Читать книгу: «The King is Dead»
JIM LEWIS
THE KING IS DEAD
DEDICATION
For Philip and Karen and Dylan and Milena
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prelude
Part One: Shot
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12: Stay
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23: Country
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35: Casey Stengel Testifies Before the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly
36
37
38
39: A Dress Ball at the Governor’s Mansion, on the Occasion of his Reelection to a Third Term
40
41
42
43
44: An Indian on Beale Street
45
46
47: Speech for Walter Selby: Draft
48
49
The Brushy Mountain Letters
Part Two: Stay
Pied Beauty
1
2: Ten Percent of Nothing
3
4: The Invention of Pornography
5
6
7
8
9
10: Million-Dollar Bartender
11
12
13
14
15
16
17: Shot
18
19: The Ballad of the Little Sister
20
21
22: Coyote
23
24
25: Options
26
27
28
29
30
31
32: Yvette
33
34: The Death of Walter Selby
35
36
37
38
About the Author
Praise
Copyright
About the Publisher
PRELUDE
There was a woman named Kelly Flynn. She was born in 1720 to a Dublin banker, and raised in London, where her father had been sent to service a loan from the King. At court she met and married a Belgian furrier named DeLours; together they had nine children, and six of them died, four from disease and two through misadventure. One who survived, an intrepid boy named Henry (b. 1745), cut short his schooling to join the Army and was commissioned as an officer.
The Empire was widening into the subcontinent and there was a great need for resourceful men. Henry DeLours was clever and brave, and he was sent to Calcutta; while there, he met an Englishwoman named Elizabeth, the daughter of a fellow officer. He married her, and they produced five children. One of them, a daughter named Mary (b. 1770), returned to England to attend boarding school.
During a tour of Cornwall, Mary met an older man, a printer named Samuel Crown, who admired her, courted her, and soon won her hand. They returned to London, and their children were William, Theodore, Olivia, and Georgia, each following on the last by a little over a year. It was expected that the male children would join in their father’s business, but Theodore (b. 1790) was willful and wandersome, and as soon as he came of age he sailed for America, looking to make a fortune of his own.
For a time he clerked in a law office in New York. Each evening he went home to his small, dark room and wrote to his mother, describing both the faith he held in his future and the hardships that were testing it: debt, the dismissiveness of the men for whom he worked, the desolation he felt in this new, strange city. But he was frugal by way of defense, and he soon managed to amass a small amount of cash, which he used to purchase a few acres of land in Kentucky. He planted tobacco, labored, prospered, and within a few years he’d expanded his estate to some three hundred acres and two dozen slaves; by the age of thirty he had come to sufficient prominence to run for a local judgeship, and, with the help of some casks of whiskey that he had delivered to the taverns on the eve of election day, he won.
It was 1820, and Judge Crown was unmarried. Instead, he took a Negro woman, a slave named Betsey, who served in his house. He brought her into his bed almost every night—Apollo may not forgive me but Pan assuredly will, he wrote in his journal—and soon she gave birth to a son, a light-skinned boy named Marcus (b. 1821).
When he was a child, Marcus’s mother told him that his father was a house slave from up the road, but by then he’d already heard rumors that he was sired by the man who owned him. The cook would cluck about it and shake her head; the footman would tease him in their quarters at night; but he never sought to confirm or disprove the story of his origin. He didn’t dare, still less when Theodore at last found a wife, with whom he could have children who were legal and sanctified.
One midnight Marcus ran away from Crown’s farm, toward a legendary North. In his pocket he carried eighteen dollars, a sum that his mother had pilfered, penny by penny, from the household accounts, and which she’d given to him along with instructions to find his way to Ripley, Ohio. Under darkness, Marcus ran through fragrant fields; in morning towns, on broad bright days, he purchased food by pretending to be on an errand from some nearby estate, where the Master had a sudden need for a particular cut of meat, or oranges to make a punch, or bread to serve to an unexpected guest. By afternoon he would be sleeping in the cover of a thick forest or down at the bottom of a ravine.
In a week he came to the south bank of the Ohio River, which he followed east as far as Ripley. He could see the town on the other side of the water, but he was afraid to cross to it, and he waited at the riverside four days and nights, for what he didn’t know. In order to stave off hunger pains he slept as much as he could; in his dreams he heard women’s laughter. At last he was discovered by the freeman John Parker, who ferried him across the water and sent him along the Underground Railroad, northwest to Chicago. Fifteen days after leaving his home and his family, Marcus landed in the living room of a boarding-house on the south side. Not knowing what his own surname might be, he called himself Marcus Cash, and soon he was working as a laborer on the docks of Calumet.
