The Plot (8 page)

Ethel pretended that he had pulled out; she said solemnly, “I remember, Louis.” She asked him idly, as if it didn't matter one way or another, “Is your conscience so very delicate, Louis?”

Louis remembered Jamey asking him whether he was “intensely moral.” “Not my conscience, Ethel, my subconscious, my subconscious would keep me from writing anything decent, so no more of this!”

“Just as you say, Louis.” She submitted. “What are you writing, by the way? I see your light on at all hours.”

“Just stuff.”

“Stuff?”

“Jamey's been giving me a lot of stuff, his life, what it's taught him, from childhood on. I decided to get it all down to use for that interview, but it will be a four-hundred-page interview if I keep going, more like a biography.”

Ethel spoke very quietly. “Have you told Jamey about writing this?”

“No, I haven't.” He didn't want to tell Jamey that he considered his every syllable worthy of putting down for posterity. He was ashamed of his real affection for the old man, his real respect. Because he was also ashamed of having Ethel discover his respect and affection, he changed the subject. “Talking about my writing, Ethel, I would like that longhand manuscript of the story.”

“Let me keep it, Louis. I want to keep it with me.”

“For a souvenir?”

“For a souvenir.” She thought: You won't give me anything else to remember you by. She thought: If you go, you'll forget me, you'll never think of Ethel again.

“Oh, come on, Ethel! I looked through your room for that ‘souvenir.' Where is it?”

She hugged her body with her arms, pretending a sudden chill, thinking: I know you looked through my room, darling. You touched my pillow, my blanket. I'll never let that pillowcase be laundered, darling. Oh, Louis, Jamey is a fool not to help you to go, but it's different with me. Her body, hugged by her arms, felt strong, felt stanch and bold and warm. She let her arms drop to her sides. “I hid it because it wouldn't be safe keeping it around.”

Louis didn't believe that for a minute, but he didn't know what he could do about it. She had her “souvenir,” all right, tied in blue ribbon. He could only hope that she intended to keep it to show her grandchildren.

CHAPTER SIX

May was over. One by one, the old houses closed in the city of Charleston. Everybody who could afford to, and some who could not, moved away for the hot season, to the beaches and to the cooler high places, and this was not for comfort only. Charleston in June, in July and August, is tropical. The tropics are dangerous places to feel the passions that, in more temperate climates, are controllable. In the heat, in the damp, they grow like any tropical plant; you cannot walk temperately through these growths; you must cut with a knife, hack your way through them.

Maum Cloe, cool in the heat, shook her head and sent her grandson on an errand to Charleston. “Go for get Miss Alex, Joseph Reas. Go for send Miss Alex a telegram.”

Joseph Reas did not ask why he had to send Miss Alex a telegram; badevil hung from the rafters.

Ethel watched Louis and knew that desperation was growing in him. When she handed him the mail, and saw his mother's shaking handwriting, she knew what that meant to him. Only Jamey didn't seem to know. He didn't watch, or listen; he talked. He talked about himself all through three-o'clock dinner. Louis, wiping his forehead on his sleeve, asked Jamey if he could do that interview now, but Jamey said, not yet, not yet, and went to take his nap. When Jamey's door had closed behind him, Ethel stood up and invited Louis to follow her, her hand to her lips as they passed the closed bedroom door. It had become more difficult every day for Jamey to get to sleep; the pills Dr. Jedway prescribed seemed to be losing their effect. Jamey had had Ethel write to the doctor about this, and the doctor said that Jamey could now take three of the pills since he had apparently acquired a tolerance for them. Ethel, opening the door to her own room, told this to Louis. “I thought of your mother—the pain——You told me they were giving her morphine for it … but if she acquires a tolerance for morphine? Like Jamey?” This was a good time to remind him about his mother. She had seen that he wanted his mother to eat the delicious meal Jamey had just had. She had noticed how he looked at the sleek silver in Jamey's old hand. She asked, “And, talking about tolerance, how is your tolerance for Jamey these days, Louis?”

