It troubled Mr. Shepherd that there were no photographs of Sheldon Harte in Mexico, to give to the father. He mentioned that, more times than you'd think. The boy always would take the camera in his own hand and urge others into the photograph. Now I've pondered why that was troubling to Mr. Shepherd, because he used his notebooks in like fashion, always portraying others, not himself. At the end of all this, when I struggled with my conscience over Mr. Shepherd's wishes, I used his sentiments on Sheldon Harte to help guide my hand. He was sad that Sheldon had perished without being in any photographs. It struck him as wrong that a man should disappear.
His task in New York was delivering important paintings to the galleries, and this he did in a perfectly satisfactory way. Probably he stayed to see the paintings hung so he could make reports to Mrs. Kahlo Rivera. His friendship with her remained an anchor for a time, yet she herself had a great many friends and may have felt anchored elsewhere. That is an opinion. She and Mr. Rivera remarried that same year, returned to Mexico, and resumed life as before. To my knowledge she never offered Mr. Shepherd encouragement to return to Mexico. His only shred of a plan, arriving here in '40, was to go to Washington, D.C., with the address of a lawyer's office in hand and ask where his father was living.
The office happened to be on the same street where he'd ducked the tear gas in the riots, years before. He said he took it as no portent. The father had written he would be moving soon to a new place, and for that reason gave a lawyer's address. The son went with expectations of making some peace, this being all the family he had left. If all went well, he could find a place nearby and perhaps look after the father in old age.
Well, what a surprise he found at the lawyer's office. His father had moved, to the sweet hereafter. The illness mentioned offhandedly in his letter was in truth a malignancy of the intestines he failed to survive. The lawyer explained how the man had come to him to put earthly matters in order, so he knew. He'd left a small sum and the keys to a car, the same he had written his son about. A Chevrolet Roadster, the very model Mr. Shepherd learned to drive in Mexico, white. He kept that car ten years. I knew it well.
So, there he was. If he took any of this as a sign, it was one that said: "Drive!" He got in the automobile and he drove. The streets of Washington, D.C., were overrun with automobiles in those days, this was before the war, when the gasoline ran like water. Mr. Shepherd followed the signs pointing out of town, heading toward Mexico for want of a better direction. Twenty-four years old, with nought in this world to count as friend and no place to call his home. What he found was a Blue Ridge Parkway. He got on that and followed to its end. He thought the Blue Ridges sounded good. He had recollections, for his family had lived in the valley west of Washington in the brief time his mother and father were wed. He hoped to see blue mountains rolling away to the sky, something like the ocean in a child's eye, as he remembered it. But in this instance, he drove hundreds of miles and never saw one blue thing at all. Gray skies only, and brown mountains covered with leafless trees, and then of a sudden, no more parkway. It was a public works project, and the government ran shy of money. That is how he came here to Asheville. It would have been November. He hadn't any gumption to think what to do next. Here he stayed.
It is not a bad place to wind up, Asheville. Our town lies in the elbow of the Great Smoky Mountains, circled by high peaks and the oldest forests of the land. The Swannanoa and French Broad Rivers twine together in the valley, and that is how the city came to be put here. Mr. George Vanderbilt found it rewarding to haul trees and coal out of the mountains and float it all out on barges, or carry it off in his railroads in due time. He made himself a fortune, and a good deal of it can still be viewed in his house, the Biltmore mansion. If you want to pay fifty cents to go look at a million dollars, you can do it any day of the week except Sundays. They have paintings of countless worth, a library, forty bedrooms, and Napoleon's chess table. Later during the war, Mr. Shepherd was to have his important duties there at the mansion, but he never did go back in as a visitor.
Our city has had its pioneers and scoundrels like anywhere. When the Central Bank and Trust failed in November of 1930, the city's own funds were in it. That was bad. Those of us on the city rolls went without pay for months. I was a typist for the city clerk's office then, making little enough to begin with, yet we still came to work. For no one offered to pay us for idlement, either. Others had lost much more. Foreclosed houses stood empty in the nicest parts of town: Grove Park, Beaucatcher Mountain, even the stately homes in the woods along the Tunnel Road where it winds down from the Blue Ridge.
