The Girl Who Ran Off With Daddy (34 page)

We sat there together in the pre-dawn darkness, Tracy engrossed in Larry, Moe and Curly, me still wondering about Thor. Why he’d run off with Clethra. Why he’d chosen to show up at my door that night. Thorvin Alston Gibbs wasn’t perfect. But he was my friend. In life, he had given me the courage to believe in myself. In death, he had given me something even more precious.

In the morning I wrote.

Sometimes as I sleep I hear a creak on the stairs. For a moment I think it is my father on his way down to the kitchen for a glass of milk in the night, and that I am in my own room, snug in my narrow bed. Briefly, this comforts me. But then I awaken, and realize that it is my own house that is creaking, from the wind, and that I am in the master bedroom. She sleeps next to me, secure in the belief that I know what I’m doing. I don’t know what I’m doing.

He never did either. But he was exceptionally good at convincing others that he did
—
so that they might sleep soundly in the night. This was, perhaps, the one thing he was best at in life. This was, for him and others like him in the middle of the American century, what it meant to be a man.

Quietly, I slip out of bed and go downstairs and pour myself a glass of milk. I check to see that the doors are locked, that the furnace runs smoothly, that the grounds outside my kitchen window are secure in the moonlight. I cherish these moments alone in the night, when my family sleeps. It is my favorite time. It is my favorite thing.

It’s a guy thing.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Stewart Hoag Mysteries

DEAR HOAGY,

You don’t mind me being so familiar, do you? I hope not. I feel like I know you, having read and enjoyed your work so much. And “Mr. Hoag” just seems so stiff, somehow.

I’m enclosing the first chapter of what I’m hoping, with your generous assistance, to develop into a novel. It’s about a character who I believe has the potential to make as big a name for himself in modern American fiction as Holden Caulfield. I’ve structured it in the form of letters to a friend, much like Ring Lardner did with the letters Jack Keefe wrote to Friend Al in “You Know Me Al,” a work I freely admit has influenced me greatly. Maybe even too much. I don’t know. I’m not a professional writer. At least not yet.

But I do feel this is a VERY commercial project. I need advice and help. I need a collaborator. I need YOU. Once we find a publisher I can promise you your usual fee and royalties, including
a
nominal share of the film rights. This is a natural for a film, by the way.

I have gone ahead and written the first chapter on my own as a sample. I am told I pretty much have to do this. I hope you can spare the time to read it. And can advise me what I should do next. I really look forward to meeting you. I’m a real fan.

Yours truly,

the answer man

I WAS AT THE COUNTER
of the Oyster Bar in Grand Central that day showing Tracy the proper way to eat a bluepoint. I figured it was important that she learn about these things from me. Who else was going to teach her? Some pimply little weasel named Gunnar or Doogie? What the hell would
he
know about raw oysters? He’d probably tell her to order a dozen. Wrong. The correct number is nine. He’d probably tell her to drown them all in lemon juice. Wrong again. You squirt each oyster individually, and only when you are just about to eat it. Add a dash of Tabasco, then swallow whole. That’s how you eat an oyster.

Tony, who’d been there behind the raw bar since VJ Day, certainly concurred. As for Lulu, my noted nose bowl champ, she merely grunted peevishly. She’d been in a sour mood ever since her annual physical exam, when her doctor remarked that she was becoming a trifle, well, jowly. It didn’t matter that she was in tip-top health otherwise—sinuses clear as a bell, figure svelte, gums as gingivitis-free as those of a basset hound half her age. Lulu was steamed—her looks mean a lot to her. Plus Tony was taking his sweet time with her oyster pan roast, mostly because he kept stopping to make funny faces at Tracy, who kept responding with gales of laughter from her perch there next to me. At eighteen months, Tracy remained a sunny, happy baby. Clearly, the Hoagy genes hadn’t kicked in yet. They would. I wasn’t at all concerned. Or at all looking forward to it.