Judge Crown’s farm began to falter, he owed money to every merchant within fifty miles, and bill collectors came by regularly to dun him. In the summer of 1840, Crown got into an argument with a barmaid over a glass of beer; he became belligerent, he became violent, and she struck him in the temple with an ax handle. He lingered on for a delirious few days, and then he died. To help pay off the debts he’d accumulated, his wife sold the slave Betsey, Marcus Cash’s mother, to a plantation in northern Mississippi.
By and by, Marcus Cash met and married a mulatto woman named Annabelle, eleven years his senior, a widow with three boys of her own. She had long soft braided hair, she could sing as sweetly as a flute, she cocked her hip and swept back her skirts. Within a year she was pregnant with a daughter they named Lucy (b. 1843).
Lucy was fair-skinned and full of feeling, and she needed more attention than her parents had to spare. What’s more, she was so much younger than Annabelle’s three boys that they scarcely thought of her as a sister at all, and as soon as she reached adolescence each in turn made advances on her. Marcus Cash walked in on the third and administered a whipping to him; but the incident suggested a danger that might recur on any wicked day, and soon Lucy was on her way to school in Philadelphia with instructions to study charm, to keep her legs pressed together, and to pass for white as well as she could, whenever it was possible.
When the War Between the States began, the Cash men watched and waited, and as soon as colored troops were allowed to enlist they joined up. Marcus died at Milliken’s Bend, when the tip of a bayonet tore his heart in half; one of his stepsons died of gut wounds received by gunshot at Fort Pillow, another of pneumonia contracted in the mountains of West Virginia, and the third of inanition while marching through Arkansas.
By then Lucy Cash had returned to Chicago, and after Appomattox she and her mother moved south to Memphis, Tennessee. At Annabelle’s insistence they pretended to be a young white woman with her aged and loyal servant—but in truth the older woman was nearly insane. Memphis had been in Union hands since the middle of the War, but she wanted to be within defaming distance of the former Confederacy: The two of them moved into a rooming house and the girl took a job sewing for a local tailor; and every evening Annabelle Cash would venture out onto a bridge over the Mississippi, where she would spit down into the water, and let the river carry her insult down.
Years passed—ten years, fifteen years. Lucy Cash had become a spinster, while her mother died a long, slow, puzzled death. The daughter was thirty-two; it was unlikely that she would find a husband, and a child was almost impossible to conceive. The daughter was thirty-three, thirty-four. And then one summer morning Annabelle awoke with a chill, complained briefly, and died, leaving Lucy Cash alone with her inheritance.
What happened then became a legend in Memphis: Lucy Cash moved out of the rooming house and into a small but elegant place on the north side of town. She hired a cook and a handmaid, bought chandeliers for the house and dresses for herself, and began to throw parties for young women and men. Within a year she was among the city’s most prominent belles, fifteen years too old but no one seemed to care; the yellow-fever epidemics of the 70’s had killed many of the younger women who might have been her rivals, and besides, the gatherings at her home were so elegant, so lively, the hostess was so charming and so duskily pretty. And in time she had her suitors: a pale and wealthy middle-aged man with a horse farm, a young rich gadabout, the blond boy born to a prosperous merchant, and the son of a minister, named Benjamin Harkness.
Having a keen sense of the mystery of salvation, Lucy Cash married the minister’s son. Her wedding took place just a few days before her thirty-seventh birthday, and exactly 280 days later the first of her four children were born; they would be Sally Harkness (b. 1879), and then Benjamin Jr. (b. 1880), and Charles (b. 1881), and finally Katherine Anne (b. 1883). The two daughters were prolific from a young age, producing a total of eleven grandchildren for Lucy Cash, none of whom she’d see or hold; she died of tuberculosis in 1892, revealing only on her deathbed, and only to her two boys, that she was one-half Negro.
In 1899, at the age of nineteen, Benjamin Harkness, Jr., went north to work for big steel, staying briefly in Philadelphia before being sent out to San Francisco to oversee the development of supply lines from the port. It was an unruly town, and being the grandson of a minister born to the privilege of wealth, he took full advantage of the sins of the Barbary Coast. By day he shuffled papers in his Russian Hill office; at night he gave syphilis and cirrhosis a run to see which could kill him first. In the end, the waves preempted both; stumbling home from a wharfside saloon late one night, he fell into the Bay and was drowned.
Charles Harkness was a dull and dutiful man, less ambitious and less lively than his brother, but his blood survived. He finished college, married a woman named Alice, and became a wholesaler of dry goods. Around Louisville, Kentucky, where he lived, they called him Gain for the number of his offspring: Charles Jr. (b. 1904), George (b. 1905), Diana (b. 1905), John (b. 1906), Robert (b. 1906), the twins Mary and Elizabeth (b. 1908), Patrick (b. 1910), David (b. 1911), and the second twins, Emily and Irene (b. 1913).