He hitched his jeans, which were sticking to his hot body. “The next time he asks me how his spiritual son is, I'm going to tell him how his spiritual son is! Sweating here watching my mother's days go by without being able to help; sweating here, dry at the mouth and getting drier——And it isn't just my mother.” He kept his eyes off Ethel, who looked particularly unattractive in the heat. “I'm not seventy-nine, Ethel; I'm twenty-five. I don't want the beauty of the world in music, in pictures, in scenery. I want to dance with it, to hold it in my arms, to caress it——What's the matter, Ethel?”

To dance with Louis, to be held in his arms, to be caressed … “Nothing is the matter.” She went to her desk, large and tidy in the corner of the room where the windows were. “I want to show you a letter from Dwight Waterbury, head of Waterbury and Sloan, the publishers, you know.”

“I know who Dwight Waterbury is.” A chill of anticipation made his sweat clammy.

“I'll summarize the letter, Louis. Mr. Waterbury is Jamey's publisher. He admits that Jamey told him, when he retired to Charleston, that all he wanted to do was vegetate and add up what he had learned, but Mr. Waterbury is certain that by this time a good mathematician like Jamey has done the sum. (Jamey was always good at figures; don't kid yourself he wasn't! Jamey only began to philosophize about money when he had his own salted away.) Then comes the proposition: Dwight Waterbury offers Jamey one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars' advance for his autobiography. One hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, Louis!” Her tongue flicked out. “Mr. Waterbury says that unless Jamey carefully omits all the hot stuff and
‘igh lif'
intrigues, it is almost certain that the movies will give him at least that to make a picture of his life.

“Can you add, Louis? Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Can you divide, Louis? It makes one hundred twenty-five thousand dollars for each of us!”

“I thought it was something like this. I thought something like this was coming.” He heard his own sentence with astonishment because he had not “thought” it, he had known something was coming deep in him, below conscious thought. “When I told you about the stuff I was writing, you wrote Waterbury and Sloan.”

Ethel banged both her hands down on the desk for emphasis. “No! I swear I didn't, I swear I didn't, Louis! This letter from Dwight Waterbury came unsolicited, without warning—the way you came here, Louis. Someone is arranging this, it all falls together, don't you see? Isn't it strange that Jamey should be handing this material over to you, that you should be writing it, that this letter should come just now?”

Louis said, “There's nothing strange about my writing the stuff. I'm interested in Jamey and when he spilled a lot of inside stuff about himself, I couldn't help writing it.”

“Of course you couldn't help it! I don't think either of us can help it. I meant——There's another thing, Louis, there's something else, too. One thing after another has led me to believe that this is a plot that somebody else has worked out for us. Louis, do you really believe that you came all these miles to get an interview that you should have known Jamey wouldn't give? Oh, no, Louis, you're the instrument of the gods, the only possible instrument; none of this would be possible without you.”

“You're damn right, that's what I don't like about it.”

“Louis, I believe this, I believe it! I believe that you were sent here to avenge Lem!”

“Now what kind of nonsense——”

“I didn't know until the day you came, Louis. If you hadn't come, I would have gone on the rest of my life thinking that Jamey, whatever he was, was good enough to sacrifice myself for.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“In the letter you wrote, the one you gave Joseph Reas to deliver to Jamey, there was one section I didn't read to Jamey.”

“What section?”

“You wrote all those pages of praise for Jamey's work, didn't you, but there was one story you didn't praise.
The Disciple
, Louis. Do you remember what you said about that story? You said the end was false.”

Louis thought about the story. It was about a boy who wanted to be a great sculptor and who worked with a real McCoy sculptor and then killed himself because he wasn't good enough. Louis remembered that he had written that the kind of boy Jamey had described would have been satisfied to be no good if he could have gone on basking in the McCoy's light. He had written Jamey that such a boy would have cheerfully spent his time cleaning the master's mallets, dusting off the marble dust on the master's shoes. He had said that the kid in the story was in love with the master and killed himself for, love, because the master had thrown him over. Louis looked at Ethel's pale-blue eyes. He said, “Oh, no!”

