The Bookman's Wake (29 page)
She sat at her telephone and made some calls: to night
city editors at the
Arizona Republic
, the
Baltimore Sun
, the
Idaho Statesman
, and the
Times-Picayune
in New Orleans. While people in distant cities chased down
any clip files that might exist, we sat at the table
drinking coffee.
Now that she had begun on Grayson’s notebook she
couldn’t leave it alone. “I’ve
interviewed some of these people. Look, here’s
Huggins…number twenty-three of the regular run. He
got in early.”
A minute later she came to Otto Murdock, number 215.
“Let’s look at what else we’ve
got,” I said. “I hear dawn cracking.”
We had our physical evidence spread out on the table
between us. We had Richard’s poem, which Trish had
yet to read. We had the paper chip from Pruitt’s
house, and the sheet she had brought back from St. Louis
with the two dim letters standing out in the soot. And I
had brought in from the car an envelope containing the
photographs I had found in Amy Harper’s attic.
Trish opened the envelope and looked at the first
picture—the Eleanor woman, shot at Grayson’s
printshop in May 1969.
“Imagine how the kid must’ve felt, finding
this,” she said. “You grow up thinking you know
where you come from. Your home and family are the real
constants in life. Then in one second you see that
nothing’s what you thought it was.”
She turned the picture down and looked at the one
beneath it. Three people walking in the woods: the Eleanor
woman, another woman, and a man.
“Look at this,” she said.
“There’s Charlie Jeffords.”
“Really?” I took the picture out of her
hand. The guy was standing in a little clearing, smirking
at the camera. The Eleanor woman was posing with him in the
same sleeveless blouse, her arm over his shoulder. The
other woman stood a few feet away, clearly unhappy.
“This is Jeffords?” I said.
“You’re sure of that?”
“Sure I’m sure. He’s got dark hair
here and that horny leer of his’ll never be there
again, but yeah. Same guy I talked to in Taos.”
“I wonder who the other woman is.”
She shook her head. “This bothers me a lot.
It’s fairly obvious now that Jeffords was a player of
some kind in Grayson’s life and I missed it.
Damn.”
I wanted to move her past it, beyond her own
shortcomings. I took the handle of my spoon and changed the
subject, nudging the chip of paper until my words
still
and
whisp
lined up opposite her
Fr
.
“I’m no expert,” I said. “But
this typography looks the same to me.”
“They seem to be the same point size. But the
letters are different so it’s hard to be
sure.”
I unfolded the library copy I had made of the original
“Raven” and showed her the words
still
and
whisp
where I had circled them in the fifth stanza.
“Here’s where your
Fr
comes from. Fourth line, second stanza, first word.
‘From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for
the lost Lenore.’”
But I could see she had already accepted the
inevitability of its being there. She picked up the yellow
pages and read Richard’s poem. I watched her face as
she read it, but she went through the entire thing
deadpan.
“What do you make of this?” she said,
putting it down.
I told her what I thought, the obvious supple-mented
with guesswork. It was a rough draft of something,
hand-dated July 1967, two years before the Graysons died.
There were numerous strike-outs and places where lines had
been rewritten between lines. In the margins were long
columns of rhyme words, many keyed to the dominant suffix
ore
. Mixed among the common words—
core, store, door, lore
— were exotic and difficult possibilities such as
petit four, centaur
, and
esprit de corps
.
“Whore,” she said, looking up from the page.
“That’s one Poe couldn’t use.”
In technique it was like “The Raven,”
written out in eighteen full stanzas with the Poe meter and
cadence. The tone was allegorical, like the old Orson
Welles version of
Julius Caesar
in a blue serge suit. You couldn’t quite be sure what
was real and what had been skewed for effect, or how much
might just be the author’s own grim fantasy.
The style was in part mythic. It told the story of two
young gods, one fair, the other dark: brothers forced to
choose between good and evil when they were too young to
understand the consequences. The road to hell was an orgy
without end, lit up with laughter and gay frolic. Salvation
came at a higher price.
One took the path of least resistance and tumbled into
hell. The other chose the high road, finding strength in
purpose and contentment in his work. But temptation was a
constant, and in the end the darkhaired god was his own
undoing.
Rigby was the symbol of blind youth. His was the only
proper name in the tale. Richard had chosen to write it
that way, the entire eighteen stanzas a lecture to
youth.
On paper he could do that. He could sit Rigby down and
make him listen. He could turn whores into saints and make
the dark-haired god bow at the devil’s feet.
