Tightrope Walker (6 page)

His lips curled contemptuously, showing small rabbit-like teeth. Obviously he was a purist but I could see his point: there
was
a difference. The instruments he was pointing out looked like bulky, foreshortened violins or lutes, and aside from the fact that they appeared to have handles at one end there was no resemblance at all to my hurdy-gurdy. Or hand organ.

“An incredibly old instrument, the hurdy-gurdy,” he said, very much the authority now, “but for most of its life it was called an organistrum. It’s history is so long that I can tell you that Odo of Cluny wrote a treatise on the organistrum in the ninth century. It wasn’t called a hurdy-gurdy until the eighteenth century.”

“I see,” I murmured, trying to strike the right note of interest.

“Take a look at this one,” he said, pointing.

“Good heavens, it’s long!”

“Isn’t it?” he said, beaming at me. “It measures five feet in length. Thirteenth century. Two people had to work it, they sat in chairs with the instrument across their laps and one worked the wheel, the other the key rods and tangents.

“But you can see the growing sophistication as time went on,” he added, darting from one glass cage to another and beckoning me to follow him. “That thirteenth-century hurdy-gurdy had only three strings. By the sixteenth century—see this one?—there were four strings, and over here you see a seventeenth-century organistrum with five strings. In the eighteenth century the instruments were considerably refined. They were given six strings with a melody compass of two octaves.”

“Amazing,” I said, feeling that I was learning somewhat more about hurdy-gurdies than I needed to know. “What’s that beauty over there?”

“A
vielle à roue
—rebuilt lute,” he said eagerly. “The one next to it’s a
vielle organisée
, with a miniature organ in the body. That’s eighteenth century.”

“Really lovely,” I said, and they were. They were made of fantastic woods, and carved beautifully by hand. Some had ivory inlays and others were brightly painted. He opened up the cage and brought one out for me to hold.

“My collection,” he said, watching me, “is considered finer than the one at the Victoria and Albert Museum in England.”

“But when did they turn into hand organs?” I asked.

“Well,” he said forgivingly, “they enjoyed a very real
upsurge of popularity in France in the eighteenth century until the French revolution came along. That’s when they were called hurdy-gurdies. They were probably corrupted in the next century—the nineteenth—by the Italian street boy who strolled through town with it and in due course discarded it for a form of organ to which he could add a strap and a stick for mobility.”

“I see.”

We had reached the end of the room and were face to face with some rather appalling objects hung on the wall. He gave me a sly glance and said, “Interested in torture, Miss Jones?”

Startled, I said, “Not particularly, no.”

“Not even—whips?” he suggested playfully.

“Definitely not,” I said firmly.

“Over the years,” he confided with considerable relish, “I have collected a very remarkable group of torture instruments and I believe you’d find them quite fascinating, Miss Jones. Would you care to join me in a drink?”

I wondered what Amman Singh would say about this little man. “Thank you, no,” I told him, “I really have to go.”

“I don’t often have the opportunity to meet such a sweet young lady,” he said archly, and emphasized this by taking a step closer to me.

I fought the urge to move a step back. I said in a clear firm voice, “No—I really have to leave now.”

“There is, for instance, one particular instrument that is inserted up—”

I gasped, “Going now—friend downstairs waiting—thanks so much,” which mercifully blocked out the rest of his sentence. Leaving him there in the middle of the room I raced back through his living room, down the short hall to the lobby, punched the down button, and
didn’t feel safe until I was in the lobby again. Nasty little sado-masochist, I thought.

“Get what you wanted?” called Alphonse the doorman cheerfully.

I felt like saying, “I did and he didn’t” but I only smiled and headed for a telephone directory to look up Robert Lamandale, and then I flagged down a taxi.

