The Lacuna (32 page)

November 19

Dear Frida,

Here is a small gift, my book, just arrived from New York. Mr. Barnes says it will begin turning up in the bookshops by Friday week, but he sent me two with a note: “A spare copy for your Mother and Dad!” The cover art is quite something, as you’ll see, with the twin temples of Tlaloc and Huitzilopochtli in the distance. The flames and thinly clad women running from the conquering army should make up for any archaeological inexactness. This format, I was told, worked well for
Gone With the Wind.

No one here knows of my impending status as a published author. The neighbor ladies find me suspiciously lacking in ambition or family. Miss Attwood still rings up; few soldiers are home yet, so she makes do with nothing new. Last week we went to a restaurant called Buck’s, opened recently to wild enthusiasm, which wraps up your meal like parcel post and sends it out to the gravel car park while you wait. The idea is to picnic inside your auto, staring at other strangers with catsup on their
chins and napkins draped on the steering wheels. You would bawl. It is called a drive-in. Now we can buy gasoline, food, and soon we’ll have new autos too. Why not make use of all at once?

The war’s end has left America with loads of get-up-and-go, and no place to send it. Also war-bond cash saved and nothing to spend it on. Unless we need hollow-lead tubing and field-combat boots, as that’s what the factories are geared for making. We still use ration stamps for almost everything. Truman is trying to keep price controls on until shortages abate, but the manufacturers can smell hoarded cash. They’re parading ad men through Congress to convince the lawmakers that Free Market is the way to go, and that Harry Truman is in league with Karl Marx. The neighbor ladies here are firm on the side of Harry and Karl Marx, they know price controls are the only thing standing between ourselves and the twenty-dollar steak. I confess to an unpatriotic yearning to buy a refrigerator, but if a Philco showed up in town now without its OPA ration tag, it would go to Mrs. Vanderbilt for the cost of my mortgage.

Meanwhile, the husbands concoct a black market with more plot twists than the Codex Boturini. Romulus, my young informant, reports his dad went to the car dealer’s to finagle a new Ford, not yet legally for sale. He was told if he bought the salesman’s dog for eight hundred dollars, they would give him a free car to drive the pup home. Romulus cheered. But he was in it for the dog.

One thing can be had without a stamp, though, and that’s my book. Please feel no moral duty to read it, you’ve done enough. Only look for the dedication page, where you’ll see a familiar name. I apologize for the title. Mr. Barnes says
Vassals of Majesty
sounds like a book people want to read, and it’s his business to know. What would you do? If a museum curator said
your paintings should be hung on both sides with pink organdy curtains? Oh yes, I remember, you would poke him in the eye with a paintbrush and tell him to hang organdy curtains over his dog’s-ass face.

Lacking your courage, I avoid disagreements with the company that buys my bread and butter, and possibly a Philco. I am getting on fine, with no complaints at all about my new country except that it has no olives worth eating and no peppers fit for adults. This package holds the proof of my incomprehensible good fortune. Use it at the bottom of your door to stop a draft, and know that I am—

Your grateful friend,

H. W. SHEPHERD
,
author

The modern reader complains that theatrics have all gone to the movies. Where is the old-fashioned barnburner to carry us away? Here is one to fit the bill. Harrison Shepherd’s
Vassals of Majesty
(Stratford and Sons, $2.39) tells of a golden age when Spanish Conquistadors fought for the New World. Cortez plays out as a winning villain, lining his pockets in the name of Church and Queen while paying no heed to the trials endured by his men. The weak-minded Emperor Montezuma makes hardly a better impression, doting on his captive birds while his bloodthirsty chiefs do their worst.

The princes in this story are the common soldiers, pushed to the limits but revealing true humanity. The story’s droll assertion: heroes may be less than heroic, while the common man saves the day.

If you’re weary of the military tribunals of Goering and Hess, their grisly details dragging on, try this one on for size: chieftains who cut out the hearts of war-prisoners while still beating! The year is 1520. The place, a glittering city on a lake
where the last Aztec emperor meets his mortal enemy Cortés. The book is
Vassals of Majesty
, a plush first effort from author Harrison Shepherd. Swords clash on every page in this clever retelling of the conquest of Mexico’s richest empire.

Greed and vengeance drive the action, but the novel’s tender theme is a longing for home. The Spanish Royalty cry out for gold, but the young men forced into battle only wish for better shoes in a prickling desert, and something better to cook than cactus pads on a campfire. These soldiers might as well be singing the song every GI knows by heart:
The coffee that they give us, they say is mighty fine, it’s good for cuts and bruises and it tastes like iodine!
While leaders plot the fate of golden cities, these soldiers worry they’ll lose the wife to another fellow while they’re far from home. In a nation of returning soldiers and war-weary civilians, this book will make a huge emotional mark.

“Vassals of Majesty” by local wordsmith Harrison Shepherd proves nothing short of sheer fascination. It might seem only stuffed shirts and long-haired professors would clamor to read of men living hundreds of years ago. Not so! Every heart will pound as conqueror Cortez pitches battle against his foe. This book has it all: blood-curdling treachery, and even heart interest. The female pulse will race for handsome Indian prince Cuautla. With the speed of a locomotive the story hurtles to its epic conclusion. Mrs. Jack Cates, owner of Cates Bookshop, confirms she cannot keep it on the shelves.

