More Tales of the Black Widowers (3 page)

Henry, who had been standing at the sideboard, as was his custom after the dinner had been served and the dishes cleared away, said, “May I make a suggestion, gentlemen?”

Trumbull said, “Good Lord, Henry, don't tell me that this nonsense means something to you?”

Henry said, “No, Mr. Trumbull, I'm afraid I no more understand what it's all about than anyone else in the room. It merely strikes me as a possibility that Mr. Bercovich may have been prepared to tell Mr. Stellar that the manuscript was mislaid—but perhaps only if Mr. Stellar had said that he had no carbon. It might have been the fact that Mr. Stellar did have a carbon that made it useless to lose, or possibly, destroy the manuscript”

“Destroy it?” said Stellar in high-pitched indignation.

“Suppose we consider what would happen if he published the manuscript, sir,” said Henry.

“It would appear in print,” said Stellar, “and people would read it. That's what I want to happen.”

“And if Mr. Bercovich had rejected it?”

“Then I would have sold it somewhere else, damn it, and it would still have appeared in print and people would have read it.”

“And if he returned it to you now, either because you refused revision or because you bought it back, then again you would sell it somewhere else and it would appear in print and be read.”

“Damn right.”

“But suppose, Mr. Stellar, the editor bought the article as he did and does not publish it. Can you sell it elsewhere?”

“Of course not. It's not mine to sell. Way of Life has bought first serial rights, which means they have the full and sole right to publish it before any other use is made of it. Until they publish it, or until they formally relinquish the right to do so, I can't sell it anywhere.”

“In that case, Mr. Stellar, does it not seem to you that the only conceivable way in which Mr. Bercovich can keep the article from being generally read is to do exactly as he has done?”

“Are you trying to tell me, Henry,” said Stellar, with naked incredulity in his voice, “that he doesn't want it read? Then why the hell did he ask me to write it?”

Henry said, “He asked you to write an article, sir. He did not know the exact article you would write till he saw it. Isn't it possible that, once he read the article you did in actual fact write, he realized that he didn't want it read and there-. fore took the only action possible to keep it unpublished, perhaps forever unpublished? He probably did not expect you to be the kind of writer who would hound an editor over such a matter.”

Stellar spread out his hands, palms upward, and looked about at the faces of the Black Widowers in a kind of semi-humorous exasperation. “I never heard of anything so ridiculous.”

Avalon said, “Mr. Stellar, you don't know Henry as we do. If this is his opinion, I suggest you take it seriously.”

“But why should Joel want to destroy the thing or bury it? It's a perfectly harmless article.”

Henry said, “I merely advance a possible explanation for what has gone on for two years.”

“But yours is not an explanation that explains, Henry. It doesn't explain why he wants the article to be left unread.”

“You had said, sir, that he asked for permission to cut the article a little and you refused. If you had agreed, he would perhaps have changed it so as to render it really innocuous and then he would have published it.”

“But what did he want cut?”

“I'm afraid I can't say, Mr. Stellar, but I gather that he wanted to do the cutting. That may have been in order not to call your attention to the precise passage he wanted altered.”

Stellar said, “But if he made the cuts himself, I'd still see what he had done once the article appeared.”

Henry said, “Would you be likely to read the article once published and compare it sentence by sentence with the original manuscript, sir?”

“No,” admitted Stellar reluctantly.

“And even if you did, sir, there might be a number of small changes and you would have no reason to suppose that one change was more significant than the others.”

Stellar said, “You know, this is a more peculiar mystery than the first, Henry. What could I have said to bother him?”

“I cannot say, Mr. Stellar,” said Henry.

Avalon cleared his throat in his best lawyer-like fashion and said, “It is rather a pity, Mr. Stellar, that you didn't bring the carbon copy of your manuscript with you. You could have read it to us and perhaps we could then spot the critical passage. At the very least, I'm sure we would have been entertained.”

Stellar said, “Who thought this sort of thing would come up?”

Gonzalo said eagerly, “If your wife is at home, Mr. Stellar, we might call her and have her read the article to Henry on the phone. The club could afford the charge.”

Henry seemed to be lost in thought. Now he said slowly as though the thinking had surfaced but was still a private colloquy he was holding with himself, “Surely it couldn't be anything impersonal. If the tenets of good taste had been broken, if the policy of the magazine had been violated, he would have seen that at once and asked for specific changes. Even if he had bought it after a hasty reading and then discovered these impersonal errors afterward, there would have been no reason to hesitate to ask for specific changes, surely. Could it be that some superior officer in the publishing firm had vetoed the article and Mr. Bercovich is embarrassed to tell you that?”

“No,” said Stellar. “An editor who isn't given a free hand by the front office is very likely to quit. And even if Bercovich didn't have the guts to do that he would be only too glad to use upstairs interference as an excuse to return the manuscript. He certainly wouldn't just hold onto it.”

“Then,” said Henry, “it must be something personal; something that has meaning to him, an embarrassing meaning, a horrifying meaning.”

“There's nothing of the kind in it,” insisted Stellar.

“Perhaps there is no significance in the passage to you or to anyone else; but only to Mr. Bercovich.”

“In that case,” interrupted Drake, “why should Bercovich care?”

“Perhaps,” said Henry, “because, if attention were called to it, it would come to have significance. That is why he dared not even tell Mr. Stellar what passage he wanted cut.”

“You keep inventing perhapses,” muttered Stellar. “I just don't believe it.”

Gonzalo said abruptly, “/ believe it. Henry has been right before and I don't hear anyone suggesting any other theory to account for the fact that the article isn't being published.”

Stellar said, “But we're talking about nothing. What is the mysterious passage that is bothering Joel?”