But I was thinking about the colonel and wondering what might have bent him out of shape like that, because he wouldn’t have been born that way. I always think it’s a matter of a person coming up against an immovable object somewhere along the way, like a foot trying to grow normally but meeting the solid wall of a shoe, the bones and flesh pressing and pressing without finding any space to expand, until the bones have to bend and twist into deformity. It had to be an absence of love, of course, it nearly always is, which is a subject on which I can expound at great length, being experienced. For instance, there was a time when I used to read all the books about love being published; I felt if I read enough of them I might find the one particular book that would tell me how to be lovable. I was that naïve, along with all the other people who kept those books on the best-seller list. I remember scanning one of these in a book store a couple of years ago. It was a very hot day, and my feet hurt, and I was feeling very lonely, and this book said that no one should end a day without touching someone, and also without telling another person they loved them. The whole book was about this, and at first I stood there feeling rage boil up inside of me because I mean, how many of us
know
anybody to touch or to say “I love you” to? But at the time I believed this writer, so I went home and selected a few names from the telephone book, I called them and I said, “I love you.”

It didn’t do a thing for me, of course. One woman
threatened to call the police, and a man asked if I was some kind of pervert or something. It would have been nice, I thought, if someone could have said, “I don’t know who you are but I love you, too.” But then I was always writing scenarios that never happened.

Robert Lamandale lived on East Ninth Street, and such was my naïveté that I believed anything
east
in New York was much finer than west; the colonel’s remark about Lamandale coming from an old family had substantiated this, and so as the cab drove through and down streets I kept waiting for an elegant neighborhood to materialize. It didn’t. I found myself growing increasingly nervous the farther we went and the cab driver, catching my eye in the mirror, must have seen my nervousness, too. “You sure you got the address right, miss?” he asked.

I read it to him and he nodded. “That’s it okay. Just down this block.”

We drew up in front of eight garbage pails piled along the sidewalk, with litter spilling over to the ground. Number 218 was a tall brick building surrounded by rubble; the whole block looked like something out of a war movie, with holes gaping like extracted teeth. The door of number 218 was half open, with two panes of glass smashed out of it. I said, “Do you think you could wait for me? I don’t expect to be long, he may not even be at home.”

“How long?”

“Ten minutes?”

“Okay. You look like a nice girl, I won’t even ask for a deposit.”

“You can hold my raincoat,” I told him gravely. “It’s the only one I’ve got.”

It felt like leaving another safety zone as I scurried up the half-rotted stairs and pressed the buzzer under Lamandale, apartment 12. Nothing happened and I
began pressing all the buzzers until someone finally buzzed me in. I started up the stairs and had reached the second landing when I heard steps racing down toward me. I stopped and waited. A man came into view, taking the steps two at a time, and as he sped past me I said, “Could you tell me where I’ll find apartment 12?”

“Twelve! Who are you looking for?”

“Robert Lamandale.”

He stopped just two steps below me and looked at me. When I’d first glimpsed him crashing down the stairs toward me I’d thought he was about thirty years old but now I saw that he was closer to forty, or perhaps even forty-five. He was small and slender and very compact, with a friendly, cheerful face, an upturned nose and thin, merry lips. But he dyed his hair too dark a shade of brown and there were hammocks of flesh under his eyes, and small lines etched around his mouth.

“Look, dear,” he said, “I’m Robert Lamandale but I’ve got a call from my agent. I can’t stop. What is it you want?”

“It’s about a hurdy-gurdy you owned once and sold. I’m trying to trace it.”

“Hurdy-gurdy? Hurdy-gurdy? Is that all?”

“It’s terribly important.”

“So is my audition, darling, there aren’t that many calls for aging ingenues. Did I ever have a hurdy-gurdy?”

I handed him the snapshot and he laughed.

“Oh God, yes … 
that.
Certainly brings back happier days. I bought it at auction in Maine, back when I had money.”

“But do you remember the name of the auction house, or where it came from?”

“Oh yes. A relative of mine—a cousin, actually—sold
off her entire estate at auction. I bought the hurdy-gurdy as a souvenir, a memento. Purest indulgence.”

“Yes, but what’s her name?”

He was already six steps below me now. “Leonora Harrington,” he called over his shoulder.

“How can I find her?” I called after him. “Is she still alive?”

“Only semi and quasi, the poor soul,” he said, turning at the next landing to look up at me. “In a private hospital near Portland, Maine, somewhere. Psychiatric hospital. Nice meeting you,” he added cheerfully, and he was gone.

I hurried down to the next landing and shouted after him, “But can’t you remember the name of the hospital?”

“Sorry,” he shouted back, and I heard the front door slam below me.