Still, no complaints from this end. It used to be that spending the better part of an afternoon on a stool in the belly of Grand Central terminal slurping up oysters was called loafing. Now, thanks to Tracy and the sober responsibilities of fatherhood, it was called quality time.

Afterward, we meandered over to Fifth Avenue to take in the annual Christmas display in the windows of Lord and Taylor, Tracy swaddled in her periwinkle-blue snug suit and cashmere ducky blanket. It was a bright, frosty early December day, the best kind of day in the best time of year in the best city on earth. New York comes to life between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The air is as bracing as a sharp whiff of ammonia. The chestnuts are roasting. People have a bounce in their stride and an unfamiliar bit of color in their cheeks. A few of them even smile. At least they smiled at us as we walked along. It was Tracy, chiefly. Not that Lulu wasn’t lookin’ buff in her Fair Isle sweater vest, prancing along beside her baby sister’s stroller. Not that I was looking too terrible myself in my shearling greatcoat from Milan, which I wore over the barley-colored Donegal tweed suit from Strickland’s, a cream and blue tattersall shirt of Italian wool and a knit tie of rose-colored silk. No, it was Tracy. Her emerald-green eyes, chiefly. Merilee’s eyes. And those luxuriant blond tresses that spilled out from under the knitted cap that was perched on her somewhat largish head. She was an uncommonly beautiful baby. People always lit up when they saw her. Especially when she was with Merilee. The two of them made quite some pair. In fact, I was becoming deathly afraid they’d soon be asked to appear in one of those vomitous celebrity mother-daughter fashion spreads in
Vanity Fair.

I’d be damned if any daughter of mine would be exploited that way. Especially without me.

From Lord and Taylor’s we strolled down to the Old Print Shop on Lex, me limping slightly. The limp had nothing to do with age and everything to do with that damned play Merilee was rehearsing. I picked out the frame for Merilee’s Christmas present, an etching that Levon West did in the early thirties of a busy New York street on a rainy day. Merilee had much admired it—looking at it, you can practically hear the car horns and the Gershwin in the background—but she was way too much of a frugal Yankee puritan to spring for it. That made one of us. For Tracy I had bought one good book. I’d decided to buy her one good book every year for Christmas—each a signed first edition. This particular Christmas, her second, she was getting
The Sun Also Rises.
From there we worked our way back up Madison to Worth & Worth, where I had my Statler reblocked while I studied how I looked in a homburg. Distinguished, I decided. I also decided I could wait another ten years to look distinguished. Lulu’s new district check wool cap had come in. She tried it on in the three-way mirror, snuffling happily. Shopping always cheers her up. Something she got from me. That and an aversion to any film starring Meg Ryan. Afterward, we took in the tree at Rockefeller Center, a seventy-five-foot Norway spruce that had been donated by two nuns in Mendham, New Jersey. We watched the ice skaters. We stopped at the St. Regis, where Sal Fodera trimmed my hair. It doesn’t take him as long as it used to, but Sal is courtly enough never to point this out. Mary at the front desk fussed like crazy over Tracy. Lulu took a nap, which is one of the things she is best at.

Yes, we made a real father-daughter-basset hound day of it. It was a happy day, a day I had earned. After all, I had at long last finished Novel No. 3. It’s true, I’d done it. Seventeen years after
The New York Times Book Review
had labeled me “the first major new literary voice of the 1980s,” six years after they’d called my second novel “the most embarrassing act of public self-flagellation since Richard Nixon’s Checkers speech,” I’d finally done it. Not that I had a publisher for it yet, mind you. It was not exactly an easy sell, seeing as how it was a prime example of what’s known in publishing as a male menopause novel, a category that made it only slightly less commercial than, say,
My Life and High Times
by Neon Leon Spinks. Right now, it was making the rounds. Which meant I was having lunches with a lot of editors. Which is what they get paid to do and writers do not. Mostly, I was sorry to discover, they wanted to talk to me about my other, decidedly less distinguished career—the Claude Rains thing. When it comes to ghosting, I am The Man. The best of what’s around. Five number-one bestselling memoirs and someone else’s number-one bestselling novel to my noncredit. So I heard all about the basketball star who had just flunked his third drug test and his fourth reading test. The U.S. senator with presidential aspirations. Or perspirations. The actress who was finally ready to tell the world who she had and had not given the skin to—now that there was no one left alive in the world who cared. I certainly didn’t. None of that celebrity rubbernecking crap for me. No more. I was Stewart Stafford Hoag, novelist. I had slain my personal white whale. Someone in power would agree with me any day now. It would happen. It would sell. I knew it was good. I was not going to worry. I was going to enjoy the city, enjoy my daughter, enjoy my life. Life was good. Repeat after me: Life is good.