As soon as she was old enough to leave the house, Diana went north to New York—to study art at the city’s great museums, she told her father, but in reality to play amid its prosperity. Many nights she came home to her Riverside Drive apartment giggling and trailing black feathers from her boa across the lobby; many mornings she sat on the edge of her bed and wept—in despair at her loneliness, in pity because she was lost. Later, she would marry a bad man named Selby in a lavish church wedding; six months passed and she had her first son, Donald; a year and a half afterward she divorced her husband, not telling him that she was going to have another child. It was a second boy, Walter, born in 1925 in his grandfather’s house in Louisville, but cared for by Diana, until one day in 1937 when she stepped in front of a car on West Oak Street, was struck and thrown, lived on for three more days, and then passed away.
When Walter Selby was eighteen he enlisted in the Marines and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. In 1945 he came home a hero, finished college in two years on the GI bill, and then went to law school at Vanderbilt. Afterward, he settled in Memphis, the home of his great-grandmother, where he went to work for the governor of Tennessee. He met a woman named Nicole, he loved her more than love knew how; he married her and they had two children, a boy named Frank, and a girl, four years younger, named Gail. This book is their annals, twice-told and twofold.
PART ONE SHOT
Dearest Father:
You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you….
—Franz Kafka, “Letter to His Father”
1
Nicole’s hand was warm and damp. Three-thirty had come, the Governor hadn’t called—nor had anyone else—and Walter Selby had gone home lively to his wife, happy to have some time to spare before dinner. He was still thinking about work, running phrases for a speech through his head, but he wasn’t thinking hard. It was an afternoon toward the end of May, and he was enjoying the last hours of sunlight, along the street, under the shade of the pin oaks. To see his own house in the late sunlight of a spring weekday was a rare pleasure, and not one he wanted to squander.
To see his own wife. He parked in the driveway and emerged into a noiseless world; some money had bought that quiet, that still and green street. He could hear his steps on the walk, the hiss of the spring on the hinge of the outer door. He had his key in the lock and he paused to prolong the homecoming moment. These were instants he liked to savor: the border, and just across the border, where he would call Nicole’s name and then wait for her to answer, wait and wonder where her voice would come from, where she would appear. In the years since they’d married the process had taken on a formal quality, and the closer it came to ritual the more it delighted him; the smell of his own house delighted him, the weather dampening, the day-late hour, the light lengthening across the lawn, his anticipation lengthening along the front hall.
It was a Wednesday, and the Governor was back in Nashville, appearing at a hearing in the State Senate about advisory appointments; he would be strolling amiably down the aisle right about now, dressed in his thin grey penitent suit, a half smile on his face while he shook alike the hands of men he enjoyed and men he despised. Then he would take to his table, sit down slowly, and drop a tablet of bicarb into his water glass to distract his interlocutors while he composed himself. The water would remain fizzing at his elbow until his remarks were done, at which point he would stand up, take the glass and down its contents quickly, and then stroll out of the room again, smiling again, shaking hands, whispering.
The Selby house was quiet. Frank and the baby would be in the park with Josephine, the nanny they’d hired soon after Gail was born. This was Nicole’s own time, the part of the day when she could do what she liked, and Walter seldom interrupted her with so much as a phone call. There was some mystery in every marriage, or else there was no material left for later intimacies—for the hours after the children had been put to bed, to save and to spend, repairing the ragged forward edge of their affairs. Away from others, away from work, toward the night.
He stepped inside and called her name. There was a long silence, and he began to wonder if she was in the backyard, so he headed through the house. Along the way the light stepped down into the darkness of the living room where the blinds were drawn, up a notch in the rear hallway, and then up again into the illumination of the kitchen, which, with its south-facing windows, its formica and its reflecting metal, was as bright as a room could be. He stood there, blinking, then he turned and started back into the living room and saw her standing in the doorway, with a look on her face that he couldn’t quite describe: surprise, the satisfactions of a day, and worry or a question. She smiled a little. You’re home early, she said.
Short day, he said. She was wearing black slacks and a simple blue sweater; her hair was down, and once again he was struck. The man who first burned clay to make china: Wasn’t this what he was after? This face, in age? He put his briefcase down on the kitchen table and crossed the room to her, taking her shoulders in his hands. How beautiful, even on a bright, unglamorous afternoon; her cheeks were slightly flushed, her pupils were dilated, her lower lip hung slightly on the flesh. He hugged her; her nipples, half hard, pressed against the upper edge of his abdomen. He stepped back and looked at her from arm’s distance.
What is it? she asked.
I was just about to ask you the same thing, he said. What is it?
