The Lacuna (49 page)

“No.”

“Last night. No, night before. I get back to my hotel after a whole day of meetings with the drizzle bags, I’m beat to the socks, and I can’t even get to the elevator. There’s a scene in the lobby. This huge colored cat, he’s got on a nice overcoat, hat, briefcase, everything, but he’s flailing. Football with the bellhops. I mean he’s down on the floor, they tackled him when he came in I guess. He’s a Negro, see. The hotel doesn’t have Negro guests.”

“What happened?”

“Well, dig this. It turns out he’s an ambassador from some African country. Ethiopia, I want to say. They got it sorted out. It’s all right because he was foreign, not an American Negro. What do you make of that?”

“Good God. I hate to contemplate. That foreigners aren’t even worth the full measure of American contempt?”

“Could be. But he seemed decent. A nice accent, like a Brit. We rode the elevator together, he was on my floor. He said he hoped I didn’t mind. He’s stayed there loads of times before, and they still make the same mistake.”

“Mind what? You said he hoped you didn’t mind.”

“I’m sure I don’t know.”

“How did you feel, Tommy?”

He rolled over onto one elbow, narrowing his eyes.
“Feel?”

“In the elevator, with that poor man.”

He fell back again, staring at the ceiling. “I felt I was going up.”

February 11

“There was a poke on your mailbox,” Mrs. Brown announced this morning as she came in the door. After these years it still takes me by surprise, though I should have known, she stood there holding it. A poke is a sack. A mesh bag in this case, the type the neighbor uses for
carrying home her groceries. Today it contained sundry fountain pens, a fedora, things I’ve given Romulus over several years. Including the rubber
atl-atl
brought from Mexico, his reward for feeding the cats.

“Here’s a note,” Mrs. Brown said, puzzling over it. “Romulus isn’t to visit here any more.”
Please keep away from my boy
was the nature of her explanation. Agent Myers had advised her they should not keep any objects given him by a Communist.

“Take a letter, Mrs. Brown. Tell the lady she needs to get in touch with General Eisenhower right away, because he too is in possession of a Communist Object.”

Mrs. Brown sat at the typewriter, hands poised, waiting for the cue that my words were going to make some kind of sense. Sometimes she waits all day.

“What did they call it? Oh, yes!” I said, snapping my fingers. My memory is fine, thank you. “The Order of Victory. It was in
Life Magazine
years ago, they had a full-page photo. A platinum star set with diamonds. Stalin gave it to him at Yalta. Tell her the next time Agent Myers comes around, she’d better tell him to go see Eisenhower. Make sure the general puts that thing in a poke and sends it right back to Stalin.”

March 4

I grew cross with Mrs. Brown today. It shouldn’t have happened, she is as good as gold. She did the shopping for me, I’m losing the nerve for going out, and it’s only March. She tolerates, as usual. Returned with change and receipts, plus cheerful news of spring, crocuses in the yards on Montford, tennis shoes on sale. A 12-pack of pencils is now 29 cents. The Zippo lighter went up to $6, so she went against orders and bought matches, more economical. I scolded her for it, telling her matches don’t work worth a damn in the bathtub. I’ve never sworn at her before. It made her go pale and sit down, like a telegram bearing bad news. It took her half an hour to respond.

“You shouldn’t be smoking in the bath, Mr. Shepherd.”

“Why, because I’ll burn down the house?”

This afternoon she brought letters up to my study for signature, and I noticed her nails looked ragged. She is on edge too; we both jump when the telephone rings, like schoolgirls, waiting for Lincoln Barnes to ring up. It’s been months that they’ve had the manuscript, and now the corrected galleys. A title, jacket art, everything you might want to have on hand for a publication. Except a publication date.

“Your stories are all about Mexico,” Mrs. Brown posed today, with forceful cheer. “Have you ever thought about writing them for Mexicans?”

“Where in the world did that come from?”

“I only ask.”

“I don’t write in Spanish. I write in English, about Mexicans. If I wrote in Spanish, I suppose I’d have to write about Americans.”

“I know you speak Spanish perfectly well. I’ve heard you.”

“Ordering a plate of fish is not writing a novel. I don’t even dream in Spanish. I can’t seem to invent anything in that language. Don’t expect me to explain.”

