Peace, p.18
Peace, page 18
“Yes, Mrs. Weer?”
“It’s Den,” my mother says. “He has a sore throat.”
“Won’t you please be seated?” We are seated. The chairs are leather, and my feet will not touch the floor. There are broad walnut arms, and on the wall opposite are two pictures in heavy frames. In one a doctor sits at the bedside of Margaret Lorn (though I do not know this at the time), a little girl with large eyes and brown braids. In the other eight doctors are opening a corpse. Why is it that there are so many physicians for the dead and so few for the living? My mother is reading Liberty, and tries to show me pictures.
“Mrs. Weer? Alden can go in now.”
“Shouldn’t I come in with him?”
“The doctor likes it better if he can see the little ones alone. He says it makes them braver. He’ll ask you in after he examines Alden.”
Dr. Black sits at a heavy mahogany table. To his left, against the wall, is a big rolltop desk. As I enter, he stands, says hello, musses my hair (which angers me), and lifts me to the top of a leather-covered examination table at one side of the room. “Open your mouth, son.”
“Doctor, I have had a stroke.”
He laughs, shaking his big belly, and smooths his vest afterward. There is a gleaming brass spittoon in one corner, and he expectorates into it, still smiling.
“Doctor, I am quite serious. Please, can I talk to you for a moment?”
“If it doesn’t hurt your sore throat.”
“My throat isn’t sore. Doctor, have you studied metaphysics?”
“It isn’t my field,” Dr. Black says, “I know more about physic.” But his eyes have opened a little wider—he did not think a boy of four would know the word.
“Matter and energy cannot be destroyed, Doctor. Only transformed into one another. Thus whatever exists can be transformed but not destroyed; but existence is not limited to bits of metal and rays of light—vistas and personalities and even memories all exist. I am an elderly man now, Doctor, and there is no one to advise me. I have cast myself back because I need you. I have had a stroke.”
“I see.” He smiles at me. “You are how old?”
“Sixty or more. I’m not sure.”
“I see. You lost count?”
“Everyone died. There is no one to give birthday parties; no one cares. For a time I tried to forget.”
“Sixty years into the future. I suppose I’ll be dead by then.”
“You have been dead a long, long time. Even while Dale Everitton and Charlie Scudder and Miss Birkhead and Ted Singer and Sherry Gold were still living, you were almost forgotten. I think your grave is in the old burying ground, between the park and the Presbyterian church.“
“What about Bobby? You know Bobby, Den, you play with him sometimes. Will he become a doctor, eh? Follow the family profession? Or a lawyer like his granddad?”
“He will die in a few years. You outlived him many years, but you had no more children.”
“I see. Open your mouth, Den.”
“You don’t believe me.”
“I think I do, but my business now is with your throat.”
“I can tell you more. I can tell—”
“There.” He wedges a big forefinger between my molars. “Don’t bite or I’ll slap you. I’m going to paint that throat with iodine.”
4 GOLD
“And now this card—a figure writes at a table, another peers over his shoulder. What do you make of this card, Mr. Weer? Can you tell me a story about it?”
The Golds were not native to Cassionsville, and it was seldom remembered that no family was. They had come in a rattling pickup truck and an old Buick on one of the fine autumn days, and moved into a commonplace brick house. They were supposed to be Jewish, but there was little about them to mark them as Jewish—no quick-witted, persuasive men; no curly-haired, clever, slant-eyed girls. The elder Mr. Gold, a machinist and tool and die maker, had an indeterminate accent that might have come from anywhere east of the English Channel. He took a job at the juice plant, terminated after a year, and opened a bookstore. His son Aaron took a similar position, applied after a few weeks to be rated as an engineering technician, and was assigned to me.
It was one of the peculiarities of the Golds that there was no family face. Aaron resembled neither his father, a stoop-shouldered man with weak blue eyes, nor his brisk, black-haired little mother. He was tall and gangling, red-headed and freckle-faced, with a large, straight woodpecker beak of a nose that always appeared to be testing the wind like a young hound’s. He was a hard worker, but clearly had no future with the company—not only because he lacked a college degree, but because he was talkative, noisy, and fond of practical jokes; these were characteristics the middle management (who counted in these things, as Julius Smart did not) detested. He was so talkative, in fact, that it was two years and more, long after his father had left, before I realized that I knew almost nothing about him beyond his opinions of the movies he had seen, his favorite make of automobile (Mercury), and his thrilling adventures with women, most of them production workers he met while repairing bottling or case-packing machines, or assisting me in my occasionally successful attempts to improve them. These girls always seemed to dote on Aaron, whom they called Ron—even the ones he no longer took home at the end of the day, or reminisced with about Valley Beach, the amusement park that had sprung up on the opposite bank of the river just below town. He made them laugh, flattered them, and I suspect spent freely on them when he could afford to.