Nothing. What do you mean?
He shrugged. Nothing, he said. He drew her toward him again, leaned down and kissed her cheek. Neither of them smiled. He reached for her hand, a gesture he had made a thousand times before: he loved the feel of her palm against his—soft, cool, and dry—how her fingers would begin to tremble when the contact, plain at first, quickly grew awkward and unnatural, and then settled again into something comfortable, as each of them abandoned the tiny flickers of will that made their fingers clench, and peace was achieved for two. It was very much like marriage itself, he thought, where some small part of one’s self was deliberately, happily, allowed to die. But that afternoon her palm was damp—slightly hot, and slightly damp—and small and subtle though the difference was, it bothered him. He felt a clinging sensation, moist and cloying; it was like putting on a still-wet bathing suit, and he disengaged his hand from hers and rubbed his palm, slowly and almost unconsciously, against the hip of his trousers, and then bade her good-bye for a time so he could shake off the office day.
He was upstairs changing into home clothes when the children came back from the park; he could hear them burst through the door, hear Frank boasting loudly about a game. I hid in the sandbox! he said. All the way down and in, and they couldn’t find me, no matter how hard they tried. Not even Josephine could find me, could you?
No, I couldn’t, said Josephine. And I looked and I looked.
And then finally I had to come out and show them where I was, or they never would have found me, ever.—Daddy!
Walter was coming down the stairs, watching the tableau below him: Nicole had taken the baby from Josephine; Frank was struggling to get out of his muddy clothes. In the hallway? said his father. We don’t get undressed in the hallway. Frank. Come on, now. Son. Frank.
The boy said, No one could find me!
I heard, said Walter. Now go around back to the porch and take your clothes off there. And then you can tell me all about it.
Later, Walter drove Josephine home to South Memphis, his big brand-new blue Impala gliding down the streets, passing into the colored part of town, with its neat little houses set a short way back from broken sidewalks. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Someday, he thought. And when Someday comes, what happens? He knew very little about the woman on the seat beside him, now holding her glossy black purse tight against her middle. She was good to his children; she had several of her own, all of them now grown. She had a husband at home who worked hard for a paycheck that always seemed to fall a little bit short of the week’s expenses. How big was their bed? And how well did they sleep? No better, no worse, this year or a hundred years ago; because bed was where the world reached its level, the one place where all the efforts of the State—his efforts, his State—came to nothing. This Negro woman beside him, the room she was traveling toward, the man she would meet there: When the blinds were drawn and the lights turned off, and she lay down beside her husband, the lying-down would exist in its long kindness, no matter what was done to help them or to cause them to die. Then was all work futile? He pulled up to the curb before her house and turned in his seat to face her. How are you doing? he asked.
Well, Frankie’s reading better …
No, I mean you. How are you and your husband doing? He couldn’t remember the man’s name.
Josephine shrugged. We’re getting by, she said … And she hesitated, waiting for him to say something else, then looked over and found him gazing at her, his expression split between the half smile on his lips and the darkness in his eyes. She didn’t want to know what he was thinking, so she made her good-bye and stepped out of the car, leaving Walter to nod and say, See you tomorrow, and pull away from the curb.
Promptly at seven, the family Selby sat down to dinner, but Walter was distracted, hardly listening to Frank as he recounted his boy’s day. Throughout the hour he could feel the sensation of Nicole’s nipples against his chest. Well, she wasn’t feeding Gail anymore, was she? Was it a thought, then, that had gotten into her and then started out again? He could feel her hand on his; the sensation had somehow stuck to his palm and wouldn’t dissipate. He felt it, beneath the skin and below the veins, behind the bones, between the nerves.
Little Frank didn’t want his food, he said something about the food, he complained about the food. I don’t like this. Mommy? he said, his gaze wandering off to one side. He really needed to learn to look people in the eye, thought Walter, if he was ever going to get the things he wanted.—Can I have something else? said Frank. Please? Can I? Please, please, please? He pushed his rice around his plate a little bit with his fork and then slumped down in his chair, his mouth set against any obstacle to his appetite.
Nicole was talking to the boy, but Walter wasn’t listening; he was trying to follow a rustling in the rearmost hollow of his mind. She looked at him with wide eyes. Could you help me? she said. Could you help me with this?
Frank, do what your mother says, said Walter gently, looking at her rather than the boy. She returned his gaze with a questioning and concerned expression, and the boy was looking at both of them. Gail began to cry and Nicole reached for her, so suddenly and swiftly that the baby screamed. Oh, now … I’m sorry, she said softly, almost singing. I’m sorry, don’t cry.—And just like that the baby stopped. Outside, it had begun to rain, the drops picking up where the baby’s tears had left off. Everybody could hear it, each of them in the room, everyone in the city. There was no thunder, no sound of wind, only the piano splash of the rain and the smell of wet leaves. Can I have a hot dog? said Frank.
