together and kept them that way in your mind.
Then there was the snapshot, shoved deep in the file between papers and obviously taken by a much less sophisticated camera. The Eleanor-woman, fat with child, standing on the mountain at Moon’s cabin: Grayson’s handwriting on the back (I could recognize it now at a glance) giving a date, Sept. 28, 1968, and a short caption, Queen of the world . She had that same seductive smile, a wanton, sexual animal even in the last days of pregnancy. She pointed at the picture-taker with her left hand, at her swollen tummy with the other. I could almost hear her teasing voice in the room: Oh, you nasty man, you naughty boy, you .
Eleanor’s voice.
I heard Amy bumping up the stairs. “Hey,” she called. “You gonna die up here?…It’s almost two o’clock.”
She came through the trap and sat on one of the boxes. “Now maybe you’ve got some idea what I’m up against.” She got up, paced, and sighed. “What am I gonna do with all this stuff?”
I broke it to her softly. “You’re gonna get rich with it.”
38
She couldn’t imagine such a thing. “I’d probably feel pretty rich if somebody wanted to walk in here and give me a hundred dollars for all of it,” she said. When I didn’t bite, she let it go. Just as well, I thought: there was no use speculating, she’d probably faint if I told her half of what I was thinking. But she looked at me across the room and a sense of it began filling up the space between us. The air seemed brighter: the sun had a different aura as it beamed through the window on the west side and lit up a million floating particles of dust. Amy moved out to the middle of the room and flipped up one of the flaps.
“Mamma never told me anything,” she said, fingering the papers in the box. “Not once did she ever say she thought this stuff might even be worth the paper it’s pr
inted on.”
Maybe she didn’t know, I thought. Maybe value to her had nothing to do with money. Maybe she figured she’d talk about it someday and just ran out of time. You can’t plan a heart attack.
“I guess I should’ve figured there was something to it,” Amy said. “The way she never wanted me to let on it was here, not even to Archie or the Rigbys. I think she was always afraid somebody would come and take it away from her.”
“Yeah, but where’d it come from? How’d she get it?”
“Just like she got everything else. Piece by piece, starting way back when she first went to work at Grayson’s. I think that’s when they started talking about her doing his book someday. And he read some of the things she’d published, and he liked what she’d written, and he said okay, but it’s too early. He hadn’t done enough yet. But he gave her this stuff, sometimes just a few pages a day, to read and think about. She’d bring ‘em home with her—a few letters, some sketches he’d thrown aside—just stuff, you know. I never paid any attention when she told me about it.”
“And over the years it became this.”
Amy was reading. Whatever was on top was working its way through her brain as she tried to understand its larger significance. “This looks like a plain old letter. He’s talking about fishing…what’s so special about that?”
“It’s something other people will have to decide.”
“And these other people will want this stuff?”
“You can count on that. They’ll want this stuff.”
“And you know who they are?”
“I do now.”
She picked up the pages and read it all—the three-page letter that Grayson had written on January 4, 1954, I saw as I crossed the room and looked over her shoulder. I moved on to the window and stood staring down at the muddy yard, letting her read in peace. When I turned again, her eyes were fixed on mine. She gave a little smile, naive and worldly all at once. Do what you want, she seemed to say: I won’t fuss, I’ll go along.
The only thing in my mind was that it all had to be moved. It had been here twenty years and I couldn’t leave it even one more night. “The real question is, how does this help us find Ellie?” Amy said. I didn’t know, it was too vast, like standing at the edge of a forest on a hunt for one tree. But it had to be moved and then maybe we could start asking questions like that.
Now a funny thing happened—Amy lit into the work with a kind of driving impatience, as if she could clear the house all at once. She had put it off forever, but moving that first box had a galvanizing effect. “You go on,” she said, “I’ll keep working on it.” We had filled up the car. It would take six loads and a full backseat when we made our last run out of here. It was three o’clock, her children had to be picked up by seven, and I still had no idea where I’d make the stash or how long it would take us to get it all moved.
“Go,” she said, insistent now. “Go, dammit, you’re wasting time.”
I drove through Snoqualmie and out along the road to North Bend. Clouds moved in from the west and the air grew ripe with the promise of rain. It came, hard and furious, washing away the hope of the morning. I didn’t know how I felt anymore, I wasn’t sure of anything. I had made a colossal discovery, but I was no closer to Eleanor than I’d been yesterday. Overriding everything was the depressing thought that I could be saving one life and losing another. Amy Harper wouldn’t ever be going back to Belltown, but where was Eleanor?
I settled for the North Bend Motel, one of those older places with the rooms laid out in a long single-story row. I rented a room at the far end, where it might not be so evident to the guy in the office that I was using it for a storage locker. I paid two days in advance. The room was small—piled four high around the table and bed, the boxes would fill it up. I unloaded fast and started back. The rain had come and gone, but the clouds hung low and you could see there was more on the way. I turned into the Harper place at quarter to four. Amy had moved a dozen boxes and was still running hard. She was slightly giddy, confirming what I’d thought earlier, that the act of moving things had given her some badly needed emotional release. Her shirt was dark with sweat, soaked across the shoulders and under the arms, and her face was streaked with dirt. “Don’t forget to check the mail,” she called as I was going out with the second load.
