by Gail Godwin
“Are you saying I could have refused sponsors and stashed my work away in a drawer, like Emily Dickinson or somebody, and died unknown? Which I’m likely to do anyway. But what made you seek a sponsor? You said that writing Nito’s story kept you from committing suicide. But you did write it and translate it, and you still hadn’t committed suicide. So what made you need to wrap it up in that package and send it off to a publisher?”
Cuervo, bilingual man of many words, silently opened his palms in a “who knows?” gesture. They were in his Greenwich Village apartment, which he called his beach house, because if you stuck your neck out the window far enough, you could see the Hudson River. Since his debilitating bout with acute bronchitis, he wore woolen gloves with the fingers cut out when he was at home because he claimed he was always cold.
27
Feron had asked Cousin Thad to pick her up at her place of work, and there was a visitor’s badge awaiting him downstairs at the entrance desk guarding MacFarlane’s bank of elevators. She wanted her colleagues to see this good-looking, soft-spoken southern gentleman who belonged to her family.
She knew she was looked upon as an oddity at MacFarlane & Company. When she had applied for the proofreader’s job advertised in the Times and the Wall Street Journal fifteen years ago, she listed her college degree in English from a good university, so far everything normal, but what made her an anomaly, and possibly worked in her favor, was the fact that she had checked the “widow” box. How had it come to pass that she was a twenty-three-year-old widow alone in Manhattan?
She was hired on the spot by the woman who interviewed her, the same woman who later offered the promotion out of the Tandem Room, where Feron and Shawna Samuels had sat congenially across from each other, taking turns reading the consultants’ reports aloud in their proofreaders’ lingo (“up” for capitals, “down” for lowercase, “point” for period, “com” for comma). Shawna Samuels had fallen through the cracks at some point, and Feron periodically tortured herself with Merry’s question at the Algonquin: “But couldn’t you and your friend still meet?”
Cousin Thad arrived punctually at noon. Feron luxuriated in leaving her office on the arm of a handsome, smartly dressed cousin, his hair a distinguished silver now, having introduced him to her colleagues.
In the taxi, he said they were going to his favorite Neapolitan restaurant in Times Square. “Naples was my last tour of duty before I retired. I hope you like Italian food.”
“I like every country’s food. When I started at MacFarlane’s, my co-proofreader and I always ordered in, which was on the house. We had an array of menus: Indian, Chinese, Italian, and she guided me to adventurous items I would never have tried on my own.”
“You have quite a setup, Feron. I hadn’t realized my cousin was a New York executive.”
“I’m hardly that.”
“You have a posh office looking out over the water, and how many people working for you?”
“Twelve at present. The number expands with the company. I’m top dog in the editorial department; we even have translators on our staff. If any consultant’s report isn’t nigh well flawless when we’ve all finished going over it, the powers on the top floor send it back to my desk with a red flag.”
“But when do you write your books?”
“Oh, at night. My day job and my night job draw from different sources of energy.”
“That’s amazing.”
“Many writers do it. Some famous examples are Wallace Stevens with his lifelong insurance job and T. S. Eliot with Lloyd’s Bank.”
“I recognize T. S. Eliot, but I don’t think I’ve heard of Mr. Stevens.”
“He was already a famous poet while he was alive. After he won the Pulitzer, Harvard offered him a teaching job, but he turned them down because he didn’t want to give up being vice president of Hartford Accident and Indemnity.”
“How do you know all this stuff, Feron?”
“I study other writers to compare my progress against theirs. It’s mostly just a matter of jealousy and ambition.”
As she asked him to do, Thad ordered for them both, speaking Italian with the waiter. It was peak season for tomatoes, so they shared a caprese rustica salad and, once he made sure she had nothing against squid, a plate of calamari fritti. After which they split the baked ziti Napolitano and the yellowfin tuna with rigatone and alfredo sauce. The waiter suggested the house Chianti.
“You drink wine, don’t you, Feron? I thought so. You asked for the spiked eggnog the day we met at the Steeds’ Christmas party.”
“Did you learn Italian in Naples, or did you speak it before?”
“I arranged to have lessons as soon as I was assigned my command. The navy encourages service members and their families to learn the country’s language.”
“Did your wife learn it, too?”
“Lou takes a pass on languages, but she can ask for everything she wants with those little phrase books.”
“I thought of Marguerite Steed just this morning. I was passing a shop that had a rat doll riding a horse doll, and I considered buying it for her collection and asking you to take it back with you. Then I looked at the price—it was called ‘Rat Race,’ and it was twenty-five hundred dollars.”
“Holy moly, was it made of gold?”
“No, just cloth and other things. Marguerite would have known. It was a work of art.”
“Marguerite and I were in high school together.”
“But you look much younger. Was she collecting dolls then?”
“She didn’t start that till later. In high school she caused quite a scandal in Pullen. She and the music teacher ran away together. Marguerite was a lovely young girl.”
“What happened?”
“The general dispatched a search and rescue mission, and they routed them out in no time. Marguerite went back to school, and the music teacher was run out of town.”