It was this road that brought Mr. Shepherd to town, when his parkway ended without further ado. After driving day and night through high-mountain vistas, he would have found himself in the long tunnel through Swannanoa Gap, then spit out from darkness into the valley. He stopped at one of the large houses on the Tunnel Road that had been made a boardinghouse. That was Mrs. Bittle's, a widow lady with children all grown who found herself betwixt the rock and the rail in '34, so began to take in boarders. I was her first one. She had a sign made to put out in the yard whenever she had a vacancy: "Clean To Let With Meals $10 Week, Only Good People Here." Somehow the wording of it struck Mr. Shepherd. Those words changed his course, brought his long drive to an end.
Mrs. Bittle took to him and allowed the Roadster parked in her garage for no extra. He kept that automobile under high polish for many years, though its destiny for the next while was to stay parked, it goes without saying. No new automobile could be had in the war years, nor gasoline for an old one if you had it. Chrysler set their plants to making tanks, Ford built Cyclone engines for the bombers, and they all quit making cars entirely. The railroad moved men and materiel instead of Mr. Vanderbilt's lumber, and the Asheville-Hendersonville airport was taken over by the armed forces. The nice homes that had stood empty since the crash now filled up with the families of government workers, thought to be safer here than in the capital, after the Japanese attacked the refineries at Los Angeles. The Nazis were sinking our tankers right off the Carolina coast, day in and day out. The thinking was that our marble halls might be next. For that reason, the National Gallery sent many trainloads of its national treasures to the Biltmore House, for safekeeping.
We were proud to hold on to treasure. Our city had never been asked to do anything important before. We were ready in a jig. Everything was rationed then: girdles, shoes, bobby pins, yet we did not complain. The Army Corps took over our shopping arcade downtown, and that was fine too, since there was nothing to sell in the shops. We heard they were keeping high-ranking Axis prisoners up at the Grove Park Inn. We reckoned it was Mussolini himself up there under lock and key, soaking in those grand old tubs and sitting on the Roycroft chairs, waiting with heavy heart to receive his comeuppance.
They had the USO dances at the Woodfin House, I didn't go. I turned forty the year before Pearl Harbor, too old for carrying on with soldiers. But the war made each and all feel young in a certain way. The town ripped up the trolley tracks to send off in the scrap-metal drives, and next they tore the iron cells from the old jail building! No American would commit a crime during wartime, was our thinking. Everyone went a little touched.
Mr. Shepherd did nought to call attention to himself. The question did come up in the roominghouse, as to what the arrangement might be between Mr. Shepherd and the Selective Service. The rest of us living there were women without family, or men who couldn't serve, for one reason or another. We thought Mr. Shepherd might have been found unfit for service, like so many his age. His slightly odd and solitary ways gave that impression, and his extremely slim build. He hardly had a scrap of meat on him. Many were the boys who had it so bad in the Depression, ten years later when called up for the draft, they failed the examination. Something inside them, the heart or teeth or legs, would be a little soft from so much hunger in the formative years. It was not just a few, either. It was thirty-nine percent of the young men called. I happen to
know, for I was in secretarial service at the enlistment office. I saw all kinds, and for all I knew Mr. Shepherd was one of them. He was later called up to serve in the Civilian Public Service, but I will get to that.
To help pay his board at Mrs. Bittle's he cooked for the other boarders, six in all, including Mrs. Bittle. Every breakfast and supper, and noonday dinner on Sunday. That came about after the war started. He had a knack for making the ration-stamp books spread over the whole ration period. Mrs. Bittle was raised on silver spoons, hopeless at any kind of budget. She would collect the stamp books from all the boarders to get what she needed, yet by Saturday would be down to a jar of mustard and a box of Ralston cereal. She never could understand how it worked, though we tried to explain. She confused the one-point tokens with the ten-point stamps. Mr. Shepherd offered his help, and he was a whiz. He would take our A, B, and C stamps downtown on Mondays, adding everyone's meat points and so forth to get the best items first. Then sail through the week entire, with food to spare.
