The Bookman's Tale (2 page)

And pleased himself for remembering it, helping to loosen the tensions still lingering from his roadside defeat—brought back for a moment as they halted at a crossroad to let the bus go by then turned off through a forest of bamboo toward the harbor. The man said something about “certain elements” liking to “keep them edgy. Somebody should have told you,” as if understanding he was a visitor, leading him on to explaining a little about the freighter and seven days down from Tampa, no time for much of it even if he had been inclined to talk, the man braking with a sliding scratch on the gravel at the foot of wooden steps up to a porch across the front of a cubical house on head-high stilts, windows all open, sashes hinged at the top.

“Give me ten minutes to change and I'll run you in,” gathering up racquets, cricket bats, towels, a folded newspaper in a rubber band, Ray protesting he would call the hotel for a taxi if he could borrow their phone: “There's a taxi stand at the door,” the woman adding with a little laugh, “Yes, ‘Twenty-two taxis facing west.'”

“No trouble,” from the man. “I'm taking a plane in an hour. I'll drop you off.
Princess Ann?
”

“Well, thank you. That's very kind of you.”

And the woman—Ray's daughter's age—seated him on the porch with a bottle of welcome Scotch and some ice cubes in a bowl, pointed hospitably at binoculars hanging from the back of a chair and vanished on rubber soles; leaving him facing a sun-streaked view of the bay and, as his eyes grew quiet, of a far-off vessel headed out that he took to be the
Lindvagen
though he realized he might not know her from such a distance, and from the side—only knew her from within (as you may know someone so intimately you forget how she would appear to a stranger), the passengers now down to five, the Captain now shorthanded (possibly promoting the steward until he reached New Orleans again), the door to a cabin in splinters and needing to be replaced—

The ship then changing course to show an ideogram on the smokestack that became a hammer-and-sickle through the glasses as if to warn him against making flash assumptions; such as assuming tomorrow's Claudia would be the one he knew—not a word between them for half a lifetime.

And none expected for the other half. Then four inches in the
Times:

WALTER MOTLOW, IN AFGANISTAN

Veteran newsman … helicopter … gunfire in the Chagai Hills … Mr. Motlow, according to sources at the left-wing daily … to investigate charges of chemical weapons
.…

He is survived by his wife, the former Claudia Baird of Austin, Texas, and two married daughters
.…

(no children when last he saw her, now grown up and married—and no doubt divorced, in the modern sequence), memories crowding into his head, the trivial with the unforgetable: “They mowed the wheat below us yesterday, what a glorious smell!” (writing from North Carolina one October—Mot reporting on the union organizers in the textile mills for the
New Republic
); overhearing, before he knew her name, knew only the back of her shoulders over the edge of a sofa, stiff black hair bunched out an inch above a soft white collar, “You're going to the mountains by
bus
!” from some man sitting beside her, unthinkable as a way of getting there.

“Oh yes. My husband needs the car.”

“God, you mustn't do that. If you wait until Tuesday I'll take you, I have to be in Asheville on Tuesday.”

She silent only a second or two, then, “Tuesday? Tuesday's fine. Thank you very much,” jealousy rising in him like a blush though he didn't even know her name, had only come close enough to notice that the laces in her brown shoes were tied with the bows falling front to back (months later showing her how to reverse the tying and send them right and left—having faced the same problem himself and taking it as a sign of compatability). Remembering, later, trying to deny the sense of completeness he felt in her presence, in the very awareness of her existence even when she was not present, refusing to hold with such sentimentality as that she could reinforce his faith in himself, his hopes for himself, could “stop the whirlwind, balk the elements”; and yet unable to deny his feeling of their affinity, the “fit” of their piano-violin difference—telling her so once in of all places a New York taxicab, she looking at her hands. Or at her “hand,” at how she should play it?—

Shocked by the sudden weight in his lap, still on edge from the roadside minutes; it took him an instant, not to see the cat but to adjust to the indiscriminate friendliness of another blue-eyed Siamese taking welcome for granted—after nearly a week of the freighter's gray-spotted Kristine and her serpent hiss for one and all except the first mate who fed her, following him, not close like a dog but springing along behind, rail to cleat to stanchion to pink Florida lumber lashed head-high between the forward bulwarks and offering a broad sundeck for Mrs. Sarah-Wesley Ackworth and Cousin in bikinis until they caught on this was world-class heat and not to be trifled with.

