Fade (18 page)

“Did the scabs win, Uncle Victor?” I asked.

“Nobody wins a fight like that,” he answered.

“We gave them hell,” Armand said, fierce and fiery, eyes blazing. “The police rode them out of town, put them in their trucks, and sent them on their way. Except for the ones in the hospital. They won't come back, right, Uncle Victor?”

“Right,” Uncle Victor said, placing his arm around Ar-mand's shoulder. His voice lacked Armand's fire and pride.

“How about the strike?” I asked, still shivering, still numbed by what had happened in Rudolphe Toubert's office, and amazed that I should be standing here asking my uncle questions about the strike.

“It goes on,” Uncle Victor said. “But it will be settled. We'll win a little and lose a little. But what we win will be more important than what we lose. …”

I ascended the steps to my mother's waiting arms, let myself be folded in them. I shivered with chills. She felt my forehead. “You have a fever, Paul,” she said, and led me into the bedroom. She brought me aspirin and hot cocoa and watched me sip from the cup. Her face looked shattered, her eyes glazed, as if she had been struck blind, was doing everything—walking, talking, tending to my needs—by memory.

“I hope Pa will be all right,” I whispered as her lips brushed my cheek.

“We've got to be strong, Paul,” she said. “No matter what happens. Pray, Paul, and be strong …”

I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, plunging into fathomless depths, into the heart of a bottomless darkness, obliterated, becoming a zero, a cipher.

I woke to the sound of laughter and merriment and clinking glasses and muffled shouts of gladness. Rubbing my eyes, I crept to the doorway, gazed out at the kitchen, saw my mother radiant at the table, my brothers and sisters at their places, my uncle Victor at the door.

She saw me standing there.

“Your father, Paul,” she cried, eyes luminous, cheeks flushed with happiness and joy. “He survived. Dr. Goldstein just left. He's going to be fine….”

“Good,” I said, my voice hollow.

I thought of Rudolphe Toubert and the knife and the peculiar sound that passed his lips as the knife penetrated his flesh and found its mark. I turned away so that no one would see me trembling.

Three weeks later, Bernard died. In his sleep.

Cold and forever remote when we tried to wake him on the last day of that doomed year.

et me introduce myself.

My name is Susan Roget and I am sitting at the typewriter here in Meredith Martin's ninth-floor apartment in Peter Cooper Village, New York, New York, and if I look out the window, I can see the East River where a tugboat is pulling a huge tanker through the choppy waters. Ifs a sparkling day in July—Saturday, July 9, to be exact—and I am haunted by something, by those final words in the manuscript I've just read for, like, the tenth time.
Cold and forever remote when we tried to wake him on the last day ofthat doomed year.

Shit.

This isn't the way I want to begin. What I want to do is keep things plain and simple and direct. Professor Waronski in Creative Writing 209 says that the best way is to plunge in, make a beginning, any beginning at all, as long as you start. Most of all, he said, be yourself.

Oh, I'm myself, all right. That's what got me into this predicament. I shouldn't have read the manuscript in the first place, had no business finding it the way I did. Then I wouldn't have known about the boy Paul and the fade and all the rest of it.

Okay, I guess I
have
made a beginning.

Next, I suppose I should explain how I arrived in Manhattan, a thousand miles from Farley, Iowa, by way of Boston University, houseguest of a famous literary agent.

Pure nerve, that's how, plus a willingness to take risks. Professor Waronski says that a writer must take risks, defy the odds, be a bit obsessed and a little mad. So I gathered up my nerve (which didn't require much effort because I am not exactly a shrinking violet) and took the risk of sending Meredith Martin a letter.

In the letter, I explained that:

1.1 burn with desire to be a writer, have always wanted to be a writer, would rather write than eat or drink, which is only a slight exaggeration.

2. I will be starting my junior year at B.U. in the fall, majoring in communications, which is actually a major in writing. Then I dropped my bomb:

3. I am a cousin of one of her most famous clients—the author of
Bruises in Paradise
and all those other wonderful novels. (Distant cousin, yes, but still related.)

Then the payoff.

4. Would it be possible for me to work as a summer intern in her agency? Salary would not be a problem because I did not require any. (My father's guilt since his divorce from my

mother has been so tremendous that he has overwhelmed me with gifts and affection and promised to subsidize me if I was successful in my pursuit of an internship with Meredith Martin.)

My final risk: including my telephone number at the dorm, in the event she wanted to call me. Which my roommate, Dorrie Feingold, said was not only nerve but chutzpah.

Lo and behold, Meredith Martin
did
call. And, perhaps out of curiosity, invited me to New York. We hit it off. I learned that she is accustomed to Manhattan visitors, constantly entertains her many nieces and nephews from the Midwest— Meredith was once a small-town librarian in Kansas—and has a room in her apartment reserved for vacationing guests. Not only did she hire me—at minimum salary with maximum duties—but she invited me to move into her apartment. She would not even let me thank her.

“I owe Paul much more than that,” she said.

What does she owe him?

I did not ask. I don't have
that
much nerve.

So here I am in Manhattan, in Meredith's apartment and in my third week of employment at Broome & Company, opening mail, typing contracts, answering the telephone, and finding it all very exciting, to say nothing of the razzle-dazzle of the city itself in this gorgeous summer of 1988.