“I had been lonely without Lem, Louis, but at least I was proud of his love and proud of myself for having had that. There hasn't been too much in my life, Louis, but I didn't know until I read your letter that Lem hadn't died because he couldn't be a good writer, which left me alone but still holding my head high. I didn't know until you told me that Lem had died because he was in love with Jamey and not with me. Not ever with me. Ever.”

“Are you sure, Ethel? How can you be sure?”

“Were you sure when you criticized the story? Weren't you certain that the end of that story was faked?”

He nodded reluctantly.

“I've always known that the young man in that story was Lem. It was unmistakable. Jamey knew I knew it was Lem. Oh, Louis, he's taken everything I had. Make him give some of it back to me!”

This was supposed to take the responsibility for this out of his hands. “Not this way.”

“He won't do it himself, Louis. He will tell me to write Mr. Waterbury a succinct no.”

“And a succinct no from me, too, Ethel.” But he did not walk out of the room.

She bit her lip to control its trembling; she waited until she could speak calmly, then, talking reasonably, she said. “You can write it so that Jamey is a great and wonderful man. I don't care. Make him grand, make him wise, make him kind. Make him much smarter than he is. He isn't smart enough to know his day is past; you know it. In your book, he can know it. Give him a shot in the arm, rejuvenate him.”

Writing page after page about Jamey, he was, in a strange way, Jamey, so that he knew why Jamey was Jamey. The details of everything Jamey had told him had grown in his imagination so that he was Jamey living his life in big warm places, and Louis standing outside the rich warm places and looking in through the glass of the windows at Jamey's life.

“This isn't plagiarizing Jamey, or your subconscious wouldn't have let you write it, isn't that so? Louis, when you come right down to it, this book would be helping Jamey at the same time as it would force him to help someone he's hurt very badly.”

“Someone he's hurt very badly” was putting it mildly. With his writer's imagination, Louis put himself in Ethel's place. He was ugly Ethel buoying herself up with the memory of her husband's love, then—socko—the letter! He was Ethel bereft of even her memory of love. He was Ethel with her memory of love forever desecrated. He put his hand on Ethel's shoulder, and she clutched at it. “I'm sorry I wrote the letter.”

“I'm not. I'm glad. I'm glad I found out. But that's enough about that. I don't want to think about that. I want to be businesslike. Louis, the difference between the ‘stuff' you're writing about Jamey and an autobiography is a difference in pronouns, substitute ‘I' for ‘he,' that's the difference in the writing! But do you know how much you'll get for a biography with your name on it? Maybe one thousand dollars' advance and royalties, not very royal royalties, I assure you. Do you know how much Waterbury and Sloan will spend to advertise your biography? Beans. Do you know how they will spread advertising when they put one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars into it to start with?”

“I know.” He thought: What don't I know? He thought: Watch. Listen.

“And, Louis, you won't have to give me another ‘souvenir' if you don't want to. Don't let me have a word in your handwriting. I'll lend you my portable. The day you finish your biography, I will give you back the manuscript of your short story. How's that, Louis?”

“And the day I finish the biography it is sent to Waterbury, who then sends back a fat check for one hundred twenty-five thousand dollars by return mail? Listen here, Ethel, what do you take me for? That short story Jamey could miss reading or hearing about, I grant that, but if this publisher will make as much of a fuss about this autobiography as you think he will, it's bound to leak to Jamey. This is twenty-five miles from Charleston, not twenty-five miles from nowhere.”

“But Jamey will be dead.”

Louis said, “
What? What?”

“Why, the publication will have to be posthumous, Louis! Why, even if Jamey sent the publishers his autobiography they would prefer it to be posthumous.” She laughed. “People love the last peep before the coffin lid is screwed down. It's good business.”

“And I sit around here waiting for Jamey to die?” The word rang in the air; both of them turned apprehensively to see whether it had been overheard.

“No, Louis, you don't sit around here if you don't want to. When you finish, I give you five thousand in advance. I give you five thousand from my savings, Louis, but you can take them in this case because it isn't a gift. And one thing more, Louis, I can take the money for Jamey's autobiography legitimately because that is a gift from Jamey to me.”