“I wonder if Marguerite still carries a torch for him and that’s why she never married.”
“The music teacher was a woman. But, you know, I’ve sometimes wondered myself.”
“How do you like the calamari? Oh, good. Lou says it’s like chewing a mouthful of rubber bands. Feron, your exemplary young tenants are moving out at the end of their lease. He’s being transferred out of state. That would give us several months to repaint and do the floors, and I have an idea about Great-Granny Hood’s old chicken coop where she would threaten to send grandchildren to spend the night. I know a person isn’t supposed to ask about a woman’s age or her bank account, but if you have anything socked away, it would be a good investment to turn that old coop into a smart little guest house or studio. The foundations are solid. I could get a few bids for you if you’re interested.”
“I have a friend who calls me a tightwad because I have yet to rent my own place here in the city. MacFarlane’s has this setup where personnel can house-sit apartments of other personnel. First I thought it was going to be a temporary arrangement, but the longer I practiced it, the more attracted I became to that way of life and the more in demand I was. It kept me from acquiring things—books, furniture, what people now call ‘collectibles’—like the rat riding his horse. If the price tag had said two hundred and fifty instead of twenty-five hundred, I might have rushed right in and bought it—if I’d had my own apartment. To answer your question, yes, I do have a bit socked away.”
“Go ahead and do it? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“You said it was a good investment.”
“You know, when I was in my early teens, before I fell in with the wrong crowd, I had this fantasy of stowing away on a freighter and becoming so indispensable they kept me on. In my fantasy I sailed round and round the world. So I can appreciate the attraction of the unbound life.”
“But you did sail round and round the world.”
“Yeah, well. As a member of the Sixth Fleet and head of an expanding family on the move. Next time you come, you’ll have to visit our house.
It’s chock-full of Lou’s collectibles from all over the globe. When will you be coming south again? Have you been back since Blanche Buttner dumbfounded us by bringing home a husband from a cruise?”
“I did go back. The Christmas following their marriage I went back, but it was a huge miscalculation on both sides. I thought Blanche would be hurt if I didn’t come, and she thought I would be hurt if she didn’t invite me. So the four of us smoldered for three days, and then I changed my ticket and left early.”
“The four?”
“Orrin’s daughter, the dreadful Daphne. She was staying in my old guest suite, which she considered her quarters, and I was put in a room with a bath down the hall. Daphne hated me on sight. No, she must have hated me from the moment she heard of my existence. She’s a person my age, an unhappy, resentful woman, and I guess she looked on me as a financial threat, even though the married couple had signed all kinds of ‘postnups,’ since they had already been married by the captain of the cruise ship. But don’t let me get started on Dreadful Daphne. If I do come back, it’ll be to Pullen, not to Benton Grange.”
“Why don’t you fly down after we’ve done the floors and the painting. You can sleep in your own house, and we can go over designs for the renovated chicken coop.”
“Maybe I will. Not for long. Maybe for the Labor Day weekend, would that be enough time for you to get everything done?”
“Plenty of time. You know who’s going to be thrilled to see you again? She talks about you every time I go over to Jellicoe Farm.”
“You mean Merry?”
“Who else?”
“How often do you go?”
“As often as I can dream up a business excuse, something I can help them with. Have you met him?”
“No. The last time I saw Merry was the day after Christmas, in 1979. We met at the Neuse River Café, and she announced she had just married Mr. Jack. What’s he like?”
“Please. Don’t ask me that. I couldn’t be objective. He has to be in his seventies, and he’s like this old cowboy in faded jeans. And I’ve never seen him sit down.”
“You once called her ‘that sublime little lady.”
“Cousin, you’ve got my number. I’m a victim of unrequited love. Of course, I couldn’t imagine life without Lou in it, and Merry seems to dote on her old cowboy. But I like to think she’s aware of my hopeless condition and doesn’t mind.”
“I wrote her a long letter after we had lunch at the Neuse River Café, suggesting she make a novel out of this piece about the slave who discovered bright leaf tobacco. She answered right back, saying it was a great idea and she was going to do it. So I guess I was imagining her down there writing away, and then I waited to hear how she was getting on, only the months went by and now it’s …” Feron tapped her fingers on the table. “Oh God, it’s nine years later, and it was my turn to write.”
“You didn’t hear about the child?”
“What child?”
“They lost a little boy.”
“You mean a miscarriage?”
“No, they had him for about three months. He was in and out of the hospital. A tiny heart that hadn’t developed right, even the experts up at Duke couldn’t fix it. They both were devastated, but she had to act strong to keep Jack from destroying himself.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Let’s see. He was born early spring in 1986 and died in early summer.”
“How strange she never let me know.”
“Well, Cousin, letting nine years go by without answering her last letter might have something to do with it. But she’s very loyal to you, you know. Whenever she mentions you, it is always with affection and excitement, as though she might have heard from you the week before.”
28
June 12, 1987
Dear Feron,
Last night I dreamed of you. We were lying on Lovegood’s lawn and I was telling you a dream I’d just had. Your expression as you listened to me was as clear to me as if you’d really been there.
