Peace, p.23
Peace, page 23
“I wouldn’t argue with you. The Boyne diary I found in a box of books I got from a local man cleaning out his attic. For this I turned the world upside down.”
“Mr. Gold, you wrote the Boyne diary.”
I had expected him to deny it, but he did not. He had seated himself, as we talked, on the edge of his desk, and he remained there, silent, his small, clever-looking hands folded in his lap. I felt ridiculous, as though I were pretending to be Humphrey Bogart or Charlie Chan. I had never held power over anyone, and now I held it over this preposterous little man—and I didn’t want it. “You wrote it,” I said again. I said it quite firmly, mostly to convince myself. “I think you found that book—empty—in a lot you bought, as you said. You had heard of Kate Boyne, and you looked up records in the courthouse. The date of John Mill’s marriage to his second wife would have given you the date Kate came here, and the record of her own marriage would have told you that she was still living at the Mills’ farm. Most of your rare books“ (I picked up the Cultes des Goules and held it in front of his face) ”like The Lusty Lawyer, I think you make up whole—paper, printing, and binding.“
I waited for him to defend himself, but he was quiet. I turned to see if there were customers in the store listening to me, but there were none. “You shouldn’t have included Quantrill’s buried treasure—”
“Old coins,” Mr. Gold said, speaking for the first time since I had begun to accuse him, “are found, sometimes, in the sands of the river.”
“That’s true. I found one myself, on a picnic, when I was much younger. But at least three steamboats have been lost on the Kanakessee above the town—and the coins aren’t all gold —the one I found was a silver dollar—and most of them date from the seventies and eighties.”
I waited for him to say something more, but he did not. “You made it too clear,” I said, “where the treasure was supposed to be. You said that Kate, standing in the farmyard near the chicken coop, could see the men’s lanterns; then you said that when they returned they left muddy footprints on her carpet; and you said that when they had gone the next day, she could see their tracks but couldn’t find where they had buried the money. I think that you were just trying to be mysterious, but when Miss Arbuthnot and I went there it was clear that if the thing had really happened there could only have been one explanation: that they buried the gold in the bed of Sugar Creek —and there is only a short section of the creek visible from the farmyard.”
Gold said softly, “Colonel Quantrill could have returned and taken it again. Or it might have washed away.”
“Quantrill was killed in 1865, but one of the men with him could have come back, that’s true; or someone might have stumbled on Kate’s book years ago and found it; or, as you say, it might have washed out. But Miss Arbuthnot and I had a disagreement while we were looking for it, and it started me thinking. She had read a part of Kate’s book to me to get me to help her, and it said that when Quantrill came, Maud Mill, her daughter Mary, and her stepdaughter Hannah were all away from the farm: Maud had taken them to Boston to see her mother. Mr. Gold, Hannah Mill cooked for us when I was a boy. She would have been in her teens in 1863, and if she’d ever gone as far from Cassionsville as Boston she would have talked about it for the rest of her life. She never mentioned it.”
I left him sitting there and went back to my apartment. It was Saturday again; Lois had gone out of my life (I should say that she had left my future—I could never eradicate her from my past, no matter how hard I tried) and there was the rest of the day to get through, and Sunday as well. I wondered what Aaron would say to me on Monday; whether his father would mention what had happened. Sometimes when I felt this way, I called Margaret Lorn; sometimes her husband or one of her children answered; sometimes she. I never spoke, but if she answered she tried, occasionally, to get me to talk, asking what my name was and why I called her, sometimes angry, more often cajoling. I think she actually enjoyed the calls, enjoyed knowing that she had an admirer somewhere. Once I sent her flowers without a card. When we met on the street—which we did less often than might seem possible in a small town—we were polite and formal.
What went wrong? That is the question, and not “To be or not to be,” for all of Shakespeare. When I recall my childhood, and forget (as I sometimes do) everything else, it is quite clear what my life was to become. I was intelligent and industrious; Margaret and I loved one another deeply. I would marry her, and enjoy a career that, if not brilliant, would at least be locally distinguished. I would inherit, between the ages of twenty and thirty, my father’s estate, an inheritance that would not make me really wealthy, but that, added to what I earned myself, would give Margaret and me a comfortable position in life.