Then again, maybe Joseph Wood Krutch was right. Maybe we moralists are never satisfied. Pay no attention to me. I’m just trying to give you an idea where my head was that day the first chapter came, okay?

It came, as do seeds from Burpee and bad news from the Internal Revenue Service, in a plain manila envelope. But inside was not the makings of Better Boy tomatoes or news that my deductions for home-office expenses had once again been disallowed. Inside was a manuscript, eight pages in length, and a very polite cover letter. Both had been typed on an old manual typewriter, which you don’t see much of anymore, not unless you get a letter or a manuscript from me.

I stood in the somewhat grand lobby of our building on Central Park West and read the letter under the suspicious gaze of Mario, the daytime doorman, who had never liked me and was liking me even less now that I’d taken to opening my mail down there before I went upstairs. Mario was positive that I was corresponding with some mystery woman. For the record, I wasn’t. For the record, I’d never liked Mario either. And Lulu liked him even less than I did. When it comes to hating petty authority figures, we always stick together.

Like most authors who’ve had their names in the papers, I get my share of oddball mail. I get letters from droolers who are genuinely convinced they were captured by an alien or Elvis or Nicole Brown Simpson and need someone (me) to help them tell and sell their miraculous story. I get inquiries from dog lovers who are thinking of adopting a basset hound and wonder if they are easy to train. (You don’t train them—they train you.) And, yes, I get submissions from would-be novelists who want my advice. (Generally, I suggest going to dental school, which qualifies you to stick sharp objects in people’s mouths and hurt them and get paid a lot of money for it.) Some of these letters are forwarded to me by my agent or by the different publishers I’ve worked for through the years. Some of them, like this particular one, find their way directly to my home. I don’t know how these people get my address. They just do. I get
Prison Life
magazine every month, for instance, and I have no idea why or how. Aside from the fact that so many of the celebrities I’ve worked for are presently doing time.

What I’m trying to say is there was nothing out of the ordinary about this letter. Except for one thing: There was no name on it—unless you count “the answer man.” Not so much as a clue as to who this budding author might be. Not on the letter, which was typed on plain white typing paper—no letterhead, no watermark. Not on the title page of the manuscript. Not on the nine-by-twelve manila envelope it came in. There was no return address on the envelope either. Just my name and address typed onto a stick-on label, the kind that come twenty to a sheet. Same typewriter. There were four 32-cent stamps affixed to it. It had been postmarked the day before somewhere in New York City, which is to say Manhattan, not Brooklyn or Queens or any of those other boroughs.

Somewhat strange. But not so strange as to intrigue me. I just dismissed it as terminal shyness or forgetfulness or any one of the other million endearing little tics that tend to take root in authors, would-be and otherwise. I tucked the chapter back in its envelope. I stuck it under my arm with the rest of that day’s mail. I rode the elevator up to our floor with Tracy and Lulu.

Merilee was home from rehearsal. I knew this because I walked through the door into utter and complete blackness, the kind of darkness that can be achieved in New York City only if you install Levolor blinds in every window and then cloak these behind heavy floor-to-ceiling blackout drapery. This, in case you were wondering, is why I’d taken to opening my mail downstairs. This, in case you were wondering, is what it means to have an ex-wife who is an actress.