The Bookman's Wake (21 page)

Trish was another matter. I let her phone ring ten times
before giving her up. I tried her desk at the
Times
, but she wasn’t there either.

Jonelle Jeffords continued keeping the world at bay with
her husband’s answering machine.

At half past midnight, I shut down for the night.

I would sleep six hours. If supercop didn’t come
in the night, I’d be well out of here in the
morning.

I had a plan now, a destination that I hoped would take
care of the lodging problem. It was a gamble, gutsy as
hell. For that reason alone I thought it was probably the
safest hotel in town.

In the morning I would become Mr. Malcolm Roberts of
Birmingham. I was going back to the Hilton.

I let Trish put me to sleep with her lovely prose.

In the first hour of the new day, I walked in
Grayson’s shoes.

T
he Grayson odyssey twisted its way through Georgia half a
century ago. The forces that shaped them were already
centuries old when they were born. Their grandfather was
still alive and whoring when they were boys in grade
school, the gnarled old buzzard a whorehouse regular well
into his eighties. The old man never stopped righting the
Civil War. The big regret of his life was not being born in
time to be killed at Fredericksburg, where his father had
died in 1862.

A plantation mentality ran the house of Grayson. The
father ruled and allowed no dissent. His politics were
boll-weevil Democrat and his neck was the color of the clay
hills that stretched around Atlanta. Women were placed on
pedestals and worshiped, but they quickly lost their sex
appeal if they wanted anything more out of life than that.
It was Darryl senior’s profound misfortune to marry
Claudette Reller, a free spirit who could never quite see
the charm of life in a cage. She abandoned her family on a
sunny day in 1932, walking off in the middle of her
garden-club luncheon without notice or fanfare. Her sons,
ages eight and twelve, never saw her again. She was said to
have died three years later in Paris. The old man announced
it at supper one night and forbade her name to be uttered
again under his roof.

The young, fair-haired son obeyed his father well. A
psychologist would say, years later, that he never forgave
his mother and that every experience with sex was a slap at
her memory.

The older son remembered her less harshly. He knew why
she’d done what she’d done, and he wished she
would write him from wherever she’d gone so that he
might answer her and tell her he understood. He and his
father were locked in their own battle of wills, and when
he thought of his mother, there was sympathy in his
heart.

In the summer of his seventeenth year, young Grayson
escaped to the Carolina coast. There he lived on a sea
island, thinking about life and supporting himself by
working in a Beaufort garage. But in the fall he was back
in Georgia, doing battle with his father in the determined
effort to become his own man. Women became an ever-larger
part of his life. Cecile Thomas had been lovely but
temporary: now there was Laura Warner, older and more
experienced, twice married, widowed and divorced, cerebral,
moneyed, and addicted to genius. She saw herself as Mrs.
von Meek to Grayson’s Tchaikovsky, one of their
literary friends suggested, but Grayson was having none of
that. They parted amicably after a short but intense
friendship. She moved to Birmingham and, in 1939, sailed
from Miami to London, where her trail petered out.

But Grayson’s life was rich with women like that.
A biographer trying to dig up his footprints forty years
later could still find some of them eager to talk and have
their memories mined. Others had been swallowed by time. A
line had to be drawn on the hunt for old girlfriends and
the book brought back to its dual focus. So Trish Aandahl
let Laura Warner slip away into wartime London while she
worked her narrative around and brought Richard again into
the picture.

There are people in Atlanta today who remember Darryl
and Richard Grayson and believe that a strong streak of
real hatred existed between them. But there are others who
tell a different story. They remember the hazing Richard
took from a pack of bullies when he first started high
school. The leader of the gang was one Jock Wheeler, a mean
little bastard as remembered by the Marietta shipping clerk
who had known them all. Today Jock Wheeler is an elderly
mechanic in an Atlanta garage. He’s a quiet man who
lives alone and bothers no one. Ask Jock Wheeler about the
Grayson boys, said the shipping clerk to Trish Aandahl. Ask
him about that night in the midthirties, when he was
ambushed on a dark country road by two men he
couldn’t, or wouldn’t, identify and beaten so
badly he almost died. Wheeler had nothing to say, but the
rumor mill persisted that one of the assailants was little
more than a boy, twelve or fourteen years old. The sheriff
floated the Grayson boys as the leading candidates, but
Wheelers said no,‘t’wasn’t them. The
rumor mill churned. The more thoughtful of their
contemporaries pointed to it as a strange quirk of human
nature. Probably on some level the Graysons truly did hate
each other, but blood is thicker than water. That’s
the thing about cliches, you know. They are usually
true.

I
woke to a gray dawn, certain I’d heard a noise off my
left elbow. It went click-click, like the sound a lockpick
makes when someone is trying to open a door. But I had been
dreaming about a raven, its talons clicking as it walked
across the table to peck my eyes out.

Both sounds stopped as I came awake and sat up in the
bed.

It was Sunday, the day of rest.

Television promised more rain, followed by bad weather.
The weather clown played with his million-dollar toys,
swirling clouds over a map and grinning with all thirty-two
as he did his dance. But this was a floor show next to the
competition. Evil, two-faced evangelists pranced about,
talked of Jesus and money in the same foul breath, and
sheared their glass-eyed flock. Praise the lord,
suckers.