But again the mailbox was empty.
At the end of the fifth load I ran into trouble. I stopped at the road and knew something was different.
The mailbox was open. I knew I had closed it.
I got out and crossed the road. The box was empty, but a cigarette had been thrown down and was still smoking on top of the damp grass. A beer bottle had been dropped in the mud. Beside it was the print of a man’s shoe, an impression that hadn’t yet begun to fill with water.
I felt the fear. Night was coming fast, fingers of fog wafted across the land, and Amy was alone in the house.
I splashed along the road with my lights off. I could see a flickering light in the trees ahead. It took on bulk and form and became a car, idling in the clearing.
I stopped and reached under the seat where my gun was. I clipped it to the front of my belt near the buckle. I got out of the car and walked up through the trees.
Headlights cut through the mist at the edge of the porch. Two men sat there in the dark.
I started across the clearing. A voice came at me from somewhere.
“Hey!…Where you going?”
I looked at them across the gap. “Going to see Ms. Harper.”
“Ms. Harper’s dead.”
“Ms. Amy Harper wasn’t dead, when I left her here half an hour ago.”
“That’s Mrs . Amy Willis to you, dum-dum. You can’t see her now. She’s busy.”
“She’s having a re-yoon-yun with her old man,” the other one said, and they both laughed.
I started toward the house. They got out of the car. They were punks, I had seen their kind many times, I had sweated them in precinct rooms when I was a young cop working burglary. When they were fifty, they’d still be seventeen.
The one riding shotgun had the James Dean look, dark, wavy hair over a fuck-you pout. They thought they were badasses and I was an old fart. That made two surprises they had coming.
“This asshole don’t hear so good,” the James Dean act said.
His partner said, “What’ll it be, Gomer?…You wanna walk out of here or be carried out strapped over the hood of this car.”
“I’ll take the hood, stupid, if you two think you can put me there.”
I veered and came down on them fast. I caught little Jimmy a wicked shot to the sternum that whipped him around and juked him across the yard like Bojangles of Harlem, sucking air till he dropped kicking in the mud. His partner jumped back out of range. My coat was open and he’d seen the gun, but he’d already seen enough of what went with it. I stepped over Little Jimmy as the ex loomed up on the porch.
“Who the hell’re you?” he growled.
“I’m Rush Limbaugh. Who the hell’re you?”
“I don’t know you.”
“I’m taking a poll to see who’s listening to the Asshole Radio Network. Maybe you’d better get out of my way.”
“Maybe what I’ll do is come down there and kick your ass.”
“Maybe what you’ll do is shit, if you eat enough.”
He started to launch himself off the porch. He balked, almost slipped, and stood tottering at the top.
Then he came, with too little too late. His pal yelled, “Look out, Coleman, he’s got a gun!” and he balked again, missed his step, and splashed face-first in the mud.
I went around him in a wide circle. “So far you boys are terrifying as hell,” I said. He struggled to one knee. I asked if he could sing “April Showers.” I hate to waste a line like that, but I know he didn’t get it. I walked past him, close enough for him to grab my leg, but he didn’t. I knew he wouldn’t. By the time I got Amy to open the door, they were gone.
Amy
stood at the window and watched them go. It was the last vestige of her childhood, the beginning of a long and wonderful and fearsome journey.
“ C’est la vie ,” she said to the fading day.
I thought about the woman in Irwin Shaw’s great story of the eighty-yard run. I told Amy to read it sometime and take heart.
She had never heard of Shaw. I felt a twinge of sadness, not only for the fleeting nature of fame but of life itself. I told her what a powerhouse Shaw had been when he was young, and how the critics had come to hate him and had made him the most underrated writer of his day. She didn’t understand why people would do that, so I explained it to her. Shaw made a lot of money and they never forgive you for that. She asked what the story was about and I said, “It’s about you and the damn fool you married, when you were too young to know better.” I didn’t want to diminish it by telling her any more than that.
We gathered ourselves for the trip to town. I’d be leaving fourteen boxes under Selena Harper’s roof for one more night.
“I don’t think we made much headway,” Amy said.
“We didn’t find Eleanor. Maybe we found you, though.”
She didn’t say anything. She gave me the key and I locked the house. She sank back in the car and closed her eyes, a picture of sudden weariness.
I told her what I had in mind as we drove. “I’m going to call a man who knows all there is to know about this stuff. If I’m right, he’ll want to fly up from Los Angeles and look at it.”
“It’s in your hands. I trust your judgment and I won’t go back on you, whatever you decide to do.”
I pointed out the motel where I’d made the stash. She gave it a polite look and we swung west with the night, into the freeway, into the driving rain.
