Different Seasons (69 page)

“Is there a guest book I ought to sign?” I asked. “Something like that?”

He looked mildly surprised. “We don’t have anything like that,” he said. “At least, I don’t
think
we do.” He glanced around the dim, quiet room. Johanssen rattled his
Wall Street Journal.
I saw Stevens pass in a doorway at the far end of the room, ghostly in his white messjacket. George put his drink on an endtable and tossed a fresh log onto the fire. Sparks corkscrewed up the black throat of the chimney.

“What does that mean?” I asked, pointing to the inscription on the keystone. “Any idea?”

Waterhouse read it carefully, as if for the first time. IT IS THE TALE, NOT HE WHO TELLS IT.

“I suppose I have an idea,” he said. “You may, too, if you should come back. Yes, I should say you may have an idea or two. In time. Enjoy yourself, David.”

He walked away. And, although it may seem odd, having been left to sink or swim in such an unfamiliar situation, I
did
enjoy myself. For one thing, I have always loved books, and there was a trove of interesting ones to examine here. I walked slowly along the shelves, examining the spines as best I could in the faint light, pulling one out now and then, and pausing once to look out a narrow window at the Second Avenue intersection up the street. I stood there and watched through the frost-rimmed glass as the traffic light at the intersection cycled from red to green to amber and back to red again, and quite suddenly I felt the queerest—and yet very welcome—sense of peace come to me. It did not flood in; instead it seemed to almost steal in. Oh yes, I can hear you saying,
that makes great sense; watching a stop-and-go light
gives everyone a
sense of peace.

All right; it made no sense. I grant you that. But the feeling was there, just the same. It made me think for the first time in years of the winter nights in the Wisconsin farmhouse where I grew up: lying in bed in a drafty upstairs room and marking the contrast between the whistle of the January wind outside, drifting snow as dry as sand along miles of snow-fence, and the warmth my body created under the two quilts.

There were some law books, but they were pretty damn strange:
Twenty Cases of Dismemberment and Their Outcomes Under British Law
is one title I remember.
Pet Cases
was another. I opened that one and, sure enough, it was a scholarly legal tome dealing with the law’s treatment (American law, this time) of cases which bore in some important respect upon pets—everything from housecats that had inherited great sums of money to an ocelot that had broken its chain and seriously injured a postman..

There was a set of Dickens, a set of Defoe, a nearly endless set of Trollope; and there was also a set of novels—eleven of them—by a man named Edward Gray Seville. They were bound in handsome green leather, and the name of the firm gold-stamped on the spine was Stedham & Son. I had never heard of Seville or of his publishers. The copyright date of the first
Seville—These Were Our Brothers-was
1911. The date of the last,
Breakers,
was 1935.

Two shelves down from the set of Seville novels was a large folio volume which contained careful step-by-step plans for Erector Set enthusiasts. Next to it was another folio volume which featured famous scenes from famous movies. Each of these pictures filled one whole page, and opposite each, filling the facing pages, were free-verse poems either about the scenes with which they were paired or inspired by them. Not a very remarkable concept, but the poets who were represented
were
remarkable—Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Louis Zukofsky, and Erica Jong, to mention just a few. Halfway through the book I found a poem by Algernon Williams set next to that famous photograph of Marilyn Monroe standing on the subway grating and trying to hold her skirt down. The poem was titled “The Toll” and it began:

And some such more. Not a terrible poem, but certainly not Williams’s best or anywhere near the top drawer. I felt I could hold such an opinion because I had read a good deal of Algernon Williams over the years. I could not, however, recall this poem about Marilyn Monroe (which it is; the poem announced it even when divorced from the picture—at the end Williams writes:
My legs clap my name:lMarilyn,
ma belle). I have looked for it since then and haven’t been able to find it... which means nothing, of course. Poems are not like novels or legal opinions; they are more like blown leaves, and any omnibus volume titled The Complete So-and-So must certainly be a lie. Poems have a way of getting lost under sofas—it is one of their charms, and one of the reasons they endure. But—

At some point Stevens came by with a second scotch (by then I had settled into a chair of my own with a volume of Ezra Pound). It was as fine as the first. As I sipped it I saw two of those present, George Gregson and Harry Stein (Harry was six years dead on the night Emlyn McCarron told us the story of the Breathing Method), leave the room by a peculiar door that could not have been more than forty-two inches high. It was an Alice Down the Rabbit-Hole door if ever there was one. They left it open, and shortly after their odd exit from the library I heard the muted click of billiard balls.