“There are a couple of lines crossed out,”
she said, “as if he had changed his mind about
something and took off in another direction.”
“He wanted to take his brother’s name out.
You can still read it, though: all he did was draw a
squiggly line through it.”
She read aloud.
Rigby was a fresh young boy when he arrived like
Fauntleroy
And took his bashful place beyond the shadows of
the Grayson door;
Little did he know that Grayson had a legendary
place in
Bedrooms: everywhere he’d hasten, wives
and
daughters to explore.
Grayson had them everywhere; on the stair and on
the floor,
Grayson lusted, evermore.
“Why take that out?” she said.
“It’s too blunt. He wanted it to flow
differently, he wanted that godlike flavor. He felt he
could do that better by keeping himself and his brother
nameless.”
The telephone rang. She picked it up and said a few
words, scribbled a few notes, asked a few questions about
when, where, and how. “That’s great,
friend,” she said. “Yeah, do send me copies of
those clips, and listen, that’s one I owe you if you
ever need a Seattle angle.”
She hung up and looked at me. She didn’t say
anything and I didn’t need to ask. She looked down at
the poem and said, “I think you’re right, if it
matters. Richard had a well-honed sense of bitter satire. A
frontal attack was never as much fun as a
hit-and-run.”
“The title was blatant enough.”
“‘The Craven.’ What an insult that
would’ve been to a man like Darryl
Grayson.”
“It belittles his genius. It reduces
Grayson’s life to the level of his own. And yet it
has moments of real…what?”
“Love.”
“Read it again.”
She read aloud from the top: the world according to
Richard, first revised version.
One night sitting with dear Gaston, as the night
fell deep and vast in
All its blackened glory: such a night to chill
him
to the very core;
A colder wind I blew upon him, one I thought
would shake and stun him
And might even break and run him far away from
sorrow’s door.
But the child remained undaunted: all his faith
again he swore
Was in his god forevermore.
“I don’t believe this,” she said.
“It doesn’t square with what I know about
Richard or Rigby.”
“You can’t take it literally, you’ll
end up doubting it all. I admit it strikes a false note at
the top. We know Rigby wouldn’t sit still for what
comes later, but that doesn’t mean other parts of it
aren’t true.”
She read two flashback stanzas telling of the
gods’ humble origins.
“I had it right,” she said. “If
anything, I underwrote it.”
The father was a mean drunk and drunk much of the time.
The mother was dead and unforgiven. If she wanted
understanding, she’d have to find it in the next
world because the son she’d left on earth had none to
give her.
Lines in the middle of the third stanza made short work
of these two and the sorry life they’d given their
sons.
Brute and whore together spawned ‘em; then
forsook ‘em; tossed and pawned ‘em
To the devil who upon them did his vile and
wicked powers pour…
I joined her reading, quoting from memory.
One would join Old Scratch the devil, while he
watched the other revel
In himself, and gaze with level eyes upon the
predator…
“I don’t see that in here.”
“He squiggled it out. But it’s there, off
to the side of the verse he kept. You can read it through
the squiggle.”
“Yeah, I see it now.”
Up to this point Richard had worshiped his brother
blindly, much as Rigby would do a generation later.
“At that time, he was buying his own god
scenario,” I said. “Grayson was his
protector, the only real constant in his life.”
“Then it all changes. The god proves
false.”
“He has his first serious romance, and Richard
rankles with fear and jealousy.”
“Cecile Thomas,” Trish said. “I
talked to her. She had gone to grammar school with the
Graysons, then her parents moved away to North Carolina
and came back to Atlanta when she was a teenager. A
classic coming-of-age romance. Grayson thought of her as
a brat when they were kids. Then suddenly there she was
again, eighteen and lovely.”
“There’s a squiggled-out verse, just
partly finished, when Richard was still trying to do it
in a half-modern idiom, with names and all.”
She read it.
Grayson had with him a harlot, who had come to
him from Charlotte,
Though Atlanta, Georgia, was her domicile of
yore…
“There’s another line I can’t
read,” she said.
“It says,
Who, you ask me, could this pig be, who so got the
goat of Rigby
. If you look at it under a glass, you can make it
out.”
“He’s doing it again, mixing his own role
with Rigby’s.”
“But he catches it before the stanza’s
done and squiggles it out.”
Her telephone rang.
She took back-to-back calls, from Phoenix and
Baltimore. She made her notes with a poker face, as if
she were working a rewrite desk assembling facts for a
weather report.
She looked up from the phone without a word, pushed
her notes off to one side, and again took up
Richard’s poem.