She should have said
Yes sir
, and turned on her Kerrybrooke heels. That’s how Gal Friday does it in the movies. Yet there she stood, wearing that look: Hell or High Water. “You might could learn,” she said. “If you stayed there awhile longer.”

“Living there from the ’20s until 1940 wasn’t enough? You think a few more decades of practice might do the trick?”

“I mean living there as a man. A writer. You’d get used to it.”

“Is this a suggestion?”

She didn’t answer. I laid down my book and glared.

“Look, I don’t have the temperament. Mexican writers are all depressives.”

She has been hiding mail. Filing it in the boxes for the attic without letting me see it all first, as is the custom. I caught her out and made
her show what she’d been holding back. She insists nearly all the mail is the same as ever, it’s only a handful that are “not very nice.”

“We say onions to H. W. Shepherd!” is the general sentiment. Shepherd the squealing pathetic traitorous free speecher, the Communist.

“You have to forgive hateful people, for what a man hates, he knows not.”

“Who said that, Jesus Christ?”

“Mr. Shepherd, there’s still a good deal of nice mail here, and some hateful. The good are from people who’ve read a book of yours or more, and glad of it. And the hateful ones are from people who know nothing of you. That’s all I’m saying. Look if you’re going to look. See if they mention a word you ever wrote.”

She was right, they didn’t. They addressed a creature they had learned about through some other means. The news, presumably.

“I can see how you’d get your feelings hurt,” she said. “As a man. But not as a writer, for they’ve not read your books. From the look of it, I’d say they’ve read nary a book at all.”

Still, it was hard to put the things down. Like a gruesome potboiler. You know how it will finish, you know it will turn your stomach, you go on reading. There were a dozen or more. “Your treacherous behavior in the Department of State is nothing but slings and arrows aimed at Old Glory. It is hard for us Americans to know how self-hating Communists can live with your grotesque deeds.”

“If the majority felt as you do, we would all be in chains. Freedom is what our country is based on. If you won’t stand up for our country, you deserve no freedom.”

“I and my friends will certainly do all we can to spread the word about your disgusting hatred for our country, and make you even more a footnote of litery history than already.”

“It sickens me to think you and your old haggard wife might raise another America-hating child. I hope she is barren.”

“Go back to your own filthy country. When we need Mexican’s opinion of America we’ll ask.”

“I’m proud to say I don’t own your book, if I did it would go in the fireplace.”

Well, naturally I felt a twinge at that one. After our newspaper-burning party. But Mrs. Brown said fiddlesticks, it’s usual to start the fire with a newspaper when it’s no longer of any use. “This is something different. It’s not civilized. Imagine saying any such things to a human person.”

“No, you’re right. They’re an angry bunch.”

She took the pages out of my hands. “Angry is not the word for it. These folk don’t even ken you to be a real man. They give you no benefit of a doubt. I expect they’d be kinder to a neighbor’s dog that bit them.”

“Well, that’s true. My neighbor here at least sent a note about Romulus. She said ‘please,’ and sent the gifts back. I’ll give her that.”

“They are just so happy to see the mighty fallen,” was her verdict. She tore the letters to pieces and threw them in the bin, then sat down to the day’s typing. Even from upstairs, her Royal sounded like a Browning machine gun.

April 7

Infuriating telephone conversation with Lincoln Barnes.

Say, did you ever think of doing short pieces? The kind of thing they run in the Popular Fiction Group?

Pulp stories. I asked him why.

“Oh, just wondering.”

My opinion of those stories, which I shared with Lincoln Barnes, is that they are all written by one person using a hundred different pseudonyms. Her real name might be Harriet Wheeler. She eats nothing but chocolates and lives in one of the upstairs rooms at the Grove Park.

It should have been a good day. With Tommy coming tomor
row. Not on the Vandy-wagon either, he just wants to visit. Passing through on his way to see some sculpture in Chattanooga. He’ll stay here, he wants to see my cave he says, the pork roast is already marinating. Mrs. Brown left early, I was boiling chiles and garlic in water to mix with the vinegar and oregano when the phone rang. Months without a call, waiting for Tommy and for Lincoln Barnes, and now they both turn up.