His trick was the fruits and vegetables. These weren't rationed, it was mainly the packaged goods, soups and canned meats and all such things they needed to send overseas. If the truth be known, Mrs. Bittle probably thought peas grew ready-frozen on the vine and cheese came from the Wej-Cut package, not a cow. But Mr. Shepherd said in Mexico every cook knew how to make from scratch. He could put a passel of red tomatoes into sauce as fast as Mrs. Bittle could have worked open a tin. In spring he planted greens, impinging on Mrs. Bittle's dahlias. She was queasy about that. The rest of us felt it a good bargain.
He looked like a scarecrow out there digging. One of the other boarders, Reg Borden, pointed out the window one time and said that. The boy was just so tall and thin, you'd have to say gaunt. And inside him, some kind of dread that went past the bashfulness. Not a workaday fear, no. He would rush in to clap a bowl over a mouse in the pantry, and once chased a sparrow from the house when it had Mrs. Bittle up on a chair. He would move a dresser any time you asked, manly in all such ways. But certain sudden things struck him dumb. He was shy of the sight of blood, and a loud sound unexpected would set his hand to trembling. A knife dropped on the floor could put such a haint over him, you would look all about for what ghost he'd seen. In summer months especially, he took spells of hardly leaving his room. Mrs. Bittle would suffer the cooking, and we all endured, saying, "Poor Mr. Shepherd has taken the grippe again." But knew very well it was no germ that had brought it on him. This is the truth, it could be anything or nothing, or just Reg Borden standing in the door with his raincoat on. There appeared to be no rhyme or reason.
Yet on most days he was like any broad-shouldered lad you'd ever known, with his manners and a sweet laugh. So fine for speaking, you asked him things just to hear what words he'd pick out in answer, for they'd be not the ones you expected. His face was pretty as a girl's, especially around the eyes. He had delicate hands despite the kitchen work, what people call "piano hands," though Mrs. Bittle had a piano and he didn't play a note.
Miss McKellar was sweet on him I believe, but all her offers to press his collars got her hands upon nothing but his shirts, so far as I know. Reg Borden was overly curious about his failure to serve. Reginald's own excuse was a glass eye. And Mr. Judd, of course too old. That poor man remained confused about which war was presently on the go. They needled Mr. Shepherd about not serving, and a foreigner in the house was something they frowned on behind his back, but Mrs. Bittle maintained he was not the bad type of foreigner, Jap or Italian. Germans she was queasy on, they ought to be bad she said, but of course they owned the hardware downtown, and no one saying you couldn't buy a ten-penny nail. In all, the men and Mrs. Bittle liked the cooking, and that swayed them.
They did press him on the lack of a fiancee, given his youth and vigor. Mr. Borden would raise this at supper, to Mr. Shepherd's mortification. I defended against the charge. I had been unwed all but one year of my life entire, and I informed the gentleman I could see the advantages. Miss McKellar had her theories: a broken heart or a girl back in Old Mexico. All we really knew of this young man was that he had a prior life in that country, and cooking was his talent, second only to making himself unseen.
To earn pocket money he taught Spanish lessons at the Asheville Teachers College, an establishment of good reputation where I also worked, up until the war. I was secretary to the administrator and recommended Mr. Shepherd to her as a person of decent character, which was all I knew. Spanish was a less fashionable language than French, so he only came to teach two days each week. He made no impression on the office staff.
His third talent was well hidden. For three years we all resided in the same house, passed in the upstairs hallway to use the bath, sat in matched parlor chairs on Monday evenings to hear The Voice of Firestone over NBC. And we never once saw him draw ink into a fountain pen. If he owned a typewriter I never heard it, and it's not a sound that gets past my ear. I know a Royal from a Smith-Corona from the next room. He wrote nothing in those years. This I know, for he later told me. He was dispirited of his past and stopped keeping the journals after everything was lost.
