The Forgers (17 page)

Our Sunday morning excursion up to Irvington—“headless horseman land,” Meghan quipped—was less fraught, although we did have to drive past the exit that I once took on my first attempt to confront Slader in Dobbs Ferry. A nightmare I'd had right before waking up also hovered like a faint skein of mist around me. All that I remember of the dream were the words
Henry slayed her
. I dismissed the whole business, in part because if it had been Henry Slader on the Montauk beach the day before, I have little doubt he would have sidled up to us and said whatever he had in mind. He may have been unhinged but he was never shy about making demands. Anyway, the man owed me a thank- you letter if he had forged that brilliant “The Cardboard Box” material. Hadn't I proclaimed it to be authentic?

The old house looked surprisingly good. A classic brick Tudor whose upper story was fashioned of white stucco with traditional wooden crisscross decoration, the house had the same lead glass windows of my childhood, fronted by noble trees in orange, red, and gold autumn glory. Resembling a pen-and-ink drawing by the wonderful British illustrator Jessie M. King, it was grander than I remembered. Whoever owned it now had taken care of it admirably.

“Shall we knock on the door?” Meghan asked.

“No, that's okay.”

“Come on, nobody would mind.”

We did walk up the snaking path to the door and ring the bell, but no one was home.

“That's for the best,” I told her, as we headed back to the car. “Too many ghosts better left alone.”

“You don't believe in ghosts,” she said, as we set off for the cemetery.

She wasn't necessarily right but I suddenly felt an urgency to get this visit over and done with. The family mausoleum housed my father's parents and other ancillary relatives I never met nor honestly much cared about. Interesting that I could write out from memory fairly detailed ancestral family trees for some of the authors whose letters I had forged most often but my own skeleton crew I barely bothered with. We didn't stay long, and as for the rest of our trip, it ended quietly with dinner for two in our hotel room.

The phrase
When you leave New York you ain't going anywhere
cycled around in my head during our flight back to Shannon. Whoever wrote that—I looked it up when we were back in Kenmare; Jimmy Breslin, a writer I had never read but recalled my father liked a lot—I appreciated the sardonic if heartfelt whimsy that informed it; the hometown narcissism that fed it; the Gotham greater-than-thou philosophy that underscored it. But for me, my embrace of the idea was of a different sort. I both wanted to leave New York and had no interest in going anywhere. Truth of it was, I had already been to more than enough
anywheres
for a lifetime. I was done with anywhere and longed to the core of my soul, assuming such a thing resided in me, for the great solace of a workable nowhere.

T
O BE BACK IN THE COTTAGE
was to be back home. That was my first thought when I woke up, a little jet-lagged but eager to vault back into my life here, comfortably narrow as it was. Even the nostalgic sights of my upstate childhood house and the familiar streets of New York couldn't hold a candle to the quasi-tranquility I experienced in my adopted Kenmare, hand-grinding coffee in our quaint cottage kitchen, putting on my casual clothes to go back to work at the stationer's, consulting with Meghan where we should get together for lunch that day, should we order peat bricks, or rather turf, for the coming winter now that the November weather was turning nicely foul. Simple things like that.

Mr. Brion Eccles, owner of Eccles & Sons, Stationery and Print, knew of my proficiency with calligraphy even while he knew nothing of its dangerous incarnations in times past. No doubt it was one of the reasons he hired me, as early on in my tenure I was put to work executing handwritten wedding invites, baby shower announcements, citations, diplomas, whatever required a fancy script on some dull-as-dishwater document. I did these because I was asked to and because I think Meghan viewed the exercise as a positive use of my skill, if not a kind of rehabilitation. Although it was akin to asking a concert pianist to bang out “Chopsticks” on an untuned spinet, I diligently went about my business with nary a complaint. Having no nefarious scheme in mind, no thought of any future activity that might carry me back into my former hidden life, I did my best not to give in to schoolboy whimsy and scribe, say, a fiftieth wedding anniversary party invitation in King-Emperor Edward the Eighth's hand. I figured if Edward could abdicate his god-given calling for love, so could I.