A bit more background before I go on:

It is one of the tragedies of my life that I never met my famous cousin, the novelist. (I have always referred to him that way—after all, he is famous, and he was my cousin.) He died in 1967 at the age of forty-two. I was not even born then. I am not exaggerating when I say that he has been the most important influence in my life. I have gorged myself on his novels and short stories, can recite long sections of them by heart. Have written countless theme papers about his work during high school and my first two years at B.U. Have tracked down various articles and reviews he wrote for small and obscure magazines.

The reason why I chose to go to Boston University is its proximity to Monument, where he lived all his life. I have walked the streets he walked, knelt in prayer in St. Jude's Church, lingered in front of the apartment house across from the church where he lived on the top floor, as if I expected his ghost to wander out of the place and greet me with a smile. (I wonder if he ever did smile—my grandfather said he was a serious, sensitive person who always seemed a bit sad and wistful.) My grandfather, of course, is my direct link with my famous relative. They were first cousins, grew up together, graduated in the same class from Monument High School. Whenever I visit Monument, I go directly to my grandfather's office at police headquarters. He answers my questions, patiently, painstakingly, and sometimes drives me around Frenchtown, pointing out sights and scenes that turned up only slightly disguised in the novels and stories.

Time now for true confessions:

I must admit I am often haunted by the possibility that I am not truly a writer, that perhaps I have been led astray by the fact that the blood of a famous writer flows through my veins. Does blood guarantee that I am really a writer? When the words don't flow or when they seem flat and stale on the page, I am racked—and wrecked—by doubts. That's my dilemma, the baggage I carry with me all the time.

One of the reasons—if
not
the major reason—I sought a position with Meredith Martin was the hope that I might show her some of my work so she could answer that terrible question: Who am I? A writer or only a pretender?

Another confession. Major. And why I sit here agonizing as I write this: I am a terrible snoop. And I eavesdrop shamelessly. I do not open other people's mail or listen in on extension telephones. But I
do
poke my nose in other people's business. I aspire to be a writer, after all. I have to find out about people. What they do and why they do what they do. So. I admit that I was snooping the day—exactly a week ago —when I discovered the manuscript in one of Meredith's closets. I wasn't searching the apartment for dark and dirty secrets. (In fact, I ignored the packets of letters in her mahogany secretary.) I simply wanted to get to know her better. What kind of cologne she prefers. Her choice of personal stationery. Stuff like that.

Meredith is very neat and organized. (A woman comes in twice a week to tidy up, but there is very little to tidy up.) If there is any clutter in the apartment, it comes in the form of boxes. Royal blue boxes, measuring eight and a half by eleven inches, labeled
BROOME
&
COMPANY,
and they can be found everywhere. In stacks, in piles, in columns. They contain, of course, the manuscripts Meredith must read every day of her life, in almost every waking hour.

In my quest for knowledge about Meredith, I pulled out drawers and opened closets, was impressed by the labels on everything from luggage to dresses—Vuitton, Halston, Laura Ashley. Meredith is crazy about hats. Big hats, wide-brimmed, floppy. (“I was born in the wrong century,” she says.) One closet contains nothing but shelf after shelf of hats.

It was in this closet that I made the discovery. On the top shelf, tucked away in a corner. A box. The kind of box that usually contains a ream of typewriter paper. Frayed and well worn, buckling at the corners, unlike the official Broome & Company boxes. I stood on tiptoe and carefully took it down. Although Meredith had allowed me as an intern to read some of the manuscripts in the Broome boxes, I hesitated now. Should I open this anonymous box? Shit, why not?

I removed the cover and stood breathless as I read the brief note on the yellowed first page:

By the time you read this, dear Meredith, I will be dead, probably for many years. (See what faith I have in you— gambling that you will outlive me by that long a time?) Make of this what you will. My thanks for everything.

Paul

Stunned, I sank to the floor. After a while, I began to read, swiftly, with no pauses, from the opening paragraph when the photograph was taken in Canada to those last sad words that told of Bernard's death.

Time passed. I didn't know how long. I wished fervently that I smoked or drank or did drugs. Because I needed desperately to do
something.
I made my way to the living room unaware of my passage through the rooms. I gobbled up a few Godiva chocolates without tasting them and felt slightly sickish.

My God. I had stumbled across a posthumous unpublished manuscript by one of the country's most famous writers, secretly kept here by his agent. And now I was part of the secret.

That's what you get for snooping, Susan baby. Maybe this will cure you of that rotten habit.

My conscience talking.

The big problem: What do I do now?

As it turned out, I did not have to do anything. Meredith came into the apartment that evening, windblown, tossed her wide-brimmed straw hat on the table in the foyer, looked at me, looked away, looked again, and said: “You found it, didn't you?”

I began to stammer apologies, didn't know what to do with my hands or legs.

“Please, Susan, no apologies,” Meredith said. “Maybe I wanted you to find it. I could have tucked it away in a better, less accessible place. Down at the office in the big old safe there. Let me soak awhile—I'm beat—and then we'll talk.”

Later, sitting across from each other, the box with the manuscript on the coffee table, Meredith said: “Paul told me once that a writer is allowed one major coincidence in a novel. Maybe that applies in real life too. Anyway, my coincidence is this—the day I received your letter asking about the internship was the day I was brought Paul's manuscript….”