He'd brought up from Mexico a crate for a painting given him by Mrs. Kahlo, but hadn't opened it. That might seem strange to others. Not to me. He wasn't susceptible to suspense the way most are. If you gave him a package and said, Don't open that till Christmas, he wouldn't shake it. Something in his nature just did not expect good things in store. He set the crate in his wardrobe closet, leaving Mrs. Bittle to run the duster around it on her weekly rounds. There was no use in any of us having paintings. Mrs. Bittle wouldn't let us pound any nails. All pictures in the house were hers, the deceased Mr. Bittle fond of landscapes. So Mr. Shepherd's sat in the dark. I have asked him if he thought much about it. He said if ever he did, he pictured something alive in the crate, and once out, he dreaded he wouldn't have the heart to shut it back in the dark.
At the end of '43 he moved to his own house. A great event. Miss McKellar and I hung up crepe paper in the parlor and pooled our stamps to get him a set of sheets. What had happened prior, to make this possible, was that Mr. Shepherd got called up to do a war job. No, he never saw gunfire. He had the safest war job of the war, he said, which was: to oversee moving many shipments of famous pictures from the museum in Washington, D.C., to the Biltmore House. The Axis powers were having no end of amusement sinking ships and firing upon our coasts. Safety of our national treasures was the concern.
Mr. Shepherd was unsure how Uncle Sam had found him out for the task. When he'd applied at the Teachers College and was asked about previous employments, he listed "Consignment Marshal, moving art pieces to museums." He thought it more reputable than "cook" and a decent cause for traveling from Mexico. (He feared they'd think him a bandit.) Some way the word passed. The War Board knew everything about us in those days. The officers called up the galleries in New York and were surely impressed to learn his association with Mr. and Mrs. Rivera, highly famous. So Shepherd was their man. It took months to see it all through. They kept him on with the CPS for the duration but he rarely had to travel far, nor to any place more dangerous than a room of naked statues.
The job gave him means to set a payment on a two-story bungalow on Montford Avenue that had stood empty for years. It was close by the stop he took for the in-town bus to the library and he'd often taken little walks up that street, for it had a cemetery up at the end and a mental hospital with nice grounds. The empty house struck him in particular. He thought it had an aching look about it, and for that reason chose it. Up until then he'd felt underfoot in every house he ever lived in. Peace and quiet was his only wish.
Soon after moving, he pried the nails off the crate from Mrs. Kahlo to see his gift. Pandora's box you might say now, given everything that happened. The canvas itself was only some sketch she had snatched up from her bin, to carry out her plan. The gift was around the painting. There were the two crates, one inside the other, and the space between not stuffed with straw but pape
r, all the notebooks and typed pages taken from his room in Mexico after the murder. Hundreds of crumpled pages in all, needing to be smoothed and sorted out. But mostly all there.
Unbeknownst, Mr. Shepherd had been writing a book for years. He believed it had gone up in ash. But Mrs. Kahlo made the police not to destroy it. She was a powerful person evidently. Then hid the pages this way, not telling the author himself what he carried. Was it a trick on her friend, or did she only want to keep him safe? I can't say. But she was first to see what the world soon would, after he'd fixed it up, filled in the missing parts, written and rewritten and stewed over it until he could stew no more. In due time it came to the Stratford and Sons publishing house in New York. That was Vassals of Majesty. It came out in '45, before Christmas. That part is common knowledge, or ought to be.
So he was right about something alive in the crate, wanting out. Mrs. Kahlo did that for him. He'd about given up on life as a whole, going away on a train to the next world. If he didn't take one other thing, she wanted him carrying his words.
--VB
October 8, 1943
Asheville, North Carolina
Gringolandia
Dear Frida,
What you have done is a miracle. But how can any thanks be enough? Just words, brought here and heaped at your feet like a pile of cold mice with gnawed ears fetched in by a cat. You have restored a life. You will see.
This morning a white cat appeared here on the back step, and it seemed you must have sent her too. She didn't cry but stood quietly, as if waiting for a well-known outcome. The wind tugged fingers through the creature's coat, trying to unbutton the shaggy garment and pull it off. Think of how you would paint this cat: with her insides exposed, the delicate rib cage curved like a ring's setting around a bloody gem of carnivorous love. This is how she seemed. When the door opened just a crack she slipped in, curling immediately on the hearth, declaring with her eyes: "Ha, you thought I was helpless! I own you now." Of course she is Frida.
The Lacuna Page 26