His father was so unlike him that, after visiting his shop, I concluded that my original impression of their relationship was mistaken. The elder Gold was a bookman—so much so that I, who have been considered bookish ever since receiving my first green-bound volume of fairy tales, was a trifle repelled by it. Louis A. Gold had his name lettered (in gold leaf, appropriately) in the window of a store that until a few months before had sold shoes; and the lettering had instantly gone from bright newness to an antique patina that might have graced the Great Chalice of Antioch. Dust settled on the glass, as bats in the tropics settle upon certain fruit trees, and half the fluorescent tubes in the light fixtures extinguished themselves at once, while the rest were obscured by tall stacks of books, books Gold brought from God knows where, many of them worthless outdated popular novels, though there were strange and interesting books as well: the technical works of little-known sciences; forgotten and eccentric tales; old books of verse; and the reminiscences of vanished circles of wits (of famous men who were known largely to each other, and who met, when they met at all, at enamel-topped tables in the cheap restaurants of New York, and talked mostly about jokes played after midnight in the corridors of second-rate hotels).
Louis Gold’s clothing changed with his occupation, gray moleskin work pants and union-made “Top Production” shirt replaced by a dark and baggy suit that might have buried Charles Curtis, and foggy gold-rimmed glasses; so that the only thing that remained of the man I remembered (though only vaguely) at a bench in the central machine shop was his calloused hands. I dropped by his store whenever I was downtown and found him open; but that was not often; he seemed to lock his door whenever he chose, and when the CLOSED sign, which hung on a nail in the window and bore OPEN as its reverse, was in place, he never answered my knock, though I could sometimes see a light at the back of the store, and his bent figure moving like a spirit among his stacks of books.
Aaron never spoke of him; nor of his mother; nor of his sister Sherry, of whose existence I learned from a girl who, on her hourly respite from the demands of a labeling machine, came looking for Aaron.
“There was a young lady here asking about you,” I told him the next time he came into the office.
“She bother you? Sorry.” Aaron extracted a sandwich from one of his desk drawers and began to eat. It was about ten o’clock in the morning, and I was trying to sketch up a star wheel for a sanitary conveyor.
“Nice-looking girl,” I said. “I wish you’d send more like her.”
“I thought you were too old for that. Black hair?”
“Brown. She said she knew your sister.”
“Just like that. I know his sister. Just dropped in to say ‘Hi.’ ”
“She asked where you were, and when I said I didn’t know, she said she was a friend of Sherry’s; so I had to ask who Sherry was, and she said your sister. What’s her real name?“
“Was it Emma?”
“Don’t you know? I mean, your own sister.”
“The girl who came. Sherry’s name is Shirley, but nobody calls her that. She’s younger than I am.”
“She didn’t say.”
There was a pause, during which I thought our conversation had ended.
“Say, Den, you’ve lived around here a long time, haven’t you?”
“All my life. I was born here—I can show you the house.”
“You know a man named Stewart Blaine?”
I put down my pencil and swiveled my chair around to face Aaron. That had to be done carefully because one of the casters was broken. “He used to court my aunt Olivia,” I said.
“I didn’t even know you had an aunt.” He was grinning, getting even for my asking about Sherry.
“I had two. My aunt Olivia’s been dead a long time now— she used to be married to Mr. Smart. My aunt Arabella’s still alive—she’s an old lady. Aunt Bella was my mother’s sister, Aunt Vi was my dad’s.”
“She was Mrs. Smart? Are you going to come into some stock when Uncle Julius kicks off?”
“He hasn’t spoken to me since my aunt’s funeral, and Aunt Vi has been dead now for twenty-five years. Do I look like a fair-haired boy?”
“Anyway, who is Stewart Blaine?”
“I told you—a man who used to court my aunt Vi. He owned the bank—the Cassionsville and Kanakessee Valley State Bank, not the First National. I suppose he still does.”
“He’s rich?”
“He was then.”
Aaron stood up with a spurious air of aimlessness and shut the office door. “Tell me about him.”
“I’ve been telling you stories about my family and our friends ever since you came into the department. I’d think you’d be sick of them.”
“You haven’t mentioned Blaine, or if you did I forgot him. This is serious, Den.”
I told him what little I knew, and he nodded, looked thoughtful, and went out of the office. The next time I saw him he did not mention the incident.
About a week later, when I was straightening up my desk at quitting time, he said, “You read a lot, don’t you?”
“I’d like to,” I said. “I wish I had more time for it.”
“How many books would you say you read in a month?”
It was raining outside, the drops sloshing down the thermo-pane window and puddling on the too flat concrete sill outside the glass, and I was in no hurry to leave. I sat down on the edge of my desk and said, “About five. More some months than others, of course.”
“You ever go in Pop’s store?”
“Is that your father? Louis Gold on Mulberry Street?”
Aaron nodded.
“Maybe once or twice a month.”
“Has he ever offered to get books for you?”
“Usually he just lets me browse around. I suppose he’d get a book for me if I asked him for something particular. If he had it.”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
I locked my desk and put my coat on, and found myself suddenly remembering that when my father and mother had returned from Europe and reopened the high, white house that had been my grandmother’s, the change in my life that seemed to me most important was that I was no longer free to run outdoors in any weather dressed as I chose. My aunt Olivia never made a fuss about coats and hats and galoshes; my mother, perhaps partly because she felt guilty about having left me for so long, always did.
“Den, have you ever heard of a book called The Lusty Lawyer? By a woman named Amanda Ros?”