Appearing beside him one velvet morning, taking welcome for granted like the Siamese—one of them (Sarah-Wesley, he thought, not yet at home with names)—he with arms on the hot rail watching the birds like white kites on strings about to dive out of control, gazing at the black cable tailing out behind them trolling for their speed and progress. At the churned-up wake as it settled back to quiet; like anguish quieting with time and distance—the truck without a driver rolling toward them off a slope in the sunshine, gaining speed, rolling unbelievably into the other lane, the coming car swinging out to avoid it, striking them from the front as the van struck from the side, her side, changing his life in an instant, wife broken and in a week mercifully dead, he on crutches for half a year, on crutches of a sort to this day. And seeking a miracle cure next week in San Juan de Pinos (his Pilgrimage to Lourdes)—

“Penny for your thoughts, Eddie,” eyes steadily on his face as if not so much to see him as to see if he saw her, bringing back the young clubwomen at home and their cookbook the Press had been publishing for them; and the “few words” they asked of him for an Introduction. “I was thinking of the ‘few words' I once wrote for a young ladies' cookbook. They didn't like them.”

“Maybe I would?”

“‘I sing the merry, merry maidens,/Lithe and blithe of limb and look,/One in girth, in coif, in cadence—'”

“I don't think I do.”

“‘—Girdled here as if to cook./God rest ye, little restless lasses,/Plunging ankle-deep in life,/God save your insulated chassis,/Daring now the paring knife—'”

“I would have pared
you
, Edward! Cut you up in one-inch cubes and—”

“‘Oh, dabble, dabble, little femmes,/Unleavened in the midst of leaven,/Hang your aprons—'”

The steward announcing lunch with his hand bell on the deck behind them—as he had announced dinner on their first night out, mid-afternoon it seemed, swinging his bell at precisely five-thirty and showing them into their white dining room-living room; seating them at a bolted-down table, four on a bench under a shelf of barricaded paperbacks, the others across in bolted-down chairs, leaving the head and foot for the Captain and his wife who might dine with them or not “depending on wind and weather and the usual temperamental behavior of a cargo ship.”

Appearing quite promptly that first evening, a bony man of forty-five with straw-colored hair (home-cut) plastered damp against skull and showing a sort of beaten path round the sides and back where the band of his cap had spent so much time. He made a polite try at connecting faces and names on a card in his hand and signaled with it at the steward to begin serving. “Mrs. Lundquist will not be dining with us but sends her greetings.”

When they reached their not-unexpected dessert of white icecream and chocolate sauce he refused his with a contemptuous flat-of-the-hand to the steward, who seemed prepared for it and refilled his coffee cup instead; he pulled it in front of him, fished out a pipe with a charred rim that suggested the smudged top of the
Lindvagen's
smokestack and settled down to making his passengers comfortable as if on Standing Orders from the Home Office. He said it was the custom on his ship, if agreeable to everybody, to tell stories of an evening, take turnabout in relating some significant event that had happened to them.

“Or almost happened. Or,” gold edging to his front teeth showing, “that you wished
had
happened,”—stirring up some “Ohs!” and “Ahs!” among them, used to talking all at the same time and with a comfortable inconsequence. But alternate diversion seemed meager (a phonograph in a salt-pitted cabinet, a recalcitrant-looking TV, the reading matter suggesting discards by passengers making luggage space for duty-free souvenirs), and everyone seemed pleased—except Ray, in the midst of what might be his most important story and not at all inclined to share it.

The Captain proposed they would later take a vote and give the winner a Christmas party on board when he cast anchor at York Island on Christmas Eve. “I discharge by lighter at York Town,” (only half audible through the ladies' delighted buzz set off by “party”), adding like a mother-hostess to gathered-about children that they would draw straws for position, holding out a browned hand behind his head with, “The ballots, Erik?” which he tapped even at the exposed ends and offered all round like after-dinner cigars—pausing as he reached Ray to explain that Mr. Ray was a book publisher “and may hear something he can turn into a best seller” (cut short by “Mr. Ray's” quick protest that his house didn't publish fiction, and that in any case he was on a holiday).