Shhh, said Walter. And then pointlessly: It’s raining.
Nicole was still for a moment, and then she spoke to the boy in a whisper. Only if you promise to eat it all. All of it, she said. Frank promised, so she rose from the table and went to the kitchen. Walter watched her go.
After the meal he helped her with the washing up while the boy sat with his little sister; they stood side by side before the sink, but aside from an occasional accidental brush against her hip, or a mutual grazing of fingertips as he handed her a plate, he didn’t touch her. He didn’t watch her undress that night before bed, or cup her shoulder and smell her neck as she fell asleep beside him, slowly passing him into dreams. He lay awake for a long time, his arms stretched behind his head, while he pondered the prodigal inching of her blood, and the damp heat of her hand.
2
One hot night nine years previously, Walter Selby had found himself alone in the parking lot outside of a baseball stadium, a vast concrete pool set in acres of asphalt down by the river. The game was done and the crowds were leaving but he’d become separated from his companion, a pyknic reporter from the Press-Scimitar, in a ruckus that had begun when an elderly woman suddenly struck her cane down on the head of a passing teenager. Now he was wandering between and among the parked cars, trying to find his man. Thirty minutes had passed since the last out had been made, and still the crowds were milling. Every so often the headlights on an exiting car would swing by, causing shadows to wheel across the way; he wasn’t sure which gate he and the reporter had used to enter the stadium, earlier in the evening, still less where they’d parked the reporter’s car. And the lights, and the groups of ghosts, marked only by their voices, which passed him in the summer darkness.
There, about thirty yards away, stood a rounded figure, much like the rounded figure he had lost. The man was standing in silhouette against the downward raking light of a stanchion; Walter started that way, but as he approached the figure turned, smiling at a passing woman with a mouth full of gold, and it was another man, no one he knew. He stopped again and sighed. A car went by, boys and girls hanging out the open windows and cheering loudly.
The woman, a woman-shadow, was coming his way. She came closer and closer, until she was within touching distance; then she stopped and looked up at him, though her face was still hidden in the shadows. Well, said the woman, shaking her head. I can’t find mine. You can’t find yours, either, can you?
He said nothing, because he could think of nothing to say. An old sedan approached them, its lights illuminating her for just a moment; she had dark hair and pale skin, and fine, taut features, and she was about to smile, but the car passed and her amusement was given into the darkness again, leaving him with the impression that he’d barely missed seeing something uncommon, a notion nudged a little further on by a trace of her perfume, loosened by the passing car from the kingdom beneath her clothes. He hesitated; she was still smiling in the night. At length he said, No. I was right behind him, but we got separated coming out.
The moon was half round; occasionally its shine would be slowly occluded and then revealed by a night cloud, and the slow shuttering of the moonlight added to the woman’s superlunar appeal. I had some friends here, she said solemnly. They could be anywhere. I don’t even know how I lost them. She spoke quickly and cleanly, with a kind of confidence that she might have learned from the movies. For that matter, she continued, I don’t really know where I am. I came along because I didn’t want to sit home. She made a wry face with such force that he could feel it in the darkness.
You’re in Memphis, Tennessee, said Walter. Where the lost can hardly be distinguished from the found.
She started at the sharpness of the sentiment and then settled. I think you’re right, she said. I think you’re right. I’ll tell you what, then: You look for my friends, and I’ll look for yours. With that she took him by the arm and began to walk him in the same direction from which she’d come. Now, don’t tell me your name, she said. But tell me what your friends look like.
My friend … He had almost forgotten his friend altogether, and now he could hardly picture the man. There’s just one, a little round fellow. I don’t know. He looks like everybody else, only a bit more so. And yours? If I’m going to look for yours, I’m going to have to know.
Oh, she said. I lied about that. I don’t really have any friends here.
Came all by yourself, did you? Halfway through the sentence it occurred to him that she might be telling the truth, however improbable it may have been, and he pitched the tone of the last words down, so she could take them for sympathy or take them for mockery, either way if she wanted.
Yes, she said sadly, protruding her lower lip in a facetious sulk. No friends. Oh, well. Who needs friends? All of these people.—She stopped in her tracks and gestured around the parking lot and then widened her eyes at him. And only you are gallant enough to help me. No, she said again. Which, after all, means you’re going to have to take me home.
I have no way to get home myself, he reminded her.
Well then, we’d better find who we’re looking for or we’ll have to walk, she said.
