The Bookman's Tale (3 page)

“Tall, good-looking, twenty-five to thirty. Southerner. ‘G-mawnin, Dr. Geltstein,' (‘steen,' as they say down there). Confident. Not put-on Jew-confident. Goy-confident, the real article. All the things I wasn't, why shouldn't I dislike him?” with a short laugh at himself that was like moving to protect a chess piece he had carelessly pushed into a trap. “Two or three years in the Navy, resigned, married the girl-he-left-behind-him and brought her up to the University while he got his Ph.D in anthropology—hoped to get it. Confident he would. Tuckwell, Oscar Tuckwell. Her name was Meg, in Barbados now—”

Breaking off as the Captain passed on his afternoon prowl, white-top cap (once-white) on the back of his head pushing out his ears like pink ventilators, first mate at his heels with clipboard and pencil (Kristine-cat following along with monumental indifference). “Ya, a little weather, maybe,” when Ray mentioned the lightning—“vetter,” actually, pronunciation sometimes wanting but fluent in the language—moving on to pointing now and then at this and that, first mate jotting.

Not enough to turn the Doctor off his subject but it did, and Ray said, “Tuckwell?” after a minute to pull him back, sensing the possibility of something for his Press after all (the Company on its feet again following a season of all but disastrous success—a wish-fulfillment book called
Life Beyond the Grave
, which hit a sort of metaphysical jack pot and trapped the Press between pay-on-delivery printers of edition after edition and jobbers paying in ninety days, if then; the Press on pins and needles about ordering a new edition, vulnerable to having orders suddenly dry up with the books still at the bindery).

“Sewanee, Washington & Lee, some such place. Masters from Emory—a long story,” dropping it as Preacher Bickle snapped their picture with the new camera he said his church had given him (his “5-church circuit”) and sat down beside them.

“I spent twelve years with the circus before I found the Lord,” as if dealing words off the top of his mind like cards off a worn deck already shuffled to suit him. “Drove the famous Forty-Horse Bandwagon through the streets of Paris for Barnum & Bailey. Frogs everywhere. Cheers.
Vivre! Toujours
! They had never seen the like. Took eight hours. Stopped now and then for ten minutes to rest my hands. Mayor of Paris gave me a medal. Lost it to the lion tamer in a poker game. I was a bad boy. Then I saw the light. Coming at me like the headlight on a steam engine.…”

They had been to the races, the Holiday Steeplechase (not the Preacher, who was done with “playing the ponies”), the Captain and Mrs. Captain, Geltstein and Ray—the Captain in double-breasted going-ashore brown, shiny in places, and white-top cap, Mrs. in something dark and Sundayish, years-ago Sundayish, had watched through the thick tropical glare as the lead horse in the third race stumbled, rolled, pitched off the black jockey in his Christmas-tree shirt, tried to get up, fell back, lay quivering in the powdery sand and in less than a minute had a bullet in his head from a pistol in the hand of a small man in a derby dressed in blue serge—everybody on his feet in the flimsy stands, Mrs. Captain turning her head, the Captain watching it all as he might watch a deck hand chipping paint, the Doctor tensed, one hand tight on the seat-back in front of him.

Mrs. Lundquist wanted to leave and Ray thought the Doctor did too but all of them stood there for a minute or two while a barefoot boy went scampering off toward the stables, danced round a skinny stable-hand already walking out behind a pair of mules hitched to a singletree dragging a chain and returned with him, eager to help with looping the chain about the horse's flat neck; she turned her head as the cortege got under way, the chain pulling up the long jawbone and stretching out the neck like old rubber with no elasticity left. They followed her out, picking their way between the half-filled benches, the Captain following last, stopping in an aisle to see the rest of it, reluctant to go until everything was shipshape again.

All of it wiped out of Ray's mind by the churn of life in the Square, the din of motor horns and motors, the imperturbable thereness of the blue-black cop at the crossing, solid on his thick-soled shoes, three-inch red slash down the seam of his black pants, white jacket, leather belt, white British helmet; by his signaling to a rattletrap car from the hills with an elegant forearm and wrist to his shoulder: everything shipshape in the Square.

“Don't shove off without us,” shouting through the racket as they separated.

“Na-a!” with his Norwegian laugh. “I vistle,” pulling twice on a make-believe cord by the rim of his cap, gold dental work shining (the Preacher in a doorway catching all of it with an inaudible click and a country smile).