Stevens passed by and asked if I would like another scotch. I declined with real regret. He nodded. “Very good, sir.” His face never changed, and yet I had an obscure feeling that I had somehow pleased him.

Laughter startled me from my book sometime later. Someone had thrown a packet of chemical powder into the fire and turned the flames momentarily parti-colored. I thought of my boyhood again... but not in any wistful, sloppily romantic-nostalgic way. I feel a great need to emphasize that, God knows why. I thought of times when I had done just such a thing as a kid, but the memory was a strong one, pleasant, un-tinged with regret.

I saw that most of the others had drawn chairs up around the hearth in a semi-circle. Stevens had produced a heaping, smoking platter of marvellous hot sausages. Harry Stein returned through the down-the-rabbit-hole door, introducing himself hurriedly but pleasantly to me. Gregson remained in the billiard room—practicing shots, by the sound.

After a moment’s hesitation I joined the others. A story was told—not a pleasant one. It was Norman Stett who told it, and while it is not my purpose to recount it here, perhaps you’ll understand what I mean about its quality if I tell you that it was about a man who drowned in a telephone booth.

When Stett—who is also dead now—finished, someone said, “You should have saved it for Christmas, Norman.” There was laughter, which I of course did not understand. At least, not then.

Waterhouse himself spoke up then, and such a Waterhouse I never would have dreamed of in a thousand years of dreaming. A graduate of Yale, Phi Beta Kappa, silver-haired, three-piece-suited, head of a law firm so large it was more enterprise than company—
this
Waterhouse told a story that had to do with a teacher who had gotten stuck in a privy. The privy stood behind the one-room schoolhouse in which she had taught, and the day she got her caboose jammed into one of the privy’s two holes also happened to be the day the privy was scheduled to be taken away as Anniston County’s contribution to the Life As It Was in New England exhibition being held at the Prudential Center in Boston. The teacher hadn’t made a sound during all the time it took to load the privy onto the back of a flatbed truck and to spike it down; she was struck dumb with embarrassment and horror, Waterhouse said. And when the privy door blew off into the passing lane on Route 128 in Somerville during rush hour—

But draw a curtain over that, and over any other stories which might have followed it; they are not my stories tonight. At some point Stevens produced a bottle of brandy that was more than just good; it was damned near exquisite. It was passed around and Johanssen raised a toast—
the
toast, one might almost say: The tale, not he who tells it.

We drank to that.

Not long after, men began slipping away. It wasn’t late; not yet midnight, anyway; but I’ve noticed that when your fifties give way to your sixties, late begins coming earlier and earlier. I saw Waterhouse slipping his arms into the overcoat Stevens was holding open for him, and decided that must be my cue. I thought it strange that Waterhouse would slip away without so much as a word to me (which certainly seemed to be what he was doing; if I had come back from shelving the Pound book forty seconds later, he would have been gone), but no stranger than most of the other things that had gone on that evening.

I stepped out just behind him, and Waterhouse glanced around, as if surprised to see me—and almost as if he had been startled out of a light doze. “Share a taxi?” he asked, as though we had just met by chance on this deserted, windy street.

“Thank you,” I said. I meant thanks for a great deal more than his offer to share a cab, and I believe that was unmistakable in my tone, but he nodded as if that were all I had meant. A taxi with its for-hire light lit was cruising slowly down the street—fellows like George Waterhouse seem to luck onto cabs even on those miserably cold or snowy New York nights when you would swear there isn’t a cab to be had on the entire island of Manhattan—and he flagged it.