“You can see the words changing as it goes
along. The tone gets darker, angrier.”
‘’He was a clingy kid,“ I said.
”He was what?…thirteen, fourteen years old.
His brother was four years older, the difference between
a boy and a young man. Richard counted on his brother to
be there when things in his life went wrong.“
“Then it got to be too much.” She flipped
a page. “We can only guess how Darryl felt, when
all we’ve got is Richard’s side to go
by.”
“My guess is the same as yours. He was being
suffocated by his father on one side and by Richard on
the other. So he ran away with his girlfriend to the
coast, only his friend Moon knew where.”
“And Moon wasn’t telling.”
“And Richard settled into a cold rage. He had
already lost his mother, and now the unthinkable was
happening, he was losing his brother. To a kid that age,
the feeling of abandonment was probably
enormous.”
“He hated Moon for obvious reasons.”
“Moon was everything he could never be. Strong,
independent…the kind of man Grayson would want for
a brother.”
“In South Carolina, Grayson found that sense of
purpose that would carry him through life. He’d
fought Old Scratch and won.”
She read it.
And when the young god chose to fight, he
waged
a battle that was mighty;
Purpose kept his honor far away from
Satan’s
harsh and blust’ry roar.
This was how he rose above it: did his work
and
learned to love it,
And his skills made others covet everything he
made and more.
‘Tis some deity, they marveled, living
there
beyond that door:
He’d joined the gods, forevermore.
For three stanzas the god walked on water, could do no
wrong. All he touched was blessed: he was on a spiral
ever upward.
Then came
The Raven
.
And when it seemed that none could daunt him,
A sepulchre rose up to haunt him
Stuck in there as if to taunt him, all the more
to
underscore
That he who’d walked among the gods
Had tumbled down to hell’s back door,
A-burning there, forevermore.
“The misspelled word,” she said.
“But it’s all out of sequence. He’s
giving his brother all that success before
The Raven
, when it really didn’t happen till five or six
years later.”
“Creative license again. He thought it worked
better dramatically. But the real question is, what is
this business of the misspelled word? What the cop in St.
Louis told you, that Hockman had just gotten a new book
with a misspelled word…that’s damned
interesting.”
“And not just any word. The same
word.”
“How could Grayson make that mistake
again?”
“If we knew that, we’d know something,
wouldn’t we?”
“Whatever happened, it was
disastrous.”
“The god begins to fail. He starts doubting
himself, becomes obsessed by a vision of his failure. He
tries to put it right, but he can never do it well
enough.”
“Nothing he does can satisfy him now.”
“It can never be good enough.”
“He sinks into despair.”
“And takes refuge in alcohol and sex.”
And Rigby heard in disbelief the Craven’s
method
and motif
Of luring maidens into wretchedness behind his
bedroom door.
One poor fool she filled herself with fantasy,
then
killed herself,
Unable to instill herself into his craven
heart
before
She turned up high the unlit gas and died upon
her father’s floor:
To irk the Craven nevermore.
“God, there was a girl who killed
herself,” Trish said. “I kissed her off with
a paragraph. I didn’t think it had that much to do
with Grayson, it was months after their affair and she
seemed despondent over everything, not just
him.”
She looked at me, riddled with doubt.
“Who knows what it had to do with,” I
said. “Maybe it’s just Richard again, trying
to blame some circumstantial tragedy on his
brother.”
“What about Laura Warner?”
“You did what you could with her. You chased her
pretty hard.”
“Not hard enough.”
“Then that’s what revised editions are
for.”
We were in the last lines now. The dark-haired god
idolized in the early verse had suddenly been reduced to
ridicule.
The time had come to resurrect the ancient
failure
that infected
Every facet of his life…
She looked at me and I gave her the next line from
memory.
But his second task was tougher; it was Poe
who
made him suffer…
“Poe defeated him,” she said. “He
never did get it right.”
“Then where’d the book come
from?”
She shook her head.
“And the ashes…”
“I don’t know.”
“If Grayson was such a failure at the end of his
life,” I pressed, “why is his book still
causing so damned much trouble?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t
know.”
We didn’t speak again till the phone rang. The
late man at the
Times-Picayune
in New Orleans.
She talked for a while and hung up.
“He burned her house,” she said flatly.
“Killed her, then set fire to her house.”
“Laura Warner.”
She nodded. “They’re all dead. St. Louis,
Phoenix, Idaho…all dead. All but a blind, crazy
woman in the Maryland case.”