And he and Geltstein had frosted pineapple drinks in the garden of the hotel and talked a little about themselves, not much—the Doctor going to Barbados to give three lectures at the College, “Codrington, know some people with a place near Bridgetown” (the words later popping into Ray's mind at the Doctor's, “Her name was Meg, in Barbados now”); Ray mentioning San Juan de Pinos and saying he had a friend there (wondering if he really did). Both of them clearly more at ease on their shipmates: Pyt who said he was a diver, a thin man with an old sunburn and a reddish beard getting gray in places (passing round a gold coin he said was a Spanish doubloon, “Minted in Colon, 1621. Off the
San Fernando
”), Frank Hardly and his wife from Colorado who had never seen the sea and thought a boat ride to Surinam and back would be a nice way to spend the Holidays (“Gave the boys at the plant two weeks, I manufacture pickles, store the cukes a year in brine, Colorado's famed for cukes, the Japs grow the best ones”), Preacher Bickle with his camera (“Gift from my flock, boat ticket too, they love me, God bless ‘em'), the two young woman from Alabama going to Paramaribo where the husband of one of them was in the Consulate (“Romance is my hobby,” Geltstein quoting the younger as saying with a bright laugh).

And going on after a silence, “Years ago a chap came up to Princeton to work with a colleague of mine for a Ph.D. in anthropology,” Ray thinking later it was the mention of the Southern women that put him in mind of the Southerner who was “Goy-confident, the real article,” though still later he wondered if it wasn't the business at the racetrack that reminded him, the pistol-shot in the sunny afternoon; stopping as if sorry he had begun and pointing off at the top-heavy palms and the buzzards high up in the sky like the cookbooks' “freshly-ground pepper,” circling idly as though waiting for bedtime to tumble into the hotel trees. “Friends of mine at Emory wrote me he was coming, top-grade student and—” the deep “vistle” rolling in over the palms like a gust of wind that might have shaken them, lifting both to their feet, the Doctor downing the last of his drink, Ray leaving the rest of his.

They overtook the two women on the dock, halfway out among the pink stacks of pine, barrels of salt fish, cylinders of oxygen, bags of maize, crates stenciled
Quinine Tonic
(with a tropical overtone), all of it under a squeaky spicy rosin smell mixed with ocean smell. They were talking to a bearded white man in a ragged straw hat and torn-off shirt sleeves who seemed to be asking for money and looked as if he could use it. One of the women was opening a hand purse when a man who might have been the head stevedore—khaki jacket, swagger stick in his armpit, sharp black features like a white actor in a minstrel show—approached them at an easy stroll and the beggar hopped away.

“Save your money, ladies,” cigarette moving in the middle of his front teeth. “I chase him off every time a ship ties up with American dollars.” As they passed Ray heard, “… on the beach … got in trouble, lost his papers … Q-mum,” pocketing what would have bought another drink for the wino—making Publisher Ray wish he had time to overtake him and maybe get a book for his
Sunwise Press
(even if Conrad and Stevenson had already written it).

Geltstein said, “All aboard, ladies,” and a few steps on, the ladies passed them, running on ahead and up the gangplank—in jeans this time. Skirts the morning they joined the cruise in Tampa, joined the four passengers in one of the ships boats, the vessel alongside the wharf but taking on the travelers from the harbor side because of the shifting engines, the cranes and winches and cables swinging the blond lumber. “Not much more, folks!” from the first mate, shouted through the clatter with a sympathetic grin from where he stood on a thwart to hold the boat against the ten-foot vertical ladder lashed to the dock while one of them (who became Frank Hardly from Greeley, Colorado) gallantly climbed part way up to assist the ladies—specifically to help them hold down their skirts against the Gulf wind; which he managed very well with the first one, standing close against her and guiding her down almost in his arms. The other one, impatient at waiting, took to the ladder on her own, pulling her skirt between her legs and trying to hold it there but needing both hands for the ladder and the skirt whipping free against her elbows; glancing round the boat with a pink-and-white laugh when she was down and, “Sorry!”, dismissing it with, “I'm Mrs. Ackworth, everybody. Sarah-Wesley. And this is my cousin Rebecca, Miss Newberry.” Miss Newberry gaily exclaiming, “Oh, ‘Becky,' please!” (Mrs. Hardly's broad fingers still against her blushes at the flash of white underpants), the mate pushing off and rowing under the salt-eaten crag of the bow—