They began to wander this way and that, they stopped to let a honking car pass, and he stole another look at her in the ruby glow of its taillights. Then they were walking again. There was something quick and supple about her stride, as she effortlessly adjusted her pace to match his. In time they came to the edge of the lot; there was a field of tall grass, and in the distance they could see the lights of cars gliding slowly along the access road. Hm, she said. This may take all night.—All right, she said, grabbing his arm a little tighter, turning him back toward the stadium. New rules: My name is Nicole Lattimore.
I’m Walter Selby, said Walter Selby. She smiled again, just as they emerged from the shadows, and this time he could see her face whole and happy, her pale blue skin and perfect countenance, and the grin set within it, so broad that her lower teeth showed like an animal’s—a figure of joy and absolute appetite, world-conquering, generous and overflowing, and so powerful upon her face that she squinted as if she too was blinded by it. Overhead there was an airplane climbing the sky, moving upward, outward from the surface of their beautiful blue-black globe. By his side there was this flawless creature, smiling and announcing her name, and he knew what he wanted.
—Stoney, she said loudly. Stoney! In the near distance a tall dark figure was loading something into the back of a sedan; the man turned at the sound of her voice, ducking his head as if it would help him see farther across the night. Nicole? Then they were at the car and all the doors were opening at once, and they were surrounded by five men, the youthful products of reason, peace, and prosperity. Oh my, said Nicole. I don’t know how I got lost, but I’ve been looking for you for almost half an hour now. This is Walter: he’s been helping me find you.
Hello Walter, said one of the men, speaking for all of them.
He’s lost also. Maybe we should give him a ride. She turned to him. Where are you going? He gave one last glance around the parking lot, now mostly empty. I suppose I should probably wait here a little while longer, he said.
No, no, she said. We can give you a ride, we can take you home. It’s the easiest thing in the world. Walter, this is George. He’s driving, and you have nothing to worry about.
They piled into the car, a big black Ford: Walter, Nicole, and two other men in the backseat, three more up front. Well, Nicole said to no one in particular, I was really worried. I was really worried, even with Walter here, and even though he was so nice. I thought I was never going to see you again, ever. With that she fell silent, but Walter listened very hard for her thoughts. He was thirty-three then, and she was only twenty-one.
To his other side there was a slight pale boy named Peter, who began to speak. You know, George, he said to the man at the wheel. You are the only man in Memphis who knows exactly where he’s going.—The car bounced over a rut in the road, and Nicole fell against Walter, her slight weight briefly lingering at his shoulder before she righted herself again. Peter continued. Your name’s Walter, is it?
Walter nodded.
Tell us about yourself, Walter.
Peter … said Nicole.
No, no, Peter went on. I’m curious. I mean, what do you do? Aside from rescuing lost women in parking lots.
That’s not enough? said Walter. My God, man. The training alone: months in the wastelands of the Arctic, years studying female physiognomy, perfecting the Reassuring Smile, the Unflappable Calm. This suit, for example: Do you think I simply fell into it this morning? Oh, no, my friend. It’s the result of decades—decades, I say—of research into color science … the psychology of texture … the evolution of animal skins. Ah, you know, John Thomas Scopes was one of ours.
The car was quiet, Peter’s wit had been broken by the time Walter had finished his second sentence, and only Nicole was smiling. Hers was the discovery: let the boys be less smug for it.
I work for the Governor, said Walter. I’m a speechwriter, an aide.
Again there was silence, and then Peter spoke again. The Governor, is that right? Tell me this, because I’ve been wondering. Has he met the newly crowned Queen yet?
The Queen? said Walter.
Elizabeth the Second. I wonder if she’ll ever come to visit us, said Peter wistfully. Well, never mind, we have our own Queen. We have our Queen right here. He reached across Walter’s legs and touched Nicole’s knee, a gesture, it seemed, as much to her silence as to the girl herself. Then he went back to staring out the window and making fun of George’s driving. The others began to go over the baseball game, making jokes, telling tales. When they got onto plays they had seen, fantastic and legendary moments, Walter spoke up.—I saw a triple play once, he said. This was in the minor leagues, though. In San Diego, while I was stationed there.
Stationed? The other man in the backseat lifted his head and leaned forward so he could crane around and look at Walter. Stationed, as in the Army? They were too young to have fought in the War, or even to remember it very well.
Marines, he said. He could feel a change of consciousness in the girl beside him, a soft click as she came a little bit more alive.
A thin-faced, red-lipped boy in the front seat turned. There were tears of excitement in his eyes. Selby, he said. Isn’t that right? Corporal Walter Selby. I knew I recognized you.
What’s that? said George, peering up at Walter through the rearview mirror.
Isn’t that right? said the thin boy again.
Yes, said Walter.