The radio was fixed to an oldies station, with something
called a salute to the British Invasion already in
progress. I got “Eleanor Rigby” as a curtain
call to my shave-and-shower, and I stood in the buff
anticipating every beat and lyric, for all the good it did
me.

The clock was pushing nine, and my departure seemed
somehow less urgent than it had at midnight, Nothing was
open yet. Check-in at the Hilton wasn’t till three
o’clock. The library, another of my scheduled stops,
informed by recorded message that its Sunday hours were one
to five p.m. I had time on my hands.

I sat on the bed and started my phone checks. It was ten
o’clock in Taos.

I punched out the number and heard it ring.

“Hello?”

“Jonelle Jeffords?”

“Who are you?”

It didn’t seem to matter so I told her my real
name, then began to improvise. “I’m a friend of
the court. The judge in Seattle gave me the job of getting
Miss Rigby back to New Mexico in the burglary of your
house. I need to ask you a few questions.”

She expelled her breath like a hot radiator.

“Goddammit, can’t you people leave us
alone?”

This was a strange attitude for a victim, but I already
knew she was not the run of the mill victim. I put an
official tone in my voice and said, “Most people
who’ve been burglarized cooperate. I find your
attitude a little unusual. Is there a reason for
that?”

She hung there a moment, surprised, then said, “My
husband is very upset by all this. It’s going to be
bad enough having to go to court when they finally do bring
that crazy girl back here. What can I tell you that
hasn’t already been asked and answered fifty
times?”

“I’m sure you’re tired of answering
questions. But I’m in Seattle, I don’t have
access to the files they’ve built in Taos, and I need
to know more about what she stole from you. Otherwise I
don’t know how you expect to get your property
back.”

“I don’t want it back. I should’ve
burned it years ago.”

“Burned what?”

“That book.”

“It was mainly a book, then, that she took from
you?”

“If I’d just given it to her when she first
came here, maybe she’d‘ve just gone away. Then
none of this would’ve happened.”

“Where did you get the book?”

“I don’t see what that has to do with
anything. It’s personal business, very old business.
It doesn’t have any bearing on this.”

“It might, if we have to determine who owns
it.”

“What are you saying, that
I
stole the book?”

“I’m just asking a few questions, Mrs.
Jeffords. If I seem to be going in a way you don’t
like, it’s your attitude that’s leading me
there. You’re going to have to answer these
questions, you know, sooner or later.”

“Listen to me, sir, and understand what I’m
telling you. My husband is extremely upset by all this.
He’s outside now on the deck, he’ll be in here
any minute, and the last thing I need is for him to find me
talking to you about that crazy girl. It hasn’t been
easy coping with this. She could’ve killed us.
Charlie gets a little crazy himself just thinking about it.
If you call here again, you’ll cause me a lot of
trouble.”

“Can you describe the book?”

“No! Can’t I make you understand English? I
haven’t even looked at it in twenty years.”

“Are you familiar with the names Slater or
Pruitt?”

“No. Should I be?”

“Slater says you hired him to find your
book.”

“He’s lying. I never heard of the
man.”

“What about Pruitt?”

Her voice dropped off to a whisper.
“Charlie’s coming. Charlie’s here. Go
away, don’t call me again.”

She banged the phone down.

What a strange woman. I could just see her, scurry-ing
across the room to distance herself from the telephone.
Smoothing her dress, sitting primly, trying to look like a
poster from
Fascinating Womanhood
as her big old bear came home from the hill.

Trying her damnedest to give away a book others would
kill for.

I hadn’t gotten to the hard questions yet. Who
really fired that gun, Mrs. Jeffords? What’s the link
between you and the Rigby girl, and why do I get the
feeling that it’s personal?

I knew, though, that I’d had my one shot at her.
She was far away and she wouldn’t be picking up the
telephone again without letting that recording screen it
first.

I tried Trish and got nothing.

Decided to put Allan Huggins on hold for the moment.

Checked out of the motel and went looking for
breakfast.

At eleven o’clock, I parked on the street outside
the library and passed the time reading.

S
uddenly it’s 1963. Gaston Rigby stands in North Bend
at the dawn of his life, ready and waiting to be molded by
the genius Darryl Grayson. Who would think that Grayson
might hire him, even to sweep out the shop? Now there are
days when every green kid with a yen to publish turns up on
Grayson’s doorstep, hat in hand, begging for a chance
to work for nothing. The mystique is in full bloom, and
Grayson is still well on the sunny side of fifty. What is
it that separates Rigby from the others?…How does he
get to Grayson on that primal level, that place where the
genius lives? Grayson leaves no clue. He is not one to talk
of such things. The hunt for verbal profundity makes him
uneasy and, if he’s pushed too hard, cross. Speaking
of Rigby, Grayson will say only that he’s a good one.
He’s willing to let it go at that, as if trying to
isolate and define everything that goes into making a good
one is beyond him. And this is Archie he’s talking
to, and Archie knows a good one as well as he does.