“Ready, Mr. Edward Ray of the
Sunwise Press
?” as if exulting at snapping handcuffs on a fugitive, handing him the newspaper folded back to show “Arrivals & Departures” at the bottom of the front page and what looked like (without his glasses) “Book Publisher among those arriving today by the
Lindvagen
” and a little more he couldn't read, she all spic and span in cotton skirt and blouse and bright silk handkerchief at her chin, leaning a forearm on the high back of another chair and watching him as if half expecting him to deny it, he for a moment thinking less about her seeing the lines than about the possibility (probability?) of Claudia seeing them too, trying to reassure himself that Claudia wouldn't be studying “Arrivals & Departures” as this woman had been—and no doubt her husband too—drawn to it by wondering about this visitor they had rescued; and then telling himself “Book Publisher” wouldn't give him away to Claudia (he hadn't been in that end of book publishing in those days), then completely reassured at remembering Claudia wouldn't have seen the paper, wasn't on the Island, was “expected by lunchtime tomorrow, sir, is there a message?”

Thanking her again for their rescue of him (almost repeating his “Apollo appears from above with Helen”—still pleased with it), she interrupting him with, “Come on. Peter's all but ready—there he is” (at a beep from below). “Oh, bathroom! Inside, first door on your right, don't see the mess, we'll be in the car.”

Five minutes in a confusion of damp towels, a dangling bra, dripping tan stockings on a shower door that reminded him of marriage like a wedding ring, and they were off with the masculine “vroom” usually promoted by alcohol or female passenger. Not much talk, with the wind and the speed and the air of semi-Britishness about them; once an offhand, “Tyner—Janet, Peter” with a move of his thumb on the wheel. No further mention of “Edward Ray,” as if everyone understood names hardly mattered with their association ending in a few minutes at the steps of his hotel. Once, halfway in, he caught himself about to ask if they knew a Mrs. Martha Freeland who had recently taken a house on the Island; they well might know her, well might know her visiting mother Claudia, well might pass on news about this stranded Mr. Ray they had picked up, make it too late to change his mind, “re-consider,” take flight—not flying well but somehow always in flight—the thought as if creating the airport in front of them, not his hotel, planes hovering like doves over a baited field, Peter maneuvering into a spot of shade and pulling the handbrake with a metallic chirp. “Jan will take you in in just a minute, do you mind?”

Ray said, “Take your time,” getting out now to give her room to pass, she sliding across and out and leaving behind her as the two of them went arm-in-arm into the terminal the faint presence of a scent that he recognized but couldn't remember what flower it came from, as a face can puzzle you when you can't supply the name, now suddenly lifted back as if on a rainbow of scents to a long-ago moment of becoming conscious of the scent that Claudia wore, not jasmin, maybe not perfume at all but soap from washing her black hair, good soap, costly—beside him in the car singing nursery songs in Canadian French (from school days in Quebec) as they drove in the summer mountains, Mary and Mot in the back, the scent there and not there like early mist thin on the slopes blowing in and out; breaking off her song with “Look at that!” as they crossed a bridge over a dizzy white waterfall, leaving the car on a shoulder and the four of them walking back to look down into the gorge. Missing Mot, “Where's Mot?” and catching sight of him climbing the guard rail.

“Mot, what are you doing!” from Mary.

No answer, Mot hopping from rock to rock and sitting down on the brink staring into the well of churning-up steam. “What's the matter with you! Come back up here!”

And quietly from Claudia, “Leave him alone. He's annoyed.”

All of it drifting inch by inch, moment by moment, into the other gorge, chasm, abyss, unacknowledged but noted by some of the canny fledgling senses, his certainly and possibly hers.

“Mot has to go to Asheville in the morning,” one afternoon, August, the summer all but gone.

“You are going too?”

“Spend the day in Asheville? Mercy on us!” Creating a day between them, Elysian, halcyon, beatific, if he hadn't been afraid of deflating it with a word—wading in a swift river at a spot she knew, skirt in her forearms, white legs turning pink in the mountain water, the pink making colored stockings to where it ended; a movement at a corner of his eye and a pale thread looping out beyond a bend as a fisherman in glistening boots followed his casts upstream, so intent on picking his target, aiming, casting his line they escaped to the bank unseen, escaped to a grass-covered shelf on the bank and lay motionless while he passed beyond the overhanging limbs, beyond their laughs smothered in each other's hands, each other's mouths. Then, “I love you, Eddie. What are we going to do?” (Do?—He loved two women, level on his balances, as an ounce of civet balanced an ounce of musk. Choose one over the other? morning over afternoon? April over May? And then watching those questions changing like clouds before a wind, changing their brightness into, for him, disquieting shapes and shadows: the ambiguity of her knowing the spot already—the seclusion, the shelf—germinating in his mind, and one season, months away, in its own good time, pushing a soft green shoot of distrust up through his beatitude.)