On the Wing (22 page)

The sense for projects—which could be called aphorisms of the future—differs from the sense for aphorisms of the past only in direction, progressive in the former and regressive in the latter.… One could easily say that the sense for aphorisms and projects is the transcendental part of the historical spirit.

Friedrich Schlegel,
Literary Aphorisms

BEFORE WE BEGAN OUR TRIP, I had hoped that here and there in our travels, during our reiteration of my aerocycle journey, Albertine and I would stumble upon some of my personal landmarks from the original trip, rediscover some of the places where I had experienced significant adventures on the way to New Mexico years earlier. I had hoped that revisiting some of those places would allow me to reflect upon the changes that time had wrought on the landscape and culture through which I had journeyed. I had also hoped to impress Albertine, or at least to convince her that the trip had actually occurred. To ensure that we would stumble upon at least one of my landmarks, I had done something, well, sneaky. I had gone looking for one of them on the Web, and I had found it. So it was with mounting anticipation that when a certain highway exit approached I suggested that we take it and see if we could find a small town where we could have lunch.

“I have a hunch,” I said.

“A hunch about lunch?”

“A hunch about a town. It ought to be around here.”

“You mean the town where Poppy lined his pockets?”

“We'll see,” I said.

The town hadn't changed much. There was more of everything—there were more shops, more houses, more cars—but still no more than the two main streets, and still the waving yellow weeds along the roadside. We drove slowly along the street that ran east-west, and near the center of the town, I found the institution I'd been looking for.

“Look,” I said. “That's the newspaper office.”

“Where?” she asked.

“There, on the right.
The Oracle.
See the lettering in the window?”

The Oracle

“Tomorrow's News Today”

“Oh, my gosh,” she said, braking and then angling into a parking slot at the curb.

“You didn't believe me, did you?”

“Of course I believed you,” she said. She switched the Electro-Flyer off and reached behind her for her handbag.

“How much?” I asked as we got out of the car and started toward the office.

“How much what?”

“How much did you believe me?”

“Pretty much.”

I swung the door open and held it for her. The office was quiet, and nearly empty. There was one young woman at a desk, tapping softly at a computer keyboard. She glanced up when we came in, smiled in greeting, and went back to her work. Albertine and I stood for a moment just inside the door, expecting that as soon as she came to a point in her work when she could pause she would ask us what we wanted. We continued to wait, but after a while we began to feel that we might wait as long as we chose to wait without ever having the woman pause and ask what we wanted, so I decided to come right out with it, more or less.

“Is the editor in?” I asked.

“Oh,” she said, apparently surprised by the question. “Yes, he is. Do you want to see him?”

“Yes,” I said. “We'd like that.”

She got up at once and came to the railing that separated the front of the office from the area that was crowded with desks, though she seemed to be the only worker.

“I'm sorry,” she said as she swung the gate open for us. “I thought you had just come in to watch.”

“To watch?” asked Albertine.

“To watch me work.”

“Does that happen a lot?” I asked.

“People coming in to watch me work? Yes, quite a lot. It's a way to pass the time. People drop in to watch me write the news.”

“You mean to watch you invent the news, don't you?”

“Yes, I do,” she said. “So you know about
The Oracle?
”

“I was here years ago,” I said. “I was a teenager at the time. I—ah—flew into town on an aerocycle. I was on my way to New Mexico—from Babbington—my home town—back in New York—and someone everybody called Poppy had just died.”

“Oh,” she said, dropping her eyes to the floor. “Poppy. He was—”

“Quite a character,” I offered. “I was there for the remembrance ceremony, at Poppy's house, on the porch.”

“The house is still there,” she said, “but—it's not a home anymore.”

“Funeral parlor?” I asked.

“Not quite,” she said with a giggle. “Medical center.”

A man wearing rimless glasses emerged from a door in the back, reading a sheet of paper but addressing the young woman. “Candace,” he was saying, “would you see what you can do with this mosquito business? I've been banging my head against it for an hour and—oh—hello.” He stared at Albertine and me.

“Peter Leroy,” I said, extending my hand, “and Albertine Gaudet.”

“They came to see you,” the young woman explained. “Mr. Leroy was at the remembrance for Poppy.”

The man bent his head forward and looked at me over his glasses.

“I remember you,” he said.

He didn't seem to relish the memory. He took the glasses off and rubbed the indentations they had left on either side of his nose.

“What brings you here?” he asked.

“We were passing through—”

His look was so full of suspicion that it was nearly audible.

“Really,” I said. “Albertine and I are retracing the route I took all those years ago, for the sake of my memoirs, and to correct certain misimpressions—back at home—in Babbington—”

“It's true,” said Albertine.

“How could I possibly have kept myself from dropping in for a visit?” I said.

“Mm,” he said. “Did you expect to find my father here?”

“He would have to be eighty or ninety now, wouldn't he?”

“He would be eighty-eight, but he's—no longer with us.”

“I'm sorry to hear that,” I said. “The fact is, though, that I had a hunch I'd find you here.”

“Why's that?”

“Just a hunch.”

“Mm,” he said again, in that suspicious way of his. “You say you're writing your memoirs?”

“Constantly,” I said. “I often say that the wick of my life is being gently consumed by the flame of my memoirs.”

The editor of
The Oracle
looked at Albertine and raised an eyebrow.

“Believe me,” she said, “he says it more often than I can tell you.”

“And I suppose you're here to tell me that you're going to write about my grandfather—about Poppy.”

“I'd like to,” I said, “but not if you'd rather I didn't. That day, years ago—or actually the next morning—you asked me not to tell anybody about what had happened, what Poppy had done—and I've kept silent about it until this morning, when I told Albertine while we were on our way here.”

