My Mistake (29 page)

Bruce, a big, bearish man with a constant congenial smile and a shy affect, comes to check out the situation. After looking around the shed, inside and out, front and back, he says to me, gazing off into the distance, “I'm not going to lie to you, Daniel. I can fix this barn up so that it will outlive both of us for around ten thousand dollars, including materials.”

Given lung cancer, the promise of the shored-up building outliving me is small comfort. But outliving
him!
That's different. A man in his late forties, I would guess. Now, that's worth 10K.

He does the work. It looks wonderful, even though the new blond boards around the shed's bottom stand out from the old, gray weathered ones higher up. That contrast will lessen over time.
Time Will Darken It
is the name of one of William Maxwell's novels. Bruce says to me, both of us standing in front of the shed, and again gazing away, “I'm not going to lie to you, Daniel, but clearing around the barn cost more than I expected. You can see here . . . and here . . . and over there the big boulders we ran into. It all comes out to about two thousand dollars more. I can keep my promise of ten thousand, but—”

“It's OK,” I say. “A twenty per cent overrun is comparatively small potatoes when it comes to contracting, isn't it? And I can see the extent of the extra work with my own eyes.”

“I like you, Daniel,” Bruce says.

 

After Hurricane Sandy, I notice that the white sliding doors at the back of the big red barn have fallen down—the barn is open to the elements and the fauna. I call Bruce. He comes over one weekend in November to take a look. “I'm very busy, Daniel,” he says. “Working right next door at the Abelson house and then down the road at the Hawkins place. But it wouldn't be a big job to hang some new doors here on a new beam. We could also strengthen some of the posts. I like you, Daniel, and I could try to squeeze this in on Tuesday and Wednesday.”

“I like you too, Bruce,” I say, “and I would really appreciate that. How much do you think it will cost? And don't lie to me.”

He laughs. “I won't, Daniel,” he says. “I'd say eighteen hundred.”

“Done,” I say.

 

I have another follow-up CT scan in June of 2013. It's negative. I feel as though these wonderful physicians are Bruce's medical counterparts. Shoring me up against ill winds, extending my life considerably beyond where it would have ended without them, giving me temporarily firmer legs to stand on. But there is an important difference. Unlike the outbuildings at The Country House, and despite the medical problems I've had and have, and despite creaking around and forgetting names and all the indignities and infirmities of age, I have never seen better days. My children grown, employed, great fun to be with. My wife successfully launched on a new career of writing very good books after a lifetime's work as a great editor. Good friends, material comfort, fine coffee,
The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, Searching for Sugar Man.
A whole fleet of young writers I worked with now approaching middle age and doing well.

The splendid improbability of the colorful outfit of the flicker on the bird feeder at The Country House. The music of J. E. Mainer available with the click of “Enter” on my computer.

This book finished. But, most radically, that amazing flicker, with his fiery red head feathers, his chevron plumage, and that stiletto beak.

I have never seen better days. No mistake.

 

 

 

 

Acknowledgments

Settle in.

Thank you to George Hodgman, the editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, who acquired this book. He left a message on my answering machine that started, “Daniel Menaker, I am you,” and he left the company shortly after that. But even though he was me, I stayed. A deal, it turns out, is a deal.

Thanks, then, subsequently, to Bruce Nichols, HMH's Publisher, for hanging on. And to Jenna Johnson, an excellent and sensitive reader who, even though she is not me, took over as editor. If I were in publishing still, I would try to poach her. And to Larry Cooper, a wonderful manuscript editor, who kept me from referring to a temperance pamphlet as an abolitionist pamphlet and saved my bacon in countless other ways, although he dared to compare Dom DiMaggio to Joe. And to Carla Gray, HMH's head of marketing, who invests in racehorses and makes all of her writers feel like Seabiscuit. And to everyone else at HMH for their revision forbearance, and their support, and the free beer and sort of ad hoc, darkling dinner at the Associated Writers Program conference in Boston earlier this year. (Eleven thousand writers in one place. Aieee.) And to Eric Hanson, who did the wonderful cover, spine, and endpapers for the book. He began to have second thoughts, as you can see from the drawing, but it was too late.

Thanks next to Judy Sternlight and Samuel Douglas, both of whom made crucial suggestions about the structure, texture, and tone of the writing here, and however lame that foot may be, saw to it that I put my best foot forward. Larry, shouldn't it be “better foot forward,” for bipeds?

James Gleick gets a separate paragraph, for suggesting, among many other deft, strict suggestions, that I take out the first eleven paragraphs of the Introduction as it stood when he read it. And for his quote there on the back. It's annoying (as he would say) that he can be such a good writer, friend, editor, and cook—and the smartest person I know—all at the same time.

Something tells me that Esther Newberg, my agent, also better get her own paragraph. So here it is. Thank you, Esther, for being such a great advocate and such a great friend (even though you yelled at me, quietly, about posting the rejections of this book on the
Huffington Post
). Just think of it—going on fifty years now. Well, maybe don't think of it. As you told me recently, comfortingly and disturbingly, “We can't die young anymore.”

Thanks to Robert Gottlieb and Wallace Shawn for their invaluable
New Yorker
perspectives, and to Gillian MacKenzie for her advice about the book. And to Charles McGrath, for his friendship and unfailing good sense—generally, among many of the rest of us, in such short supply.

Thank you to Drs. Minn Fyer, Zachary Bloomgarden, Barbara Schultz, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Balazs Halmos, Gregory Riely, Andreas Rimner, Kent Sepkowitz, and Valerie Rausch—and everyone else at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center—for your expertise and superb care.

My family—my wife, Katherine Bouton, and my kids, Will and Elizabeth: Thank you for every inestimable thing you've given me, except when you were three or four, Will, and gave me scarlet fever. Thanks even for that, come to think of it, as it kept me from smoking for seventy-two hours and I was then able to quit.

 

D
ANIEL
M
ENAKER
began his career as a fact checker at
The New Yorker,
where he became an editor and worked for twenty-six years. Formerly executive editor in chief of Random House, Menaker is the author of six books. He has also written for the
New York Times,
the
Atlantic, Harper's Magazine,
and many other publications. He lives in New York City with his wife, the writer Katherine Bouton.