Moon looks back at it many years later. At times he
thinks Rigby took the place of the younger brother—
almost but not quite. He thinks Grayson and Rigby were,
almost but not quite, like father and son. That spiritual
bond can be difficult to understand when you stand outside
it: it goes deeper than anything Moon has ever seen between
men of solidly heterosexual persuasion. He insists he felt
no jealousy: he is secure in his own importance to Grayson,
and if Rigby mattered as much on another level, why should
it worry him? He was still Grayson’s best friend in
life. They grew up together, they swam buck naked as kids,
tramped woods and fields, hunted deer and birds, chased
women as young hell-raisers, drank, dreamed and shared the
same calling. When Grayson left the South after the war and
wrote that he had found a promised land, Moon came along to
see for himself. Moon still remembers the first words he
spoke as he got off the train in Snoqualmie.
What the hell is this little burg gonna do with two
goddamn printers, for Christ’s sake
?

But Moon is a mechanic and Grayson is an artist. They
coexist perfectly, perhaps the only friends in
history—to hear Moon tell it—who never had a
disparaging word between them. Moon does worry, especially
in the beginning, that Grayson is chasing an impossible
dream. Nobody ever made money doing small-press books. Put
that in caps and say it again. NObody. If you can do it for
twenty-five years and not lose your pants, you can call
yourself blessed. Grayson never made a dime. His entire
operation was bankrolled with family money. Eventually the
boys came into hundreds of acres of prime Georgia planting
land—peaches, corn, just about anything a man wanted
to grow. But Darryl and Richard Grayson were not farmers.
They sold the land and Grayson took his half and did what
he did with it. His books made enough to keep most of his
principal intact, and that’s all they ever made in
his lifetime.

What is it about the book business anyway, Moon wonders.
Sometimes it seems like nobody on any level of it makes any
money. Maybe if you’re Random House and you can
figure out how to publish nobody but James A. Michener, you
can make a little money. Everybody else picks up
peanuts.

Why do they do it? he wonders. But he knows why.

Now it’s 1963 and Rigby arrives, joining Grayson
in the quest for the perfect book.
Look at you, Darryl
, Moon says over beer in the town bar,
you’re launching a life
. Grayson just nods in his cups. What has never been
said—what Moon tells Trish Aandahl years after
Grayson’s death—is how much influence Rigby had
on Grayson. Rigby was truly remarkable for a kid:
damn, he had the greatest hands
, Moon says,
he’da been a great doctor, delivering babies,
coaxing ‘em into the world…he could coax butter
out of a witch’s heart
and his instincts for binding and design were almost as
fine and fully formed as Grayson’s. Rigby offers his
opinions timidly at first—a kid does not come in and
tell a genius how to run his business— but he soon
learns that Grayson has no ego in the heat of the work.
Grayson will listen to the man in the moon if the guy can
give him an idea, and Gaston Rigby is a fountain of ideas.
Do you think, Darryl, that the center of the page is
too dense?…Not by much, maybe, but listen to what the
words are saying and look at it again
. Grayson studies it. He walks away and looks from afar.
More often than not, he decides that Rigby is right. Their
talk runs nonstop through the day, every word germane to
the work at hand. There is never a joke between them or a
comment on the outside world or a reflection on womanhood.
There are no calendar-girl pinups, no radios or newspapers,
nothing that would take away Grayson’s concentration
even for a moment. There are no clocks. Grayson comes down
to the shop in the morning and Rigby is already there. They
work until some inner clock tells Grayson that the day is
done. In Grayson’s shop, time stands still. He alone
knows when the work is through and he walks away, leaving
Rigby to wash the press and tidy up the workbench and put
everything back where it goes.

Rigby’s responsibilities grow along with his
salary. By his second year he seems indispensable. His eye
is uncanny: he catches things that might even escape the
master in various stages of trial and error. Broken serifs,
hairline cracks, typos: he spots them instantly. He checks
each impression for indentation, uniformity of punch,
blackness of ink (“needs a little more color here,
Darryl”). His eye is so good that Grayson comes to
depend on him in those final stages when the books are
inspected and shipped. This gives him a sense of family,
something he’s never known. Rigby lives upstairs, in
the loft over the shop. He stands in darkness now, staring
off through the black woods at the lights of the big house.
He knows that sometimes the brother brings whores over from
Seattle, but this too he sees as part of the process. If
Grayson can be relaxed and made ready for tomorrow by the
services of a whore, let him do it. They come and go,
harmless fluff. Only near the end does the one called Nola
Jean take on a major negative importance. She screws with
Grayson’s head and is not good.

It is now 1968. Rigby is twenty-two. He has been with
Grayson five years and life is sweet. He has a woman of his
own, a relationship nurtured slowly like a courtship from
another time. This is Crystal, Moon’s teenage niece,
who ran away from her home in Georgia and now finds work in
the North Bend bakery. Crystal loves Rigby’s shyness,
his brilliance, his teddy-bear presence. He is the first
solid man in her life, always the young gentleman. Rigby
has none of the stormy impatience that runs rampant through
his generation. Politics bores him: even the Kennedy
assassination, he tells her, struck him as little more than
another TV show. Crystal marvels at this. She is seventeen,
and in love.