It was, then, with restrained excitement on my part that Eccles pulled me off one of these somewhat galling calligraphy projects and asked if I could give it a try at working the Vandercook proof press he used for printing pamphlets, broadsides, and the like. He said his shoulder was aching, and because the press obliged the operator to crank the heavy roller holding the folio of paper across the type bed, back and forth, back and forth, he wasn't able to make a job deadline without help.

To say I took to it like a duck to water would be to employ a cliché—a lame duck of a cliché, at that—while understating an unimpeachable truth. I adored the smell of the viscous ink and tang of machine oil; adored the heft and smooth movement of the handle and roller; adored the repetitive sound of type lightly biting the skin of the paper. Above all, I adored seeing sheet after sheet of sharply printed leaves pile up. The textual contents of what I was printing became absolutely secondary to the act itself. I was reminded of my first writing lessons under my mother's tutelage, a watershed experience.

When Mr. Eccles thanked me for doing such a nice job, saying, “You're a quick study,” I thanked him right back for the opportunity of running his press and offered to do it any time he needed me to in the future. “I may well take you up on that,” he responded.

At home I announced, “I have news.”

“Talk to me,” Meghan said.

“Eccles had me run the Vandercook for the first time today.”

Without a hint of sarcasm or irony, she marveled, “Apprentice no more. We have a Gutenberg in the family.”

“Well, hang on. I doubt Gutenberg ever printed a four-up wedding invitation.”

“
‘Four-up'? Listen to you, mister. You already sound like an old-salt pressman.”

“He threatens to ask me to do more. Even said he'd be willing to teach me how to set and lock the type, clean up the press, from soup to nuts, if I was interested.”

“Seems like you are.”

“To be honest, I think it's a little bit of a childhood dream come true. As I'm afraid we both know all too well, the handwritten word's my first love—”

“Bad mistress more like.”

I couldn't argue with that, so nodded before going on to say, “But typography and typefaces, my dad tried to teach me a little about them. He had sets of
Print
, a quarterly journal that was all about graphic arts and type, and another called
The Colophon
, from the thirties, just chockablock full of color illustrations, beautiful designs, and type treatments. Other kids had their picture books of Dr. Seuss and Babar and the rest. Me, I had something like four dozen hardcovers of
The Colophon
.”

“Come on, you read
Cat in the Hat
and things like that.”

“Only because of my mom. My father and I had loftier illustrated texts to concern ourselves with,” I said, laughing along with Meghan. “Point is, I got to love those fonts. Bodoni, Caslon, Gill Sans. We even had a cat named Bembo. And old Eccles has trays and trays of this kind of type. I feel like a kid in a candy shop.”

“You're a character. A true nerd.”

“Nothing wrong with that, right?”

“I wouldn't love you so much if you weren't,” she said, but then threw me off a little by adding, “Just don't go printing up any rare nineteenth-century poetry broadsides by Poe or Keats or something.”

“Not funny,” I shot back, with probably a far more snarling tone of voice than her comment had invited. What point would there be in lying to myself about the fact that this very idea had crossed my mind the first moment I set eyes on Eccles's proof press? Or, at bare minimum, printing up facsimile bookplates of collectible authors—an E. M. Forster or Edgar Rice Burroughs, say—to glue to the front pastedowns of others' books, thus making them into more valuable association copies given their estimable provenance. And yet just because I had expertise in one kind of forgery didn't mean I could, let alone should, attempt to learn another. Great painters don't necessarily make great sculptors, apples are not oranges, and so forth. I struggled to soften my tone. “Been there, done that. Or, I mean, been near there, done something like that.”

“Done and forever finished with that, too, right?”

“Meghan, drop it,” I warned her, immediately ashamed
of myself for being so cross. I was defensive, of course, and she was simply behaving like the protective, decent wife she was, one whose concerns about her husband were more than justified. Imagine what a dog's life mine might have been without her. For her sake, for our child's, I needed to stay on the path of probity as best I could, needed to be not just a loving but a forthright, honest man. So easy to say those words to myself and at the same time so difficult, I knew, to live up to such standards. I got up from where I was sitting, walked over to her, and kissed her, saying in little more than a whisper, “I'm sorry, Meg. I didn't mean to snap at you like that. You don't deserve it, god knows.”

