Peace, p.19
Peace, page 19
“It wasn’t long. I was waiting at my desk.”
“You mean you prop a book against the wheel of the car?”
“Something like that. Where would you like to eat?”
“That’s up to you, isn’t it? Besides, I don’t know much about restaurants around here. I’ve only lived here for a couple of months.”
“We’ll go to Milewczyk’s, then. The food is good—mostly French—and I know the owner slightly.”
“You’ve lived here since you were a child, haven’t you? I thought so because of what you said about our building.”
“Yes, all my life.”
“It’s a funny town, isn’t it? So mid-America. I’m a city girl myself.”
“Chicago?”
“You’re guessing from my accent, aren’t you? No, St. Louis.”
“Is it polite to ask why you came to Cassionsville? I don’t mean to pry.”
“Very polite. I came here because I’m a librarian—I have a master’s in Library Science. I’d been cataloguing—and not much else—in the St. Louis Public Library System ever since I graduated, so I answered an ad and came here, and now I’m a big froggy in a little puddle. I like that better.”
“You enjoy the work here, then.”
“We’ve got a good collection of early documents, and I’m sorting out our genealogical material. Then, too, I like our building, even though . . . Weer. I should have spotted that name. Are you—you have to be, you said you’d lived here all your life. I was just going to ask if you were one of the locally prominent family, but you must be; I didn’t think there were any of you left.” The wipers sponged generations of raindrops from the windshield as she spoke.
“I’m the only one.”
“Your ancestors used to own most of this town—I suppose you know that.”
“I know they bought land from the Blaines and built a gristmill on the Kanakessee.”
“At least they bought it—the Blaines stole it from the Indians.”
“I thought there was some sort of treaty.”
“All right, they stole it by treaty. Only the treaty can’t be found, and for that matter neither can the Indians. The thing they show the school kids was painted on buckskin by a group of local ladies about forty years ago.”
“I know.”
She was silent for a moment. In the library I had noticed that, as so many librarians seem to, she wore glasses that hung from a chain passed behind her neck; these were gone now, and from the way her eyes flashed when she looked at me, I suspected that they had been replaced by contact lenses. “Have you ever thought,” she said, “of Indians inhabiting this land? People killing deer with stone-tipped arrows on this street? . . . Oh, I see Milewczyk’s! Is that how you pronounce it?”
I told her it was, and swung the car into a parking place. It was early, but the lot was already more than half full.
“Now that I see it, I can remember having driven past it, but I’ve never been inside.... It’s nice, isn’t it.... Louis Fourteenth. I like Louis Fourteenth, particularly his carpets, and I feel I should be wearing a powdered wig.”
“And I should be carrying a sword.”
“Why, how gallant you are, Mr. Weer.” A waiter—not Milewczyk—led us to a table. The wallpaper was gilded in a pattern of fleur-de-lis; a reproduction of Watteau’s Le Mezzetin hung on the wall behind us in a velvet-covered frame. When we were seated, the librarian said, “I daresay you do have a sword, Mr. Weer—no, I’m not thinking of Jurgen. Have you read Chesterton? He said that a sword was the most romantic thing in the world, but that a pocketknife was more romantic than a sword, because it was a secret sword.”
“Yes. I do have a pocketknife.” I took it out and showed it to her.
“A Boy Scout knife—I think that’s sweet. It looks old; have you had it for a long time, Mr. Weer?”
“I got it for Christmas when I was six.”
“That’s marvelous—you’ve carried your secret sword almost from the beginning.”
“I’m afraid it hasn’t slain many dragons.”
“What do you do for a livelihood, Mr. Weer? I’ve told you what I do.”
“That’s very mid-American, isn’t it? You are what you do.”
She nodded. “Yes, we think that when someone loses his job he goes out like a match in the wind. That’s the trouble with a lot of us women, I think; we don’t have jobs, and so unconsciously we feel we’re no one.”
“I don’t believe I’ve ever been unemployed, technically. I had accepted the job I have now while I was still in college. But I’ve felt I was no one for a long time now.”