Holiday?—Awake in his bunk for hours wondering how he could play along in the little game (he seemed to be sixth or seventh) and at the same time hold back the very story that was in the front of his mind, the story indeed of his being on the ship at all; wondering accompanied by the far-down mumbling in the engine room, by the hiss of warm air through his wide-open porthole, the sleepy rocking of the vessel that even when he put out the light continued to show the oscillating pale ghost of his white dinner jacket, on a hanger to save its being crushed by half a week in a suitcase and spoiling, marring anyway, his entrance—re-entrance—into the life of someone he hadn't seen in so long, the last time still wrapped in train sounds, night sounds, closing doors, her face pale in the narrowing crack of a door and gone, the sharp click of the latch saying “end” as distinctly as a voice, to which was added now the uncomfortable fact that she didn't know he was coming, that he deliberately hadn't told her, afraid she would say—write—“Don't you dare!”

And coming by water when a plane would have delivered him before a ship got well under way, explaining again to himself that he didn't want mere transportation, wanted a feeling of distance, of change in keeping with his change of outlook (possible change), wanted a sense of leaving, passing through, arriving some place else. He didn't want to look down on the Island with his head still full of the mainland, didn't want to go knocking at her door or ringing her telephone or seeing her face until he had considered everything again—re-considered, in the sense of maybe thinking better of the whole romantic plan, sentimental in a way he should have long outgrown. The years had rained down on her as well as him; they would have passed on the street without knowing each other.

Unless he heard her speak; he would know her voice, the tilt of her head if she laughed, the sort of thing that made her laugh. He loved her, but he also
liked
her, with the liking that underscores a love, the stem that carries the flower; he needed her, had felt a need of her at every clouded moment of a mostly sunny marriage, had often faced down the skeptic mocking him from a corner of himself: “The one that got away?” And now, three years after the accident, old but not old-old, hair a sable silvered (in Horatio's terms), he needed her in ways he hadn't known before, in ways the overheated young wouldn't understand, or value if they did. Not just another body but another presence, another consciousness—and not just “another” but hers.

Lonesome? No-and-yes. No, during the day; at the office with the others, a staff in more than one sense, his prop of questions and decisions (that he leaned on as he had the “walker” of his invalid months), his two or three current authors and their ingenious complaints. But afterhours was another matter, as if well-being faded with the sun. Lonesome then? Well, anyway, lonesome enough one night to half remember what the eagle said to Chaucer about
his
afterhours—something like, “Instead of reste and newe things, thou goest home to thy hous anoon, and also dumb as any stoon, thou sittest at another book, till fully dazed is thy look, and livest thus as an hermyte, althou thine abstinence is lyte.”

At a bookshelf, in the midst of looking it up when Isabel phoned from Connecticut, she and Mary friends in college and the three of them in the New York years—widow now. “I'm going to Florida, Ted, to spend a week or so with Sister. I could take a plane over from Atlanta for a day or two if that's convenient, for old time's sale.” “Of course it's convenient.” “If not, then on my way back?” “It's perfect.”

Why not Isabel? Why did it have to be Claudia? Just wanting the remote instead of the near? the chancy instead of the possible, the possibly possible?—the white pendulum of his dinner jacket melting away into the clang of Erik's hand bell from the deck outside,
pianissimo
, to
forte
as he passed, to
pianissimo
, and the porthole full of horizontal, point-blank, booming-at-you sunlight.

And then, day after day, bearing almost straight down, reminding you the Equator was just over the horizon, he and the Doctor in deck chairs in the shade out of the sticky wind, the Doctor saying he “took a dislike to the boy—man—the minute he walked in my office.” There watching the sky to the northeast light up in occasional bursts like a lantern uncovered then covered again, the back of his chair nudging his shoulders now and then as if this part of the Gulf Stream needed a resurfacing job.