You came to my school to give a talk, about five, six years ago.—Walter frowned, not from forgetfulness but merely to disavow any vanity, but the thin boy misunderstood. Oh, you probably don’t remember, he said, as if remembering were a weakness.
Eddy remembers everything, said a weary man sitting beside Walter, who until then had said nothing at all.
You were awarded the Navy Cross, said Eddy. Yeah. For distinguished something, valor and bravery or something. Boy, you stood up there …
What’s the Navy Cross? said George.
A bit of ribbon, said Walter, and a bit of bronze.
Did you fight Germans?
You don’t use a navy to fight Europeans, said Peter.
Of course you do, said George. There’s a whole ocean between us. They had U-boats. They had a navy.
I fought Japanese, said Walter softly.
The car was quiet. They were passing over a bridge, the water below was pitch black and as smooth as glass, and Nicole reached over and briefly touched Walter’s arm.
Then they were at his door, and she was stepping out of the car, leaving him room to exit. Good night, you all, he said.
Five good-nights came back. He stood on the sidewalk, slightly turned away from Nicole, as if he couldn’t quite bear her brightness full on.
Thank you for taking care of me, she said.
You’re welcome, he said. It was a pleasure. Good night. He nodded gently and started up his walk, looking back at the girl when he was halfway to his door. She was standing beside the car, she smiled at him again with her effortless jubilation; then she waved good-bye. And she climbed back in, and the car drove off, leaving him there in the quiet of his neighborhood, in the center of his tiny little lawn, which stretched for miles and miles to his lighted front door.
3
Back in the days when days were new, Nicole had met a man named John Brice. That was in Charleston, it was early in the fall, and all of her friends had thought he was strange. Yes, they said, he was handsome, lean and graceful, but he was strange. To begin with, he’d just appeared on the street one April day—Nicole had seen him standing outside the Loews in the middle of the afternoon, waiting all by himself for a matinee to begin—and then again, there he was on Broad Street a few days later. After that it was time to time; he was always alone, often with his hands thrust into his pockets. Sometimes it seemed as if he was dancing a little bit, dancing to himself as he went on his way. She’d seen him, a tall slim fellow with refined, almost feminine features and his hair combed back.
At the time she was just out of her parents’ house; an only child, imaginative and open. She’d spent two years in junior college, and then she came home again, took an apartment with a girlfriend named Emily, and started working in a women’s clothing store called Clarkson’s: some dresses, some underthings. Just a job, although she took pleasure in the details of the place, the feel of her fingers stretching over satin or the resistance of a band of elastic. Mr. Clarkson was usually at home, tending to his sick wife, so most of the time the store was hers; she even had keys to open it in the morning and close it at night, with only an hour or two toward the end of the day when he would stop by to empty the till and deposit it into the bank across the street. Otherwise, there she was, alone amid the cloth, the silks and nylons, and the ladies who came in.
This man, he must have been new in Charleston but he strode down the sidewalk as if he’d put a down payment on the whole town. That was something you noticed right away. Still, she didn’t think much of him; he was not-quite-regular and all alone, and it didn’t take much to make a young man wrong for a girl, in that city, in those days. At first she couldn’t quite tell what it was, exactly, and then it came to her: there was a slight eccentricity in the way he dressed, nothing that most people would have heeded, but she had an eye for the way a man put himself together. He would pass her on the street, wearing a pair of black dress shoes, perfectly acceptable, except that the laces were mouse-grey, and he had doubled them through the eyelets before he tied them. Was that on purpose, or couldn’t he shop for something as simple as shoelaces? One evening when she was walking home from work she saw him standing outside a florist’s in a seersucker suit, quite a nice one, actually, with narrow stripes of a deep rich blue; but it was a little bit late in the year to be wearing summer clothes, late enough that you would’ve thought he would be cold; and his belt was a few inches too long, so that the extending tongue turned and fell a few inches down over his hip. It was just the kind of thing she would notice, and she crossed the street instead of passing by him; but he turned and watched her all the way down to the end of the block, and she could feel his attention dragging on her at every step.
Then he came into Clarkson’s. It was a Tuesday, late in the morning, and he opened the door, peered in for a second, and then slipped across the threshold. He didn’t say a word, he just moved among the dresses and the blouses, along a line of girdles, back and around and back again, while she followed him from behind the counter and thought, What is this man doing? He took a little half step sideways—very gracefully—and she stood perfectly still. Then he did a little dance, maybe, a few subtle steps almost too soft to be seen at all, a slight gesture with his hip, his head cocked. He glanced up at her, studying her face, and she would have reddened before his eyes—but just then the telephone rang, she looked down at it, and he suddenly turned and left the store before she’d even had time to pick it up.