“Maybe being the last of the Weers has something to do with it.”
“I think being the last human being is more important. Have you ever wondered how the last dinosaur felt? Or the last passenger pigeon?”
“Are you the last human being? I hadn’t noticed.”
“You were talking about the Indians—how do you think the last Indian felt? Indians have more feelings, I should think, than dinosaurs or pigeons.”
“There are still Indians—perhaps not around Cassionsville.”
“Don’t you think we should call them Americans of Indian descent?”
“I see what you mean, but it makes them sound as though they came from Bombay. Is that what you feel like yourself? What do you call it?”
“Various things. Let’s just say that I’m conscious from time to time that my skull is being turned up by an archaeologist’s spade.”
“You shouldn’t feel dead before you are, Mr. Weer.”
“That’s the only time you can feel it. You’re like the people who tell me I talk too much—but we’re all going to be quiet such a long time.”
“You don’t seem to me like a talkative man. And you told me in the library that you never talked to anyone except a friend at work.”
“Aaron Gold. That’s why I was looking for The Lusty Lawyer. For Aaron.”
“You’re going to have to tell me about him.” (The waiter came to take our order.) “I haven’t even looked at this menu. What’s good here?” (I told the waiter we would have champagne cocktails while we looked over the menu.) “Is your friend Aaron a reader? Why does he want to see The Lusty Lawyer? And why are you anxious to get it for him?”
“I don’t know. I hardly know the Golds, except for Aaron, but they seem to be an odd family.”
“It’s not just for himself that he wants the book, then.”
“It has something to do with his father—Louis Gold. He operates a used-book store on Mulberry.”
She snapped her fingers. “I know him. I’m trying to buy a book from him: an old diary. I know his daughter, too. She comes to the library to do her schoolwork. A bobbysoxer—is that what they call them now? Very pretty; a bit plump yet, but she’ll outgrow it; a nice girl with lots of bounce. Would you mind if I asked her why her father wants to see The Lusty Lawyer?”
“He doesn’t want to see it; his son does. Mr. Gold sold a copy for quite a high price.” I was beginning to feel that I had said too much, told more about Aaron’s affairs than I should.
“He probably thinks his father is being cheated.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Isn’t that the way sons and daughters always think? They believe their parents are senile and that someone else is taking advantage of them. If Mr. Gold sold this book for fifty dollars, you can bet his son thinks it’s worth five hundred. But I doubt that anyone is really robbing poor Mr. Gold blind. He wants enough for the Boyne diary.”
I said, “Let’s change the subject. I’m getting tired of The Lusty Lawyer already. What’s this about a diary? There used to be a woman living around here named Katherine Boyne— it wouldn’t be the same one, would it?”
“It’s the same name. Or at least close. Mr. Gold says the diarist calls herself Kate Boyne.”
“This woman was called Kate. I knew a grandson of hers when I was a boy. He called her ‘the old Kate.’ ”
“This is fascinating—listen, do you mind if I have another of these? Did he ever talk about her?”
“He told some stories, yes. But I’m afraid I’ve forgotten most of them. I got the impression that the old Kate—I mean Doherty’s grandmother, as distinguished from your Katherine Boyne—was illiterate, or nearly so.”
“She was. You understand, Mr. Weer, I’m not committing the library to buying a pig in a poke—I’ve already read quite a bit of the diary. It’s full of misspellings and so on, but nevertheless it sheds a great deal of light on the history of this region. From what Mr. Gold has told me and what I’ve read myself, Katherine Boyne was born in Boston of Irish immigrant parents —probably before 1850. That would have been the period of the potato blight, and it seems quite probable that the family had just arrived in the United States. Somehow or other, she became a kind of girl-of-all-work to a lady schoolteacher, and when the teacher left Boston to marry a man who had settled here she went with him. It—”
“His name was Mill,” I said. “I’ve forgotten the first name.”
“That’s right—how did you know?”
“Our cook was his daughter by his first wife. The schoolteacher was her stepmother. She used to talk about Kate.”