Asheville’s very own Harrison Shepherd is a young man of only thirty holding the secrets of the ages in his pen. Calls to the home confirmed he resides in Montford Hills. Young ladies take note, our sources say he’s a bachelor.

In the literary season of Anna’s beleaguered King of Siam and Teddy Roosevelt’s “Unterrified” grab of Panama, a nation at peace seems keen for tales of exotic foreign conflict. Readers will find rich fodder in this novel of shrewd ambition in the bloody Spanish conquest of Mexico.

Narrating the tale are Cuautla, an heir to the Aztec empire, and Lieutenant Remedios, who must execute the commands of notorious empire-builder Hernando Cortés. History buffs are warned, scarcely a hero in this tale survives with reputation intact. Cortés shows a weakness for Mexican liquor, and cares more about his page in history than for the men who give their lives to write it for him. And the sweet-natured, delusional Emperor Mucteczuma leaves most of the decisions to a ruthless cadre whose protocol for handling war prisoners may cause the reader a night of lost sleep.

From its snappy title onward, this is a potboiler with no real aspirations to literary importance. The exaggerated setting of blood-stained temples and battlements seems to flutter with the tags of a Hollywood film set. But the characters threaten to burst from their archetypes. The humblest have a winning way of striving for honor in duty, while the powerful fall prey to familiar political failures, revealing themselves as ordinary men all, not so different from the modern-day elected official or office clerk. The author suggests no disagreement among men is ever entirely foreign, after all.

(A sample of reviews sent by the publisher’s clipping service, twelve in all, Jan.–Feb. 1946)

March 10, 1946

Dear Frida,

Thank you for the box of chiles, a spectacular surprise. I’ve strung them in a red
ristra
for the kitchen alongside the onions I plait and hang near the stove. The neighbor boy suspects me of “harboring spells,” but Perpetua would approve of my kitchen. I will ration these
pasillas de Oaxaca
like anything, dearer than gasoline.

Our Carolina shows signs of spring: crocuses appear in front lawns, long wool underwear vanishes from clotheslines in the back. Yesterday I bought a frozen lamb shank from the butcher’s and set it in the flowerbox outside the window to keep it chilled overnight. This morning it had completely thawed. Today I will rub it with garlic for an impromptu feast. The cat Chispa spreads the word of my erratic cooking extravagances around the neighborhood, and now another scoundrel has followed her home. I call him Chisme, for the gossip that brought him. Black as the devil and fond of lamb.

Soon my shanks may get to visit an authentic Philco. The publisher’s accountants are preparing a royalty check for the first 50,000 copies of the book. You can’t imagine what you set loose on the world, with one quick job of paper-smuggling. I have to run a gauntlet when leaving the house. Two young ladies are out there now, lollygagging on the front walk in saddle shoes and rolled-up dungarees. Reporters for a school newspaper from the look of them, or just autograph hounds, sucked in by the bizarre and rampant rumors that I am a person of interest. Even my neighbors brought over a book for autograph—it was wrapped up as if they meant to give it a state burial, or else cure it for a ham. Romulus says he spotted some girls slipping around to the back to steal my shirts off the clothesline, and chased them off by “whooping and hollowing.”

I am abashed by this admiration, for it seems directed at some other person. How these girls would hoot if they saw me as I really am, cowering indoors on washdays, festooning the bathroom with my damp balbriggans so they won’t be stolen or made the subject of a theme paper in Senior English. My new life. No one has said I eat human flesh in a tortilla, but I’m getting an idea how your lives have been disfigured all these years by gossip. I can’t answer the telephone, for it’s sure to be a newspaper man asking questions: place of birth, status of bowels. I don’t know what to do with this havoc.

I learned today by mail about the publisher’s check. Mr. Barnes tried all week to reach me, unaware I was hiding from the telephone. Soon I’ll have to do something about the mail; the box fills daily with notes from readers. Seven proposals of marriage, so far. Such a query requires a gentle response, but I’ll confess I’m flummoxed. I’ve had no practice in the skills of being admired. Frida, sometimes an acid panic rises in my throat; people want something, and I am not the thing at all. As I’ve mentioned, girls are desperate, with the fellows still over there patching up the potholes in France. Poor England and France. Their great kingdoms nothing now but fairy tales.

Did
El Diario
mention Churchill’s speech last week in Missouri? The European leaders seem terrified by the new landscape, flattened at the middle with Truman still on his feet at one end, and Stalin at the other. You could see why Mr. Churchill wants to keep them from shaking hands—if Harry and Comrade Joe reach across that mess, these two could make a new empire on which the sun never sets. Mr. Churchill sounded like a child goading his parents into an argument, he was absurdly dramatic: “A shadow has fallen upon the scene…. Nobody knows what Soviet Russia intends to do,” etcetera. Next he will probably go to Moscow and say the same about us.