Henry said, “Perhaps you can recall some personal reference, since that is what we suspect it would have to be. Did you not say that included in your article was an account of a dinner rather like the one that had inspired Mr. Bercovich to ask for the article in the first place?”

“Aha,” said Gonzalo, “got it! You described the dinner too accurately, old boy, and the editor was afraid that the host would recognize it and be offended. Maybe the host is an old and valued friend of the publisher and would get the editor fired if the article appeared.”

Stellar said, with no effort to hide his contempt, “In the first place, I'm an old hand at this. I don't write anything either actionable or embarrassing. I assure you I masked that dinner so that no one could reasonably speak of a resemblance. I changed every major characteristic of the dinner and I used no names. —Besides, if I had slipped and made the damned thing too real, why shouldn't he tell me? That sort of thing I would change in a shot.”

Henry said, “It might be something more personal still. He and his wife were at the dinner. What was it you said about them?”

“Nothing!” said Stellar. “Do you suppose I would make use of the editor to whom I was submitting the article? Give me that much credit. I didn't refer to him under any name or any guise; didn't refer to anything he said or did at all.”

“Or anything about his wife either, sir?” asked Henry.

“Or about his wife— Well, wait, she may have inspired one small exchange in the article, but of course I didn't name her, describe her or anything of the sort. It was entirely insignificant”

Avalon said, “Nevertheless, that may be it. The memory was too poignant. She had died and he just couldn't publish an article that reminded him of—of—”

Stellar said, “If you're about to finish that sentence with the dear departed,' I walk out. That's tripe, Mr. Avalon. With all respect—no, without too damn much respect— that's tripe. Why wouldn't he ask me to take out a sentence or two if it aroused too keen a memory? I would do it.”

Avalon said, “Just because I phrase the matter in sentimental fashion, Mr. Stellar, doesn't mean it can't have significance all the same. His failure to mention it to you might be the result of a certain shame. In our culture, such things as sorrow over lost love are made fun of. You've just made fun of it. Yet it can be very real.”

Stellar said, “Manny Rubin said she died about a year and a half ago. That means at least half a year after I wrote the article. Time enough to have it printed by then, considering his anxiety to have me meet an instant deadline. And it's been a year and a half since and he's married a beautiful woman. —Come on, how long does one sorrow over a lost love after one has found another?”

“It might help,” said Henry, “if Mr. Stellar could tell us the passage in question.”

“Yes,” said Gonzalo, “call your wife and have her read it to Henry.”

“I don't have to,” said Stellar, who had only with difficulty withdrawn the wounded stare he had been directing at Avalon. “I've read the damn thing again a couple of weeks ago—about the fifth time—and I have it reasonably fresh in my mind. What it amounts to is this: we had been served the roast at a kind of snail's pace and I was waiting for others to be served before beginning. A few weren't quite that formal and were eating. Finally I broke down and salted it and was going to eat when I noticed that Mrs. Bercovich, who was on my right, had still not been served. I looked surprised and she said she had a special request and it was delayed in getting to her and I offered her my plate and she said, 'No, thank you, it's been salted.' I told that passage, without names, just so I could get across my funny line, which I remember exactly. It went, 'She was the only one at the table who objected to the salt; the rest of us objected to the meat. In fact, several of us scraped off the salt, then ate it in a marked manner.'“

No one laughed at the funny line. Trumbull went to the trouble of simulating nausea.

Halsted said, “I certainly don't see any great sentimental value in that.”

“I should say not,” said Stellar, “and that's every last mention of her, without name or description, and none of Joel himself.”

Henry said, “Yet Mr. Rubin said that the first Mrs. Bercovich died of a heart attack, which is rather a catch-all reference to circulatory disorders in general. She may well have had seriously high blood pressure and have been put on a low-salt diet.”

“Which is why she refused Stellar's salted meat,” said Gonzalo. “Right!”

“And why she was waiting for a special dish,” said Henry. “And this is something to which Mr. Bercovich desperately wants no attention drawn. Mr. Rubin said Mrs. Bercovich had done her best to hide her condition. Perhaps few people knew she was on a low-salt diet.”

Stellar said, “Why should Joel care if they know?”

“I must introduce another perhaps, sir. Perhaps Mr. Bercovich, weary of waiting and, perhaps, already attracted by the woman who is now his second wife, took advantage of the situation. He may have salted her food surreptitiously, or, if she used salt substitute, he may have replaced it, at least in part, with ordinary salt—”

“And killed her, you mean?” interrupted Avalon.

Henry shook his head. “Who can tell? She might have died at the same moment anyway. He, however, may feel he contributed to the death and may now be in panic lest anyone find out. The mere mention of a woman refusing salt at that table may, in his eyes, be a shrieking out of his guilt—”

Stellar said, “But I didn't name her, Henry. There's no way of telling who she was. And even if somehow one were to find out that it was she, how could anyone suspect anything out of the way?”

“You are perfectly right, Mr. Stellar,” said Henry. “The only reason we have come to suspect Mr. Bercovich now is because of his peculiar behavior with respect to the article and not to anything in the article itself. —But, you know, we have biblical authority to the effect that the wicked flee when no man pursueth.”

Stellar paused a moment in thought, then said, “All this may be, but it's not getting my article published.” He pulled out a black address book, turned to the Bs, then looked at his watch. “I've called him at his home before and it isn't ten yet”

Avalon raised his hand in an impressive stop sign. “One moment, Mr. Stellar. I trust you are not going to tell your editor about what we've said here. It is all strictly confidential in the first place, and it would be slander in the second. You would not be able to support it and you may get yourself into serious trouble.”

Stellar said impatiently, “I wish all of you would take it for granted that an experienced writer is aware of what libel and slander are. —Is there a telephone handy, Henry?”