I was telling you how my dream opened with my brother Ritchie approaching me out of a fog. Then the fog became the floor of a hospital. Ritchie was wearing his air force uniform with his pilot’s wings. I never saw him wearing it, but he had sent a picture the day he shipped out.
He was carrying something in his arms, and when he got closer, I saw it was a little boy. I started running toward them, but Ritchie put up a warning hand and said, “Stop right there, Merry Grape, this is a hazardous maneuver and we have to do it strictly by the rules.”
The rules were that I was allowed to look at the boy without speaking or moving. I have never looked at anything so hard. I forced myself not to cry because the tears would blur what I wanted to see. It was Paul, our Paul, but older than when I’d last seen him alive.
Ritchie said, “He can’t look back at you, because he doesn’t know you’re there.” Then Ritchie started walking away backward down the hospital floor. I started to call out, please stay a little longer, but I wasn’t allowed to speak. As they disappeared into the fog, Ritchie called, “He’s with me, Merry Grape. This is—” The voice was fading, but I think he said, “This is the way we do it,” but I couldn’t be sure.
Now comes the second part, Feron, the part about you. We were lying in the grass, “lingering on the lawn,” remember? And I had told you my dream. This is the first time I have ever had a dream within a dream. Have you ever had one? In my dream you had stopped looking at me and were busy digging out something from the grass with your finger.
I started to cry.
“What did it mean, Feron? It’s got to mean something.”
And you pulled out this piece of jewelry from your digging. It looked like a large medieval brooch. You said, “Don’t you recognize this, Merry?” “No, what is it?” “It’s an award of recognition from Maud Petrie,” you said. Then you leaned forward and kissed me. “I will tell you what your dream means,” you said. “Paul is inside your reference aura, and once someone is in it, they are in it forever.”
Paul Jellicoe Rakestraw
March 7, 1986–June 12, 1986
Today is the first anniversary of the last day Paul could look back at us. It was in the hospital. He was weak but had a little color in his face, and we were about to get down on our knees and thank God for letting him come through the surgery. Then as quick as someone putting out the light, he was gone. They had warned us it was a high-risk operation. Even if it had succeeded, there would have been more operations in early childhood. He had what is called hypoplastic left heart syndrome, which means that the entire left side of his heart was underdeveloped. His little casket is buried next to Ritchie in the Jellicoe family cemetery.
After I woke from my dream within a dream, I clung to what you’d said in the dream about “reference auras.” It seemed to point to a way of trying to live with this unbearable absence. Once someone is in your reference aura, they stay there forever. Couldn’t forever include after death? I mean, if someone has died, they are still in your reference aura and so continue to grow in your heart like a living person. That little boy Ritchie was carrying in his arms was about a year old. “This is the way we do it,” Ritchie said in the dream, and perhaps this is the way to do it.
The first time I heard of reference auras was when we were meeting at the Algonquin, our first meeting since we said good-bye (not knowing it was good-bye) before the Christmas break at Lovegood ten years ago. I can even trace back the links in our conversation that day at the Algonquin that led up to it. I had asked you if you thought about your time at Lovegood, and you said, “It’s more like I carry it with me.” And then you said it provided a whole sort of reference aura. You spoke of your husband, Will, approving of Miss McCorkle without ever having met her, and you went on to say that Miss Petrie in her classes had been trying to teach us that we had to get used to uncertainty in our reading and writing. And that was when I told you I wished I had someone in my daily life who could talk about things like ref
erence auras.
When Paul was born, I was going on forty-six. Talk about living in uncertainty. That’s when I began to go to church regularly. There is an African Methodist Episcopal church not far from us. I had gone there a few times when I was making notes about Stephen Slade’s life, the task you had “assigned” me in your generous letter. We didn’t tell many people, Jack and I, because we were waiting for something bad to happen as it often did with women my age. There was one scare with some bleeding early on, but then we sailed through the rest of the pregnancy. Of course, we had to dread the bad things that could still happen. The baby could be born damaged in some way. I say the baby, because we were too superstitious to ask for too much, and we refused to learn whether I was carrying a boy or a girl.
And then there was this perfect little boy. It has only been recently that I have allowed myself to look at the photos. Jack has yet to feel up to it. Needless to say, I choose my lookings when I am sure he is going to be out for a while.
In those three short months when we thought we were home free, Jack started talking about the future when Paul had grown to manhood and had taken over Jellicoe. We got into an argument. I reminded Jack that Ritchie had been a grown man when he went off to war, and who knew what kinds of wars this country would be fighting in eighteen years. Not to mention that there might not be any Jellicoe bright leaf allowed to grow. He stormed out, and then it was time to feed Paul again, and that’s when I noticed that after he had sucked for, say, half a minute, he was gasping for breath.
I am going to have to continue this later, Feron.
[unfinished, unsent, and destroyed]
29
Feron had insisted that she wanted to walk back to work, but it was raining outside the restaurant, so Cousin Thad put her in a cab.
Still smarting from his delicate rebuke, she said, “Please tell Merry I am going to write to her tonight.”
“Will do!” he said, sending the driver off with her work address: gentleman to the last.