I shook my head.
“Pop sold it to a Mr. Stewart Blaine for two hundred dollars.”
“It must be a rare book.”
“I guess it is,” Aaron said.
“Pornography?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. You never heard of it, though?”
I assured him I hadn’t, picked up my umbrella, and went out into the hall and through the side door of the building into the muddy parking lot. I was living by myself, as I have ever since Mother died and I sold my grandmother’s house, and I decided on God knows what impulse to stop by the library before getting my dinner. There were no books by Amanda Ros listed in the card catalogue, but there was a biography of her, Oh, Rare Amanda. I thumbed through it and found that Mrs. Ros had been an eccentric Victorian novelist with a penchant for alliteration. Her works were given as Irene Iddesleigh, Delina Delaney, and Donald Dudley, plus two books of verse—Fumes of Formation, and Poems of Puncture. No Lusty Lawyer.
“Can I help you with something, sir?”
“No,” I said.
“You looked rather lost.” The librarian smiled. “But I see you’ve found a book.”
“I’m not going to read it,” I said, and reshelved it.
The librarian was a rather pretty woman of thirty or thirty-five, quite slender. “If I can help you,” she said, “I’ll be at the main desk.”
“I didn’t mean to be rude,” I said, “but I don’t read much biography.”
“What do you read?”
“Fiction and history, mostly.”
“Then you should try biography. Someone said that it was the only history, and I suspect most of it’s more than half fiction. And it can be quite interesting.”
“It depresses me, to tell the truth. I came in here looking for what I’m told is an old novel—The Lusty Lawyer.”
“Sounds eighteenth century, though if it’s a novel that isn’t too likely—”
“Nineteenth century.”
“Did you look in the card file?”
“It’s not there.”
“We can borrow books from other libraries for you, you know. There’s a central clearing house that takes the requests and passes them on to a library that catalogues the book. It usually takes about two weeks. Would you like me to put that one on order for you?”
“Yes, please.” I followed her to the desk, and she wrote, “The Lusty Lawyer,” on a card. I said, “By Amanda Ros.”
“By Amanda Ros. And your name?”
“Alden Weer.”
“You have a library card?”
I nodded.
“You don’t come here often, do you, Mr. Weer? I don’t think I’ve noticed you before.”
“I usually prefer to own the books I read.”
“Well, don’t be such a stranger. We’re small here in Cassionsville, but it’s a lovely library. This used to be a private house, as I suppose you can tell by the way the rooms just wander into one another, although you might be fooled by the Greek cupola thing on the roof.”
“I know,” I said. I must have looked upward as I spoke, because she continued to talk about the cupola.
“I’ve never been up there, but it’s the kind of thing I would have loved as a child. I don’t even know if you can get into it from inside the building.”
“There used to be a trapdoor in the attic; you pushed it up with a pole, and leaned an old ladder nailed together from flooring against the edge when you had it open. The upper side of the door—inside the temple—was higher than the rest of the roof by an inch or so, and covered with sheet copper so it didn’t leak. I used to climb up there and dangle my legs over the coping and look at the endless sky.“
And it has just struck me that that sky must be the only thing left unchanged since my childhood. There is an elevator somewhere in this house that will take me to the attic, if only I am in my house and this office in which I find myself is, as I hope it is not, Barry Meade’s simulation of the real thing. In a moment I will press the intercom button and ask Miss Birkhead to bring me coffee.
“What are you thinking about, Mr. Weer? You looked very abstracted there for a moment.”
“Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”
“I need your telephone number. So we can call you when your book comes in.”
“Five six two, seven oh four one.”
“Your telephone number.”
“That was—”
“Telephone numbers are supposed to have exchanges—you know. Our number here at the library is ELmwood four, five four five four.” She had a large mouth, bright teeth, and a wide, infectious smile.
“I’m sorry; it seems I drew the wrong number from my memory. The right one is TWinbrook five, four six seven oh. Would you like to have dinner with me?”
“That’s very nice of you, Mr. Weer, but I’m afraid I couldn’t.”
“I just realized what a long time it’s been since I’ve really talked to anyone except a friend at work, and it was very pleasant talking to you here.”
“You live alone?”
“Yes, I have a small apartment now. Do you have to make supper for someone? Your mother? You’re not wearing a ring.”
“I’m divorced, Mr. Weer. I have to stay here until six.”
I looked at my watch, and discovered with some surprise that it was my old one. I said, “That’s only forty-five minutes off. No problem.“
“You won’t be able to wait in here—we close at five-thirty.”
“I’ll be outside in my car.”
What was her name? I can’t remember it, I who pride myself upon remembering everything. And of course there will be no coffee. The drawers of this desk are nearly empty, but not completely so. A few stale cigarettes, a picture of a girl caracoling a clockwork elephant before the eighteen-foot-high orange in front of this building, the orange that shines like a sun by night. In a moment I will leave this place and find my way back to the room with the fire, where my bed is, and my cruiser ax leaning against the wall.
“There you are. Do you know, I didn’t really think you’d be here.” She was wearing a woman’s tan trench coat, and had raindrops in her hair.