None of this happened, and I found myself instead a poor man at forty, and a very rich one at fifty; and never found Margaret at all. The silver dollar I picked up once when I was on a picnic with her—a dollar from, I believe, 1872, which had the seated figure of Liberty in profile on its obverse—I carried as a pocket piece for years afterward; perhaps it brought me bad luck. Where it is now I have no idea, though I visualize it lying in one of the upper drawers of my old bureau in my grandmother’s house, beside my scout knife. I still have not found my way, as yet, back to that comfortable glassed-in porch where the fire was. But I carry my notebook and pen with me, and write, sometimes, in the corridors, and sometimes in strange rooms. One of the rooms I have found is my apartment in the Commons.
My apartment is larger than Lois Arbuthnot’s, but not much. I have a living room, a bedroom, and an eat-in kitchenette. (That last phrase is the landlord’s, not mine.) My windows— two in the living room, two in the bedroom—overlook what should be Catalpa Street, but which, in winding away from what is now called the old village, has changed its name to Ivy Road. I make my bed neatly when I rise, change the sheets twice a week, and wish my bedroom were large enough to hold an occasional chair, though it is not. My living room (where I am sitting) is ten feet by fifteen. There are two chairs in it, my footstool, a sofa, a coffee table, a radio, and five bookcases. I am thinking about buying a television, and the Commons, I hear, is considering putting up an antenna and running wires through the walls. There is no desk, and so I am sitting in the best chair with my legs propped up on the footstool, writing in my lap.
The buzzer sounds.
“Who’s there?”
A murmur.
“Who’s there?”
A murmur.
“Lois?”
“I’m murmur murmur, Mr. Weer.”
I pressed the button to unlock the outside door. My visitor, whoever she was, would be entering the cramped little lobby, trying to decide which of the three stairs she should take. (I have been sitting listening for her step on the thin carpet outside, my book on my lap.) A knock at the door.
“Come in.”
She was a girl of sixteen, barelegged, long-haired, wearing a sweater and skirt. Her face was round, pretty, accustomed, I think, to smiles; her hair dark and tawny, between brown and blond. She had a well-developed, somewhat fleshy figure, and today had painted her nails bright red.
“Excuse me for not rising. I have suffered a stroke resulting in partial paralysis of one leg.”
Nervously: “That’s all right.”
“Won’t you sit down?”
She sat, then stood again at once. The chair wasn’t close enough, and yet she was afraid to move it. At last she sat on the edge of my footstool, her knees carefully together, her legs bent back as though to hide her feet.
“I know,” she said, “you know what I’m here about. My dad—”
I said, “I’m afraid I didn’t catch your name when you rang the buzzer.”
“Sherry. My dad ... He feels awful, Mr. Weer. Just awful.”
“I felt awful.” I remembered standing hip-deep in the hole, which could actually have been called a ditch or a trench, we had dug in the dry bed of Sugar Creek over the space of two days. My shovel had struck a stone, causing the blade to ring, and in a spot of moonlight I had seen the glint of metal in Lois’s hand. I had taken it from her—a little, nickled .25 caliber Colt automatic—when she bent down to see what I had found. She had said she had been afraid I would try to keep everything for myself.
“I guess it’s not nice to be fooled.”
“I’m told some people like it.”
“That’s what Dad said. I talked to him about it this afternoon, and he said he’s made a lot of people very happy, and it hasn’t hurt anyone. Five hundred dollars is the most he’s ever got, and usually it’s a lot less. When you think about the work he’s done, that isn’t so much, is it? I mean he has to write the text. The place in New York that prints them for him would do that, too, if he wanted, but they charge a lot—he says they have to. And it’s the same with binding. He has to find the old materials and work with them, and a lot of times they’re so rotten they’ll almost tear when you touch them.”
