Different Seasons(174)

“ ‘I’ve got to talk to Joe right now,’ he reiterated as if he hadn’t heard me. ‘There’s something in the trunk of my car ... something I found out at the Virginia place. I’ve shot it and stabbed it and I can’t kill it. It’s not human, and I can’t kill it.’

“He began to giggle... and then to laugh... and finally to scream. And he was still screaming when I finally got Mr. Woods on the phone and told him to come, for God’s sake, to come as fast as he could...”

It is not my purpose to tell Peter Andrews’s story, either. As a matter of fact, I am not sure I would dare to tell it. Suf _ fice it to say that it was a tale so gruesome that I dreamed of it for weeks afterwards, and Ellen once looked at me over the breakfast table and asked me why I had suddenly cried out “His head! His head is still speaking in the earth!” in the middle of the night.

“I suppose it was a dream,” I said. “One of those you can’t remember afterwards.”

But my eyes dropped immediately to my coffee cup, and I think that Ellen knew the lie that time.

One day in August of the following year, I was buzzed as I worked in the Reading Library. It was George Waterhouse. He asked me if I could step up to his office. When I got there I saw that Robert Carden was also there, and Henry Effingham. For one moment I was positive I was about to be accused of some really dreadful act of stupidity or ineptitude.

Then Carden stepped around to me and said: “George believes the time has come to make you a junior partner, David. The rest of us agree.”

“It’s going to be a little bit like being the world’s oldest Jay-Cee,” Effingham said with a grin, “but it’s the channel you have to go through, David. With any luck, we can make you a full partner by Christmas.”

There were no bad dreams that night. Ellen and I went out to dinner, drank too much, went on to a jazz place where we hadn’t been in nearly six years, and listened to that amazing blue-eyed black man, Dexter Gordon, blow his horn until almost two in the morning. We woke up the next morning with fluttery stomachs and achy heads, both of us still unable to completely believe what had happened. One of them was that my salary had just climbed by eight thousand dollars a year long after our expectations of such a staggering income jump had fallen by the wayside.

The firm sent me to Copenhagen for six weeks that fall, and I returned to discover that John Hanrahan, one of the regular attendees at 249B, had died of cancer. A collection was taken up for his wife, who had been left in unpleasant circumstances. I was pressed into service to total the amount—which was given entirely in cash—and convert it to a cashier’s check. It came to more than ten thousand dollars. I turned the check over to Stevens and I suppose he mailed it.

It just so happened that Arlene Hanrahan was a member of Ellen’s Theater Society, and Ellen told me sometime later that Arlene had received an anonymous check for ten thousand four hundred dollars. Written on the check stub was the brief and unilluminating message: Friends of your late husband John

“Isn’t that the most amazing thing you ever heard in your life?” Ellen asked me.

“No,” I said, “but it’s right up there in the top ten. Are there any more strawberries, Ellen?”

The years went by. I discovered a warren of rooms upstairs at 249B—a writing room, a bedroom where guests sometimes stayed overnight (although, after that slithery bump I had heard—or imagined I had heard—I believe I personally would rather have registered at a good hotel), a small but well-equipped gymnasium, and a sauna bath. There was also a long, narrow room which ran the length of the building and contained two bowling alleys.

In those same years I re-read the novels of Edward Gray Seville, and discovered an absolutely stunning poet—the equal of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens, perhaps—named Norbert Rosen. According to the back flap on one of the three volumes of his work in the stacks, he had been born in 1924 and killed at Anzio. All three volumes of his work had been published by Stedham & Son, New York and Boston.

I remember going back to the New York Public Library on a bright spring afternoon during one of those years (of which year I am no longer sure) and requesting twenty years’ worth of Literary Market Place. The LMP is an annual publication the size of a large city’s Yellow Pages, and the reference room librarian was quite put out with me, I’m afraid. But I persisted, and went through each volume carefully. And although LMP is supposed to list every publisher, great and small, in the United States (in addition to agents, editors, and book club staffs), I found no listing for Stedham & Son. A year later—or perhaps it was two years later—I fell into conversation with an antiquarian book-dealer and asked him about the imprint. He said he had never heard of it.

I thought of asking Stevens—saw that warning light in his eyes—and dropped the question unasked.

And, over those years, there were stories.

Tales, to use Stevens’s word. Funny tales, tales of love found and love lost, tales of unease. Yes, and even a few war stories, although none of the sort Ellen had likely been thinking of when she made the suggestion.

I remember Gerard Tozeman’s story the most clearly—the tale of an American base of operations which took a direct hit from German artillery four months before the end of World War I, killing everyone present except for Tozeman himself.

Lathrop Carruthers, the American general who everyone had by then decided must be utterly insane (he had been responsible for better than eighteen thousand casualties by then—lives and limbs spent as casually as you or I might spend a quarter in a jukebox), was standing at a map of the front lines when the shell struck. He had been explaining yet another mad flanking operation at the moment—an operation which would have succeeded only on the level of all the others Carruthers had hatched: it would be wonderfully successful at making new widows.