Then there was her father’s fiftieth birthday party, marked by a family gathering in their house outside of town—she remembered the weekend well and long afterward. So goes the tone of a time: not just forward over everything to come, but seeping outward too, in every direction, like wine on the figures of a carpet. She helped her mother in the kitchen, there was an aunt who got drunk at the party that evening, and wept noisily all night at something no one else had noticed and the woman herself couldn’t explain. That night Nicole slept in her old bedroom and listened to her parents in the room next door, arguing in soft voices and then, worse, giving in to that silence which had frightened her so when she was a child, and still made her uneasy. Poor father: a few years after she was born he’d contracted a fever, which was polio and paralyzed his left leg from the hip down. Poor mother: a local beauty alone with an infant, her husband quarantined and perhaps never to come home. By the time he recovered they were strangers again, the large family they’d dreamed of was not to be, he retreated into hobbled quiet, and she wore a seaside cheerfulness everywhere but on her mouth’s expression. Now Nicole listened as her mother sat heavily on the edge of the bed, and her father cracked his knuckles as if he would break his fingers right off.
The next day she was back at work, and that very afternoon John Brice appeared again. The same man, he walked around the store a little bit and then left. But she knew he was going to come back again, she knew she was going to know him, and she waited for him; a few days went by, and then right when she’d decided to stop thinking about it, he opened the door and came in. He had a look, didn’t he? Not just his expression, which was ready, but his clothes. This time he was wearing a grey double-breasted suit and a wide blue-and-grey tie, a foppish outfit, kind of high-toned, she thought, although he wore it very casually. He ambled up to the counter where she stood. Hello, was what he said.
She should have just said hello in return. Instead she fell back on her shopgirl manners. How may I help you? she asked.
He paused. I was just looking, he said, and motioned to the inventory with one long pale hand.
Anything in particular? she said
No…. He shook his head a little.
Maybe if you tell me who you’re shopping for, I can recommend something. The sun outside the windows shone down on an empty street, and she looked up and read the name of the store imprinted backward on the inside of the day-dark yellow glass.
What’s your name? he asked. She didn’t expect that, and she hesitated. It was something she didn’t want to give away, because she knew she’d never be able to get it back. Come on, now, he said, and made her feel foolish.
Nicole, she said at last. Lattimore. It was as if all the dresses and underthings were filled with silent women, watching women: were they smiling or shaking their heads? It didn’t matter anymore. It was done, really, with that. She gave him her name, and that was all he needed.
4
On the third weekend after they’d met he invited her for a drive down to Sea Island and she accepted. He had a huge blue car, a Packard Coupe that he’d bought almost new a few weeks after he’d arrived in town; he came to get her at the hour they’d set, just past dawn, and parked outside her apartment building, but he didn’t ring her buzzer. She only realized he was there when she grew impatient waiting and put her head out the window to see if he was coming; then she went hurrying down to him, though she didn’t chastise him for not coming to her door. It seemed like one of his things, she could let him keep it if he wanted.
It was a long way, and chilly, and he drove fast, flying along the edge of the ocean, beside inlet and alongside islet, blue outside his window and green outside hers. On Sea Island they bought a basket lunch from a general store, then parked by the ocean and scared the seagulls off the sand with the car horn. Later, they kissed until her lips were sore and her tongue tasted just like his. They arrived back in Charleston that evening; it was too late for dinner, really, but he was hungry, so they stopped for a hamburger. She asked him what he intended to do with his life. She thought it would be a good way to begin to get to know him.
He didn’t hesitate and he didn’t look away. I’m going to be a bandleader, he said, and for a moment she couldn’t imagine what in the world he was talking about. Play the saxophone, jazz, he went on, and he held his hands up, one above the other, gripping an imaginary instrument and wiggling his fingers. Jazz, jazz, jazz. New York, Chicago, maybe Los Angeles. I’m going to be famous.
At first she thought he was joking; it had never occurred to her that a man could have such an ambition, that wealth and fame could be studied, rather than simply stumbled upon by those with improbable access to the unreal. Oh, you are? she said teasingly, and she saw him wince. I’m sure you have the talent, she added hastily, and you certainly look the part. But isn’t it difficult to break in?
Sure it is, he said. He paused. I’ve got a little luck, he admitted. My father, over in Atlanta—he has some money. He stopped again, as if he was suddenly embarrassed by the rarity of his fortune. My father is what you might call … a wealthy man. He doesn’t much approve of what I’m trying to do, but he’s willing to support me for a little while.
Then why did you come to Charleston?
My grandfather had a house here, he said. When he died, he left it to my parents, but they never use it. So I came up here to get away, to practice—you know. To get myself ready.
Ready, she thought. Odd syllables. Was she ready, herself? The more she thought about the word, the stranger it became.—And here was the waitress with the check, it was time for him to take her home.
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