The Paperboy (45 page)

S
HE WAS WITH
Ward most of the afternoon, and left apologizing for taking so much of his time. The office was still warm with the heat from her body when I went in, and smelled of her soap.

“What does she want now?” I said.

He shook his head. “I’m not sure,” he said. “She keeps coming back to the timing of it, the story being written while I was in the hospital …”

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her that Mr. Van Wetter was facing the electric chair, and the paper didn’t think it could hold the story.…” He shrugged, as if the arguments were self-evident.

“She ought to talk to Yardley Acheman,” I said, making a joke.

“He thinks she’s stealing his book,” he said. “Something about a swimming pool. He thinks she hates him for pushing her into a swimming pool.”

A
LTHOUGH AGAIN DRAWING
a paycheck, Yardley Acheman had, for all practical purposes, never come back to work. There was no way to quietly fire him, however, and the
Times
had too much invested in him to do such a thing in public.

He worked on his book in spurts, and complained out loud that he could not concentrate, knowing that there were people out to ruin him.

A
ND MY BROTHER WENT
back to what had worked before.

He disappeared into a new project, night and day, collecting the contradictory facts and details of things that had happened, sometimes years before, filing them away against the day when he would look at them again and decide a certain chain of events, a version of history that would be printed. Believing this time it would emerge on the pages of the newspaper exactly as it had happened in life.

Strangely, he refused to discuss what his new project was, and his editors began to worry that they had lost them both, with Yardley Acheman complaining that they had no understanding of the pressures of writing a book, and Ward not talking to them at all.

Neither of them could be fired, of course, and Yardley reminded them of that from time to time, asking out loud in the newsroom how the paper could afford to keep him around.

And while I wasn’t there for the conversations with his publisher in New York—he tended to keep that aspect of his life more private than the rest—one morning I did see a draft of a letter he wrote the man, which he’d left beside the copying machine in the office (he was making copies of all his correspondence then, against the day students would be studying his work in English classes), explaining it was impossible to continue to work at the paper and, at the same time, finish the book. “They don’t seem to be able to turn on the lights around here without me,” he said.

He believed his wife was having an affair. He called her
daily and reported his progress on the book and begged her to come to Miami to visit. She, however, was working on something of her own and could not get away. He would hang up enraged.

He worried out loud about his marriage, and added that to the distractions keeping him from finishing his book. He estimated his marital problems had set him back six months, a figure he offered to anyone who would listen, even to me.

On the day he did that, however, he turned abruptly away, not waiting for an answer, as if he had just realized I was not in a position to forgive his obligations.

H
ELEN
D
REW
R
ETURNED
to the
Times’s
newsroom, still smelling of the same soap. She seemed happy to see me, as if we were old friends. And perhaps I was as close to an old friend as she had.

She wondered out loud how Yardley was doing with his book, if he might have time to talk to her now. There was something wide-eyed and sweet in her tone which did not quite hide the edge beneath.

I
LEARNED OF MY
father’s engagement to Ellen Guthrie through a wedding invitation mailed to me at the paper. I used the newspaper’s address for the little personal correspondence I received because mail which came to me at the rooming house was left on a small table near the front door and inspected by the other tenants as they came and left during the day. Often, one of them opened it.

The invitation was professionally printed and included a small map of Thorn, showing the location of the Methodist
church and the country club where the reception would be held, as well as the name of a store in Jacksonville where Ellen Guthrie had established an account of the things she needed in the way of gifts.

I took the invitation straight to my brother, who by now had generated enough piles of documents and records for the new project to cover his desk.

Yardley Acheman was also in the room, on the telephone with his agent in New York.

“Listen,” he said, “I need six months to finish this thing, and I have to get back to the city to do it.…”

I dropped the invitation in the middle of Ward’s documents. “Did you get one of these?” I said.

He looked at it without touching it, cocking his head to read the words, then seemed to follow them off the page, across the desk to some banking records sitting beneath a staple gun at the far corner.

Yardley was asking for another eight thousand dollars.

“It gets better and better,” I said.

Ward turned toward a corner of the room where his own mail lay in a mound on a shelf, unopened since he had begun the new project. Some of it had fallen off onto the floor.

Yardley was telling the editor now that the story was timeless.

Ward touched the invitation I’d dropped on his desk, turning it with one finger until he could read it again without moving his head sideways. “He’s going to marry her,” I said.

He nodded, still looking at the invitation, still touching it with the tip of his finger.

“She’s after the whole paper,” I said.

He smiled again, and then shook his head no, as if he found the idea implausible.

“If you want it faster, then get me out of this fucking hole and back in New York where I can write,” Yardley said. “Six thousand dollars, I’ll live on a thousand a month …”

Yardley squirmed quietly in his chair while the man on the other end of the line spoke. He looked up at us, then back at the paper in front of him. He had written the number 6,000 and circled it several times, now he crossed it out.

“Well, they seem to get along with each other,” Ward said.

Yardley closed his eyes, listening to the man in New York. My brother seemed unaware of the conversation; he seemed only vaguely aware of me.

Yardley suddenly slammed the phone onto the cradle and sat for a moment, breathing hard. He looked at the phone, then across the room at Ward. “Your friend Helen Drew?” he said. “She’s been checking on me in New York.”

T
WO LETTERS ARRIVED
at the paper from my father’s attorney later that week, one to me, one to Ward, formally notifying us of a change in the structure of the company. My father had named Ellen Guthrie as president, but had held on to the formal editorship of the newspaper, as well as his title of chief executive officer.

She had also been named to the board of directors. There was no explanation of the change, no personal note or call later from my father.

He had simply changed the locks again.

Ward left the office after he opened the letter, brushing past Helen Drew, who was waiting at the receptionist’s desk to see Yardley Acheman. He walked to the bar at the corner and drank beer all that afternoon. I found him there after I’d finished work, still wearing his tie snug against the top
button of his shirt. He was sitting in a booth against the wall, his head resting against the plastic cushion, a watery look to his eye. There was no other sign that he was drunk.

I got a beer from the bartender and sat down and offered a toast. “To the new Mrs. James,” I said, and he touched the lip of his bottle against mine, and we both drank.

“Was the girl from the
Sun
still there when you left?” It was a beer or two later.

“Still waiting for Yardley,” I said.

He thought a moment and said, “I wish she’d go away.”

“I think there’s something wrong with her,” I said.

“I wish they’d all go away.”

“Who?”

He smiled, and drank his beer. “All of them,” he said, and then he brought his bottle across the table and touched mine again. And then he laughed.