I stood there in a shaft of sunlight watching the dust motes lazily rise and fall, and then I heard the door open and he shouted up the stairwell, “Try Greenwood Hospital. Green
something
, anyway.”

I called out, “Thanks!” and then I raced down after him, thinking to offer him a lift uptown in my waiting taxi, but when I arrived on the street he had already wheeled out a small motorbike from a locked shed attached to the building. “Thanks,” I shouted again. “I mean
really
thanks.”

He grinned. “No charge,” he called, and with a flip of his hand he buzzed off.

I climbed back into my taxi and gave the driver the name of my hotel. I hoped Robert Lamandale got the job; I really liked him.

I returned to Trafton on Monday night with, among other things, a first edition of Gruble’s
The Maze in the Heart of the Castle.
I could see that at this rate I was rapidly losing ground; I’d paid sixty-five dollars for the first edition, and counted it a bargain at that, but I certainly wasn’t going to show any profit buying out-of-print first editions of a book I already owned and had read as a child until its pages were tattered. I knew I’d never want to sell it. I consoled myself by remembering that a box of Bavarian cuckoo clocks was on its way by truck, as well as a crate of blue willow ware, and that I’d bid next to nothing on a trunk of Indian fabrics that just missed being garish and would make
awfully good saris, or bedspreads, skirts, or curtains. I had also experienced my first auction.

It was past ten o’clock when I climbed the stairs to my two rooms over the shop. The refrigerator had gone wild again and I gave it a kick to quiet it; it settled gratefully into a sonorous purr. I opened a can of chowder, made a pot of coffee, buttered two slices of bread and sat down at the battered kitchen table to thumb through the pages of the book I’d so recklessly bought. I was really glad now that I’d bought it; it took away the lingering taste of Colonel Morgan Alcourt completely. Here were the same beloved illustrations by Howard Pyle of Colin meeting the Grand Odlum, of Colin fighting alone against the Wos, and of the Conjurer building a rainbow for Colin. When I was eleven years old nobody had ever told me about
Winnie the Pooh
or
The Wind in the Willows
or the Hobbits:
this
was my book.

My favorite part had always been Colin’s meeting with the Despas. When he began his search the Grand Odlum had told him, “If search you must, then I can only give you this advice: the important thing is to carry the sun with you, inside of you at every moment, against the darkness. Because there will be a great and terrifying darkness.”

The Despas were the darkest, which is why I loved best of all Colin’s outwitting them. When he reached them he was exhausted and ill from his journey and the Despas sheltered him in their dark caves out of the wind. They gave him food and safety and chided him for his precociousness. They told him that beyond their valley lay high cliffs and an intolerable cold, that he was naïve and a fool to think of going on, that he really must give up. Colin listened and believed, finding their dark caves womblike and hypnotic, until one day he remembered the Grand Odlum’s words and he realized
the Despas had nearly extinguished the sun in his heart because they had none at all in their own.

But when he told the Despas that it was time for him to leave they said that he was theirs now forever, and they would never let him go.

I turned the pages until I found the illustration I loved most, and I was smiling now. Eleven years later, and grown up, so to speak, I had to concede that the drawing still brought a quickening of my heart: that moment when Colin, trapped and desperate, tears away the animal skins the Despas have hung over every entrance and opening of the cave, and then races to the solitary lantern and lights torch after torch until the Despas are blinded by light, and he escapes them.

It wasn’t until I was twelve that I realized the book was a miniature
Pilgrim’s Progress
, and it wasn’t until I met Dr. Merivale that I understood why the Despas had affected me so: I’d been born among them, I’d lived with one for half of my life.

Carefully, very carefully, I rewrapped the book and put it away in the drawer with my bankbooks, and then I returned to the pile of brochures I’d collected on cars and vans because I’d decided I was going to drive to Portland. I also realized I was growing very interested in life, as if it suddenly had a great deal to offer, but somehow, because of this, I didn’t want to call Joe and tell him I was back. I was beginning to feel extremely vulnerable where Joe was concerned. I didn’t want to expect anything from him, which of course meant that already I was expecting too much: I was looking forward to seeing him again and terrified that I might not. It is very uphill work being insecure, and profoundly exhausting.