“Then why do it?”
“He won’t. I mean, I promise you, he won’t anymore. I mean, he told me that. He didn’t know I was going to tell you—he doesn’t know I’m over here. I think he wants to kill himself, Mr. Weer, I really do.”
I said, “Did he tell Aaron? About my talking to him today?”
“Oh, no!” Sherry Gold wiggled as she sat on my footstool; wiggled when she talked and, equally, when I did, as though she were unable to keep still. I noticed that she wore a senior class ring with next year’s date; it had been a long time since I had seen a senior ring with next year’s date. “They don’t get along. I mean not at all. I mean, I know Ron loves Dad, and Dad loves Ron, but they can’t agree about anything, and Dad is so quiet and Ron always yells. You know how he is. And then Mom gets mad at Ron for yelling, because she doesn’t want the neighbors to hear that we fight, and then Dad fights with her because of the things she calls Ron, and that makes Ron just furious, and he goes stamping out of the house and sometimes it’s a week before he comes back. He has friends who have their own places, and I think sometimes he stays with a girl who does. I mean, don’t ask does what.”
“I won’t.”
Her right hand was moving, though only slightly, toward the waistband of her skirt. The memory of that night with Lois was still so strong that for a moment I actually thought she might be about to draw a weapon.
“You’re not going to the police?”
To see what she would say, I told her, “I had planned to go to the people who have bought the books; after all, they’re the ones who’ve been defrauded. Mr. Blaine and the library are the only ones I know of now, but I think I can find out who some of the others were.”
There was a button, apparently, at the side of her skirt, and she had stepped out of it (still wearing saddle shoes and short socks) almost before I was aware of what she was doing. She had on that cheap rayon underwear sold to girls considered to be socially, though not sexually, immature; and she sat on my lap quite promptly, kicking off the shoes without untying them. “You see,” she said, “we can make a deal. If you don’t tell, I won’t.” Her young hair was so fragrant that I might have been thrusting my face among the boughs of a blossoming apple tree.
Later she asked if I were surprised that it had not been her first time. I said that I was not.
“I’ve done it with a boy in school three times. Two boys, really.”
I warned her about several things.
“Oh, we’re careful. The first time—you know, you’re supposed to get drunk or something. Or he’s supposed to make you—tear your clothes off or something. Only it wasn’t like that at all. We had been—you know—in his father’s car out on Cave Road, and I just wanted to so much, so I said, ‘Come on,’ and he took my pants down, and then he—you know—made a mess on himself, and I felt so sorry for him, he was so embarrassed. So a couple of hours later, when he was feeling better, and everything, we did.“
“You shouldn’t talk about it. You’ll get a bad reputation.”
“Well, I don’t. Do you mind if I put my panties back on? I want to use the bathroom again and get a glass of water if you don’t mind. But you’re not going to tell; I mean, an old man like you! If you won’t tell about Daddy, you won’t tell about me—I mean, why should you? It’s the boys you have to worry about because they like to blow off. But they tell so many lies nobody believes them much—you know? But these two have been pretty nice about it, because it’s hardly got back to me at all. Wait a minute.”
She went into the toilet, and after a pause called, “Can I take a shower?”
“Certainly.”
I began to get dressed, and by the time she came out (again in her underpants, but holding a damp-looking towel in front of her chubby breasts) I was finished. She asked, “Are you going out?”
“I think we should see your father.”
For a moment she looked frightened. “About me?”
“About the books. If he’s as worried as you say, I ought to let him know that I’m not going to tell anyone. We can just say that you came and asked me not to, and I had been thinking about it, and so I promised you I wouldn’t.”
She nodded, and after a moment began to get dressed. While we were walking around the building to get to the parking lot, she asked, “Do you always keep a gun in your bed?”
For a moment I did not know what to reply.