Barnes didn’t want to talk to me directly, I could tell. He’d hoped to leave a message with Mrs. Brown. I usually don’t answer in the afternoons. What he seems to be saying is they are uncertain about publishing the book. At all. With the Communist Business starting to tie their hands.

“I could see that, if I were a Communist. Luckily for you, I am not.”

“Look, I know you’re not a Communist. Everybody here knows that. We know you’re loyal to the U.S. Your name doesn’t even sound all that Mexican.”

I had to go in the kitchen and turn off the pot, it was boiling over.

“What you are,” he said when I came back, “is controversial. The fellows running the show here are not very keen on controversial, because it stirs people up. For most readers out there, controversial means exactly the same thing as anti-American.”

“Barnes. You’re a man of words, they matter to you. Why would you say this? You don’t like controversy because it stirs people up. Controversy
means
stirring up.”

He didn’t respond.

“You could say you don’t like an eggshell, because it has egg in it. Why not go ahead and say you don’t like eggs?”

He sighed into the phone. “I’m on your side, Shepherd. Believe me. I didn’t call you up to play games. The suggestion that has been made here is that we publish the book under a pseudonym.”

Good idea. How about Harriet Wheeler? This is madness. The
novel is set in Mexico, written in the same style as two previous books, which have been read by practically everyone in the nation, schoolchildren included. Does he think they’ll believe this is some other writer’s work?

He said every publisher in New York is now scrambling to publish books set in ancient Mexico.

“Are you serious?”

“Oh, yes. You’re going to have fifty imitators soon. Why not get in line? You could be among the first.”

The thing was boggling. He mentioned other possibilities. Using a ghostwriter. Not exactly that, but a real person, I would pay him a fee to use his name. In case I am worried about the press uncovering that the book was actually written by me.

Uncovering. My words, me, how could there be any difference?

“You’re an editor, Mr. Barnes. Your stock-in-trade is the handiwork of other people. So this could be Stanback Powders we’re discussing, or fine leather shoes, as far as you’re concerned. I don’t know, I’m only guessing. But for me it is different. I am the tongue of the shoe. If you pull me out of it, the whole thing falls apart.”

April 8

A day could be perfect. You could forget fear altogether. Or fear might no longer make any difference, because it is the whole ocean and you’re in it. You hold your breath, swim for light.

Tommy found it hilarious that Barnes had to be talked into putting my name on my book. Or that he would at least “pitch that idea to marketing.” A freaking gasser. Somehow I was persuaded to agree. Tommy is persuasive.

“Oh my
God
, pitch that to marketing. Author’s name on the author’s book,
what next
?”

God has no better card to play than an April day, a well-tuned car, a world with nothing so wrong in it really, if a
lomo adobado
could still be cooked to such perfection, consumed to excess, distributed
thereafter between a working Philco refrigerator and two happy, useless cats. And all of it left behind, dishes still in the sink. The mountain parkway is open to the west now, a skyline viaduct to the Great Smokies, they finished it just for us. Tommy and me. We were quite sure of that. The tunnels are no longer blind, they all go somewhere. You arrive at the other side.

“Mr. Barnes seemed to think he was taking a terrible risk on me. I’m a regular Moriarty, my menace looms large. He said, ‘I just hope I won’t be sorry about this.’”

“Oh, you devil,” Tommy said. “Wanting your name on your book. Next thing you know they’ll be calling a spade a spade.”

“Calling a rake a rake,” I proposed, opening the Roadster full throttle on the parkway, letting the curves pull us, feeling their outbound gravity. The world blurred, the April trees lit up with pale green flames, scenes flashed by, falling water, swinging bridges strung across rocky ravines. Windows wide open, the full breath of spring of dirt of new life stirring in the breast of whatever was left for dead, all that rushed at us now. Tommy’s hair shuddered golden in the wind. He is a rake, a rake, the blinding shine of him reflected in the windscreen, Tommy’s glint and glory. Tommy’s hand laid here and there as if it hardly mattered, making me want to wreck the car. To find speed, drive myself deep into it.

“You and me, cat, this is the life,” he said, and with Tommy that’s as near as it gets to the terms of affection. “This is the life and you know it.”