“A memoir is a history,” he said. “It's a story with a debt, a debt to the past. You pay the debt in the coin of truth.”

“Hmm,” I said, nodding thoughtfully but noncommittally.

“All I would ask is that you remember all the people who were on the porch that day, for the remembrance, and think about the Poppy they remembered, rather than the Poppy we—ah—discovered—later—”

He broke off. He looked at Candace. He looked at Albertine and me.

After a while, he said, “Sorry. I'm not talking about truth, am I? What I guess I mean is that I wish you knew more than what you learned that day. If you did, you might—look, have you got a while? I'd like to tell you about Poppy, and my father, and myself, and
The Oracle.
”

The young woman cleared her throat.

“And about my family,” the man said. “This is my youngest daughter, Candace.” He drew her to him and hugged her, then said, “If you've got a little while—”

I looked at Albertine, asking, with my eyes, whether we had a little while.

“We've got more than that,” she said. “We'll spend the night in town if there's a decent hotel.”

“There's a hotel,” said Candace, “but I wouldn't ask you to stay there. Come home with us.”

We did go home with them. It wasn't far. Albertine and Candace rode in the Electro-Flyer, and I walked with the editor, Edward Hemple. The house that he and his daughter lived in was modest but solid, unassertive, a good refuge for a father and daughter who spent their days at the taxing and audacious task of predicting the future.

Edward's story didn't come until after dinner, when we settled into the plump furniture in the front room and listened in the gentle light of two dim lamps.

“My grandfather died in disgrace,” he said, addressing this preliminary to Albertine. “He stole from the church where he was pastor, literally taking the cash from the offering tray.”

“I know,” said Albertine. “Peter told me about the remembrances on the front porch and the discovery of the hidden—ah—”

“Loot,” suggested Candace, with a giggle.

With a smile for his daughter, Edward said, “You see how time has diluted the shame—for some people. Candace thinks of Poppy's thefts as a joke—”

“Not a joke, exactly,” she protested. “More like a single picaresque escapade in a narrow, conventional, and essentially honorable life.”

“Maybe it was that for Poppy, too,” Edward said. “An escapade. And maybe he did it for the little thrill that it may have given him, for the spice that it may have added to his life. He certainly never seems to have spent any of the money. Maybe he never intended to. But for my father it was a heinous crime, and he lived the rest of his life under the shadow of its disgrace.”

“He ran
The Oracle
then,” I said. “I'm curious to know how he handled the story.”

“He didn't,” said Edward.

“He didn't report it?”

“He arranged things so that he wouldn't have to.”

“How?”

“The next day, after you had left, he came to breakfast late, and he had a plan. He summoned all the family and friends, everyone who had been on the porch that day, to the house, and he distributed the cash among them. Their job was to return the money by putting it into the collection plate, little by little, a small amount added to their usual offerings, Sunday after Sunday. It took years, but eventually it was all returned.”

“The debt was paid,” I suggested.

“The financial debt,” he said, “the debt to the parishioners of the Little Church on the Hill. But not the debt to the past.”

“The one that you pay in the coin of truth,” I said.

“Exactly. My father never wanted to pay that debt. He never wanted to acknowledge it, didn't even want to think about it. He wouldn't talk about Poppy, and his silence and denial drove a wedge between us, because my curiosity about the man was boundless. I wanted to understand him. I wanted to know how he had come to do what he did. I mean, in this little town, especially in the little town that this used to be when he was stealing from the collection plate, or the little town that everyone thought it was before they discovered that its pastor had been stealing from the collection plate, the enormity of that theft was—it was staggering.”

He got up and went to a cabinet. From it he took a bottle of cognac and four glasses. The look of surprise on Candace's face said that this was an event. It portended revelations.

“I kept pestering Dad to tell me things about Poppy that he didn't want to discuss,” he said as he poured, “and I pestered him and pestered him until he ordered me out of the house and struck me from his will.”

He raised his glass to a portrait of his father.

“I moved into an apartment over the grocery store downtown. Fortunately, my mother was sympathetic. She used to visit me every Thursday, and she'd bring me a roasted chicken. I wonder if my father knew. One Thursday, she brought me—in addition to the cold roast chicken—a paper bag with some of Granddad's papers in it. Week after week, she brought more, until I had them all. I read my way through them, and I began to understand him. I began to see that Poppy had had one very good idea in his life—and I don't mean skimming the collection plate.”

“I'm glad to hear that,” I said.

“I mean what I've come to call the power of positive predictions.”

“You mean his sermons telling people what life would be like if they lived as they should?”

“I do, but at first I got it backwards.”

“How so?”

“I couldn't help wishing that my grandfather's history had been different in the one essential way that would have made it better.”

“No wads of cash,” I said.

“No wads of cash,” he said. “I'm sure you can understand how I wished I could rewrite that history, changing only that one thing, making my grandfather again the innocent that we had all thought he was, making his life end the way it should have instead of the way it did.”

“Did you?”

“I tried. I couldn't do it. I couldn't make it convincing. I couldn't even convince myself. It was as if the truth was there, between the lines, and anyone would be able to see it.”

“Sometimes,” I said, with conviction, because this was a subject I actually knew something about, “we say much, much more than we mean to say, because what we want to hide reveals itself in every word that we say about everything else.”

“That's it,” he agreed. “The thing that I was leaving unsaid announced itself on every page.”

“It was the past reminding you of your debt,” said Albertine.

“It was,” he said, and with a sly smile he added, “but when my father retired I found a way to stand that debt on its head. Instead of paying the debt to the past, I began investing in the future.”