“I felt it. When I was lying with my head on your shoulder. I was looking for a good place to put my arm—there’s never anything to do with the arm you’re lying on when you’re like that—so I slipped my hand under your pillow. It was just a little gun, but it was a gun. Do you always keep a gun in your bed?“
“It was a twenty-five caliber automatic. No, only for the past couple of weeks; I think I’ll get rid of it tomorrow.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Throw it in the river, or the bottom drawer of my bureau.”
And that is where my scout knife is, I am sure—in the bottom drawer of the bureau in this room, not eight feet from where I sit. I am not going to look. If it is there, I will be no happier than I am now; but if it is not, I will have to begin the search again. Or perhaps I will look—I am not sure I have the strength of will to walk from this room without it.
“You look so serious. What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, I was telling you about me. You know, you said I’d get a bad reputation. Well, I’ve thought a lot about that—I mean, I really have. Because I’m a nice-looking girl—I mean I’m not the greatest, I never thought I was, but I am a nice-looking girl—I have this thing, comprehend? Down here. I call it the ‘magic ring.’ And it’s going to last from now to about when I’m forty or forty-five. Only if I don’t use it I don’t get the wishes—you see? Like, I wanted you not to tell about Dad, and you were going to, so I used the magic ring and—”
“Presto chango.”
“Yes, presto chango, the world turned upside down, and now you’re not. But most people—I mean, most girls—only use it to get a husband so they won’t have to work. So they have the husband, and children and so on, and that’s it. But I don’t want those things—I really don’t. You cook a roast and baked potatoes, and make a salad, and after he eats, you do the dishes and mend socks—socks, for God’s sake. I mean, who needs it?”
I asked her what she was going to do instead.
“Well, first I’m going to look around— Hey, where are you going?”
“To your father’s shop. Isn’t he open this evening?”
“He felt so bad—because of you—he closed up. If you want to talk to him, you’ll have to come to our house. Turn left at the corner and we’ll go out Browning.
“Like I was saying, I want to look around. I mean—look at my father, for example. He was born way over in Europe, and went to England—”
I said, “I didn’t know that.”
“He went to England first. And he came here and learned a new language, and he’s had all sorts of jobs—he was a furrier for a while in New York, and everything. I mean, he’s seen things. How do I know what I want to do! I want to travel and find out, and I’ve got my ticket. You know the immigrant joke? This immigrant writes back to his cousin: ‘America! What a country! A person comes here with nothing, no friends, can’t speak the language, not a word, knows nobody, the first day eats free in the best restaurant, sleeps in the best, the most luxurious—I tell you, like a palace!—hotel, and gets a hatful of money and jewels.’ So the cousin doesn’t believe all this, and he writes back. ‘This happened to you?’ and the immigrant writes, ‘Not to me, no; but to my sister.’ You know we’re supposed to be Jewish?”
I nodded, although I had never specifically thought of Aaron as Jewish.
“We’re washing away—that’s the way I think of it. The whole family must be washing away, for God’s sake. Excuse me a minute, huh?” She reached up and adjusted the rear-view mirror until she could see her face in it. “I didn’t bring a purse with me, and all my makeup came off in your shower.”
“Did you walk to my place?”
“Rode the bus. I got a token in my bra for the trip back, but you probably didn’t see it when I took it off because I did it so it wouldn’t fall on the floor. I don’t look Jewish, do I? I was looking at myself the other day. What do you think I look like?”
“American.”
“Go slow here—it’s the middle of the next block, the brick house with the rosebushes. I look Slavic is what I think. So many darn Poles and Russians mixing with us that now we are them. We don’t go to temple, did you know that? Or keep a kosher house or anything. What we do is, we don’t eat pork. That’s it. My dad has breakfast in a restaurant, the waitress says, ‘Sausage?’ my dad says, ‘No.’ That’s our Jewishness. The next house, with the light in the front window.”
Mrs. Gold (who told me to call her Sally) met us at the door. There was something birdlike about her, and something British as well; I think she knew why I had come, but wished to maintain the fiction that she did not. “My son Aaron works for you, doesn’t he?” she said. “He’s not in difficulties, I hope?”