How strange, that this is the wide-open moment Lev spent
his life hoping for. With America brimming with brotherly love for the Soviets, our own laborers on the march, and Russia with everything to gain, it seems the right time to support them in tossing out Stalin’s bureaucrats and finishing the democratic socialist revolution as Lenin intended. Or, it could go the other way, our two nations falling apart like split kindling. Mr. Churchill seems to want that. “From the Baltic to the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” He sweetened the pot later with goodwill for the valiant Russians and comrade Stalin. But the howlers went right to work as soon as they heard of this strange new curtain of metal. They are thrilled with the image. The cartoonists draw the poor Russians slamming their heads against an anvil. Probably in a fortnight they’ll have forgotten it, but for now it’s a sensation. Two words put together,
curtain
and
iron
, have worked alchemy on a kettle of tepid minds and anxious hearts.

The power of words is awful, Frida. Sometimes I want to bury my typewriter in a box of quilts. The radio makes everything worse, because of the knack for amplifying dull sounds. Any two words spoken in haste might become law of the land. But you never know which two. You see why I won’t talk to the newsmen.

My dread is sometimes inexplicable. How do you bear up under so many eyes? And what ludicrous worries I have, compared with yours. I hope the bone-graft operation you mention will make your life worth living again. I worry for your weariness, but trust in your strength, and often see your paintings in my dreams. Your friend,

H. W. SHEPHERD

P.S. I enclose a review, to clear up any mistaken notions you may have about my novel.

This one is flying off the bookstore shelves from coast to coast:
Vassals of Majesty
by Harrison W. Shepherd, with 50,000 sold the first month after publication. Its pageant of noble heroes and dastardly villains plays out on the golden shores of ancient Rome. When you’ve had enough of the “heart and soul of the common man” exalted by the late FDR, here are uncommon men with derring-do, sweeping the reader into the Success Dream that drives them. Ladies and gentlemen, but definitely. Harry Shepherd cranks out a darn good read. And watch out, girls: he’s single!

March 13, 1946

Dear Shepherd,

What’s steamin, demon? Remember me, from civilian service? (Nobody forgets this Tom-cat.) Hope you’re all the aces since last we soldiered together for Art and Country. Everywhere I go now, some guy is just home from Europe telling how he dodged the lead pill or brought in his bomber on a wing and a prayer. Does anybody want to hear a hair-raising tale of Army SNAFU in the National Gallery? You and me buddy, a couple of Civvy cream puffs, it’s a void coupon ain’t it? If only my old chum Shepherd were here, we could tell some war stories, sure. How you and I drank so much joe on the train, we almost dropped a marble Rodin on its head in the Asheville station
.

Man, you could have had me for soup when I saw your name in the
Book Review.
Is that you, or some other Harrison Shepherd? I didn’t have you figured for the Shakespeare type. But who knows? If it’s really you, drop a line
.

Plant you now, dig you later,

TOM CUDDY

March 29, 1946

Dear Shepherd
,

Holy Joe, it’s really you. Thanks for the buzz. Cat, you know how to percolate
.

With everything you are currently hipped to, this will probably sound like cake and coffee, but a proposition has come up and I figure I’ll give it a sock. The Department of State is getting into the art business. It’s not enough that chumps like us packed off America’s treasures to the Vanderbilt Mansion and back, to keep them safe from Tojo. Now the idea is to pack up a fresh load of paintings on Uncle Sam’s ticket, and parade them around the museums of Europe. A special show of American painters to send overseas, to show those Parisians we’re not a bunch of rubes. Somebody spilled the beans to the Department of State that the Europeans hate us. Surprise, Jean-Pierre thinks GI Joe is a slob with chocolate on his face! Between you and me, I doubt the Parisians care, as long as we keep putting the bricks back in their castles. But the Congress cares, they are convoying this ship and aim to blitz it
.

Here’s where you and I come in. They recruited my old boss for the job, Leroy Davidson from the Walker. He only got 50 thousand clams to work with but he’s done a killer job, Leroy chose everything himself. He’s fed up with the Europeans sniggering about heart-throbbing landscapes and the American Scene, so he decided to give them an eyeful. Seventy-nine paintings, mostly Modern Art: Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, it’s a killer. Even Goodrich at the Whitney says so. We’re hanging it here in New York for the summer and then it moves to the National for a few weeks. Leroy says Congress needs to see what American Art looks like, before we send it off
.

That’s the story, morning glory. You’d come to D.C. in October. You’re already on the State Department’s cleared list, Leroy says we can hire you in a tick to help with the crating and get this show ready for transatlantic. If you want, you can even come along for the ride. The war’s over, pal, this time we would go first class, not steerage. No more riding on top of our wooden crates in the train car, which really was not half a bad place to lob around,
as it turned out. (Like Hope says, Thanks for the memories!) But think of it, man, you and me in Europe. Goose-feather beds. What a gasser
.

Sounds like you might be cooking with gas already in your present situation. But give me a buzz if you are ready to take Paris. So long chum
,

TOM CUDDY