“You mean a cook you have now—”
“When I was a child. She was an old woman then; her name was Hannah Mill.”
“She might be mentioned. I think there was a Mary Mill.”
“You’re trying to buy this for the library? From Louis Gold?”
She nodded. She had dark hair, curled (I suppose artificially) close about her head. The curls bobbed when she moved her head, as the bird on Mrs. Brice’s hat used to long ago.
“How much does he want for it?”
“Seventy-five dollars. Now, don’t smile; that may not be a great deal to you, but we only have two hundred and fifty to buy new books for the entire library for the year. If I were to spend seventy-five on one book, there would be some eyebrows raised at the next board meeting, believe me.”
“Suppose I were to give the library a gift, specifying that it was to be used for the purchase of this book?”
“Could you? I mean, it’s not too much? It won’t inconvenience you?”
I wrote her a check.
“You wanted coffee, Mr. Weer?”
“Yes. Coffee, Mr. Batton?”
“Call me Bill. You know I’d expected I’d be drinking your juice when I was at your plant.”
“It makes a good screwdriver—I’ll show you at lunch. But I thought you might prefer coffee now.”
“Thank you. Let me begin by saying, Mr. Weer, that there are two basic types of campaign—the institutional campaign and the selling campaign.”
“We want a selling campaign.”
“I know you do. What I was leading up to is that in an institutional campaign you want to reach everyone, but in a selling campaign you have to reach the buyers. The buyers of your product are housewives, Mr. Weer. Good coffee.”
“What is it, Miss Birkhead?”
“Sir, there’s someone outside who wants to see you.”
“I’m sorry, Bill. Apparently this is an emergency.”
“It isn’t, Mr. Weer. Not really. It’s just that I was hoping you’d either see him now or send him away. I don’t like having him out there. It’s a little man all covered with hair.”
The next morning was Saturday, and I slept late. (My job required that I get up at six on weekdays; our early starting time was supposed to stagger traffic in the plant area—though by nine there was almost none, and a late start would have spaced things out better—but had actually been instituted, as I came to realize, because our section and department heads wanted the luxury of late arrival without the danger of being away from their desks when the main office called.) The telephone woke me. “Den? This is Lois.”
“Who?”
“Lois Arbuthnot. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten me already.”
“Sorry, I’m not awake yet.” (Nor was I. When we are asleep, so it seems to me, we sleep surrounded by all the years. I have imagined, sleeping, that I heard the footsteps of the long-dead; I have held conversations with them, and with the blank-faced people I was yet to meet, conversations that seemed of unbearable poignancy, though when I woke I could remember only a few words, and those not words that possessed, waking, any emotional significance to me. It is said that this is because content is divorced from emotion in sleep, as though the sleeping mind read two books at once, one of tears and lust and laughter, the other of words and phrases picked up from old newspapers, from grimy handbills blowing along the street and conversations overheard in barbershops and bars, and the banalities of radio. I think rather that we have forgotten on waking what the words have meant to us, or have not learned as yet what they will mean. But the worst thing is to wake and remember that we have been talking to the dead, having never thought to hear that voice again, having never any expectation of hearing it again before we ourselves are gone.)
“Your book. Remember your book? I phoned in the request, and Marie—that’s a friend of mine, we went to college together —says there’s a man in their office who’s a shark on the Victorian novelists, and he’ll be able to tell you all about it, and where you can find a copy if it’s rare.”
“I think I already know that.”
“I thought you were looking for one.”
“I was. I just thought of something, that’s all. Listen, I want you to keep on with your man for me if you will; my idea may not work out.”
“He’s not there now—that’s the only thing. He’s on vacation; but Marie promised to ask him as soon as he comes back.”
“Fine.”
“And I ordered the diary. We have to put a check through, and it goes by mail, but I called Mr. Gold just a minute ago, and he says that as long as I’m willing to vouch for the fact that I’ve put it through, we can come by and pick it up anytime.”
“Good.”