Inside, safely warm, the taxi-meter charting our journey in measured clicks, I told him how much I had enjoyed his story. I couldn’t remember laughing so hard or so spontaneously since I was eighteen, I told him, which was not flattery but only the simple truth.

“Oh? How kind of you to say.” His voice was chillingly polite. I subsided, feeling a dull flush in my cheeks. One does not always need to hear a slam to know that the door has been closed.

When the taxi drew up to the curb in front of my building, I thanked him again, and this time he showed a trifle more warmth. “It was good of you to come on such short notice,” he said. “Come again, if you like. Don’t wait for an invitation; we don’t stand much on ceremony at two-four-nine-B. Thursdays are best for stories, but the club is there every night.”

The question was on my lips. I meant to ask it; it seemed
necessary
to ask it. I was only mulling it over, listening to it in my head (in my tiresome lawyer’s way) to hear if I had got the phrasing right—perhaps that was a little too blunt—when Waterhouse told the cabbie to drive on. The next moment the taxi was rolling on toward Park. I stood there on the sidewalk for a moment, the hem of my topcoat whipping around my shins, thinking:
He knew I was going to ask that question—he knew it, and he purposely had the driver go on before I could.
Then I told myself that was utterly absurd—paranoid, even. And it was. But it was also true. I could scoff all I liked; none of the scoffing changed that essential certainty.

I walked slowly to the door of my building and went inside.

Ellen was sixty per cent asleep when I sat down on the bed to take off my shoes. She rolled over and made a fuzzy interrogative sound deep in her throat. I told her to go back to sleep.

She made the muzzy sound again. This time it approximated English: “Howwuzzit?”

For a moment I hesitated, my shirt half-unbuttoned. And I thought with one moment’s utter clarity:
If I tell her, I will never see the other side of that door again.

“It was all right,” I said. “Old men telling war stories.”

“I told you so.”

“But it wasn’t bad. I might go back again. It might do me some good with the firm.”

“ ‘The firm,’ she mocked lightly. ”What an old buzzard you are, my love.”

“It takes one to know one,” I said, but she had already fallen asleep again. I undressed, showered, towelled, put on my pajamas ... and then, instead of going to bed as I should have done (it was edging past one by that time), I put on my robe and had another bottle of Beck’s. I sat at the kitchen table, drinking it slowly, looking out the window and up the cold canyon of Madison Avenue, thinking. My head was a trifle buzzy from my evening’s intake of alcohol—for me an unexpectedly large intake. But the feeling was not at all unpleasant, and I had no sense of an impending hangover.

The thought which had come to me when Ellen asked me about my evening was as ridiculous as the one I’d entertained about George Waterhouse as the cab drew away from me—what in God’s name could be wrong with telling my wife about a perfectly harmless evening at my boss’s stuffy men’s club... and even if something were wrong with telling her, who would know that I had? No, it was every bit as ridiculous and paranoid as those earlier musings ... and, my heart told me, every bit as true.

 

I met George Waterhouse the next day in the hallway between Accounts and the Reading Library. Met him? Passed him would be more accurate. He nodded my way and went on without speaking ... as he had done for years.

My stomach muscles ached all day long. That was the only thing that completely convinced me the evening had been real.

 

Three weeks passed. Four . . . five. No second invitation came from Waterhouse. Somehow I just hadn’t been right; hadn’t fit. Or so I told myself. It was a depressing, disappointing thought. I supposed it would begin to fade and lose its sting, as all disappointments eventually do. But I thought of that evening at the oddest moments—the isolated pools of library lamplight, so still and tranquil and somehow civilized; Waterhouse’s absurd and hilarious tale of the schoolteacher stuck in the privy; the rich smell of leather in the narrow stacks. Most of all I thought of standing by that narrow window and watching the frost crystals change from green to amber to red. I thought of that sense of peace I had felt.

During that same five-week period I went to the library and checked out four volumes of Algernon Williams’s poetry (I had three others myself, and had already checked through them); one of these volumes purported to be The Complete Poems of. I reacquainted myself with some old favorites, but I found no poem called “The Toll” in any of the volumes.