The look in her richly blue eyes when she accepted my apology—eyes the color of the earth's oceans as seen from, say, the moon—made me all the more regretful. I knew that I didn't deserve the love my wife felt for me. But what was there to do about it now? My sole course was to set any regrets aside, drown them in the oceans of her eyes, and move forward.

Thanksgiving having come and gone, Meghan's birthday was around the corner. I had kept up a tradition that started when I and, of course, Adam gave her books by Yeats. Because I'd added a new volume every birthday, she had a superb little collection of half a dozen volumes. This year, for her first birthday in Ireland as an adult, I needed something particularly special. Nor could it be a copy I jazzed up with some counterfeit inscription to Maud Gonne or Lady Gregory. Knowing it was impossible to buy one's way out of inextricable guilt, I still felt it couldn't hurt to make some gesture in that direction, and aware that Meghan's favorite Yeats poems were collected in his 1928 volume
The Tower
, I contacted Atticus and asked him to track down a first edition. It was not an inexpensive book, but I had plenty of credit with my friend and figured I wouldn't bother paying attention to the cost. True to his word, he located a beautiful copy in dust jacket and airmailed it to me the week before her birthday.

The stationer's shop wasn't far from the post office and, being excited about the book—Atticus told me the gorgeous T. Sturge Moore jacket was the sharpest he had ever seen—I dropped by every morning before work to see if it had arrived. Her birthday this year was on a Saturday and we planned, weather permitting, to drive to Kinsale to have a celebratory lunch at our usual place. Atticus's parcel arrived, along with another package for Meghan, on Thursday. Curiously, the second parcel had a shape and heft similar to the one containing my Yeats book. I took them both home that night and hid them from Meghan—not just mine, which I intended to keep secret anyway, but the other one as well. I knew it wasn't right to conceal mail addressed to someone else, be it spouse or stranger, but I needed time to think.

Something was wrong. No evidence one way or another, but I just sensed things were off. The label was typed, and not even on an electric typewriter but an old manual Royal or some other squat metal dinosaur of its ilk. Who used manual typewriters anymore? Also, the sender included Meghan's maiden name along with her married surname, a ridiculously tiny detail that nevertheless struck me as being amiss, or else taunting somehow, reminding her that she was a Diehl still. To what end, that? Above all, there was no return address although the postmark was New York.

By the time Meghan got home, I had decided the package must be from the kids at her old bookshop. Only paranoia would suggest otherwise. But still I hadn't removed it from its hiding place. Give it to her tomorrow, I thought. No, better yet, give it to her on her birthday. I should have been self-aware enough to recognize that I was postponing the possibility of trouble lurking inside the parcel. During a sleepless hour or two that night, I even considered throwing it out. Who would be the wiser? When the bookstore staff called to see if she liked her present, it would become clear that it went astray in the mail. Sad, but it happens more often than one likes to think. Was it insured? Did they have the correct address? What was it? Oh no, what a shame. Meghan, bless her, would undoubtedly say it was the thought that counts.

In the end, I neither destroyed nor looked inside my brown-paper-and-string tormentor—yes, the package was done up old-style. Instead, I wrapped
The Tower
in beautiful pochoir gift paper that my boss had saved for a special occasion, printed with hot air balloons and, wonderfully if oddly, pachyderms in full regalia ridden by pashas, also in full regalia. The book itself was a stunner, a copy my father would have loved, and back in the day I would have loved to improve it with at bare minimum a signature. Aware I owed good Atticus more than money for this, I brought my gift, along with the mystery package, to Kinsale.

We ordered quite a banquet. The weather held as we drove over, but then a rainstorm the likes of which we'd heard about in Ireland but not yet experienced set in on the coast. Drumming, thrashing water drenched everything outside.