There was a pause. I was conscious that I had failed her in some way—as I fail people so often in conversation—but too stupid to see in what way it was. In desperation I said, “You’ve been very active. And very successful.”
“Don’t you want to go by with me?”
“What?”
“Go by and pick up the Boyne book. I had the impression you were anxious to read it, and we could go past this afternoon and get it. The library closes at noon on Saturdays, and I’m through by one.”
“I’m sorry. When you said ‘we’ could pick it up, I thought you were referring to some messenger from the library. I’ve told you I’m still asleep, Lois. Your call woke me up.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yes, I’d like to see it. I’ll meet you in front of the library.”
“You’re invited to dinner with me later. At my apartment.”
What I had told Lois was perfectly true: I had remembered at last that someone I knew had a copy of The Lusty Lawyer, that someone being Stewart Blaine. The only question was whether or not to telephone him before driving over, and in the end I decided against it.
I bought a car during my third year at college, and brought it home with me when I graduated, and have since owned several others, but it has always seemed somewhat unreal to me to drive on the old brick streets of Cassionsville. So many of these streets are meant only for walking, streets that would be called courts in an English city, streets without sidewalks or curbs, the houses and their little plots of grass, their evergreens and rosebushes, at a level with the bricks, so that I might have driven unimpeded to their front doors, or parked beneath their windows. So many others retain clear traces of the Age of the Horse, having limestone curbs with iron rings (still staunch, though I have heard children wonder aloud why the horses were not tied to the parking meters) set into the stone, and even faint narrow grooves in the brick from the iron rims of wagon wheels. As I drove to Stewart Blaine’s, however, it seemed to me, doubtless because of some association awakened by the route, which was not one I normally had reason to take, that an automobile was the proper vehicle; but that it should be open, a thing of heavy steel and brass, with free-standing lamps and a brake handle (beloved of small boys) outside the car, sprouting from one running board, a handle whose operation required reaching across the top of the door.
Stewart Blaine’s house was gone. When I reached the corner at which it had stood, it was no longer there—the U-shaped drive, the pillared portico, the stable and carriage house that had employed Doherty, all gone. Half a dozen smaller houses stood in its place. I went to one and knocked, and told the woman who answered that I was looking for Mr. Blaine, who had once lived there. She was a friendly woman, plump and not pretty, but smiling, wiping soapy hands on a checkered napkin, and she asked me in, and called to her husband. He lumbered out in trousers and a strap undershirt, and proved to be a man I knew slightly from work, a draftsman. He had never heard of Stewart Blaine, nor had his wife. They had lived in the house eight years.
I found Blaine’s address (of course) in the telephone book, an address in an area that had been a farm when I was a boy, a farm I had passed, once, on my way to the Lorns’, when Mr. Macafee and my aunt Olivia had gone to buy the wonderful egg which was to be Mr. Macafee’s forty-first birthday present. The house was timber and plaster now, in the style that is called Tudor. Two stories and what appeared to be a finished attic, but nothing to the glory that had been Blaine’s old house. I rang, and the door was opened by a stout, frowning woman who was not Mrs. Perkins. She told me that Mr. Blaine was ill, and seldom saw visitors, and asked me for my card. I gave it to her, writing on the back, “Olivia Weer’s nephew. About The Lusty Lawyer.” The woman asked me to wait in the hall.
It was an old house—that was the first thing that struck me. The woodwork had been painted several times, and in differing shades; the light fixtures and the switches looked worn, and so did the dimly patterned runner, worn by that heavy, frowning woman’s going to the door to say that there would be no candy this Halloween, no oranges or apples, nickels or dimes, for carolers this Christmas, that no brushes, brooms, or cosmetics were wanted here, that there were no knives to sharpen, no pots to mend. There was a tarnished silver tray on a marble-topped table, and several minutes passed before I recognized the table as the same one that had stood in the hall of the old house, the white house, the house in which Doherty, that lax and lazy and doubtless drunken Irishman, had scrubbed the interiors of the fireplaces until the blacking of the smoke could scarcely be seen all summer long.
