But here Miss Kramer, although she knew she was imagining too much, gave way to cowardice and ran, ran, ran, gasping, until she had reached the subway station and could—burying her face in her handkerchief—give way to tears.
After that Irv was not well. He missed days. He came late to work. When she spoke to him he answered her shrilly, denouncing the office, the people, the books, the world, everyone. It was impossible to talk to him. Three days before he finally disappeared, he cornered June in the stockroom and cried out to her, with an air of pride mixed with defiance: “Miss Kramer, I’m going to get married! My girl is going to marry me!”
She said congratulations.
“We’re going away, to stay at her folks’ place,” he said, “but don’t you tell anybody, Miss Kramer; I wouldn’t want any of those—those shrimps who work in this office to know about it! They’re just cowards, they’re stupid, they don’t know anything. They don’t know anything about literature! They don’t know anything!”
“Irvin, please—” said Miss Kramer, alarmed and embarrassed.
“Go on!” he shouted; “go on, all of you!” and then he turned his back on her, rubbing his eyes, mumbling, looking at one title after another on the stockroom shelves—though all of them were the same, as June Kramer told me afterwards. She thought of touching him on the shoulder, then she thought better of it, she thought of saying “congratulations” again but was afraid it would set him off, so she backed off as quietly as she could. She paused unwillingly at the door (she said) and then Irvin Rubin turned round to look at her—the last time she ever saw him. His defiance and his pride were both gone, she said, and his face looked frightened. It was as if human knowledge had settled down on him at last; he was ill and terrified and his life was empty. It was like seeing a human face on an animal. June Kramer said, “I’m sure you’ll be very happy, Irvin, congratulations,” and hurried blindly back to her desk.
This is Irvin Rubin’s story as Miss June Kramer told it to me one winter morning in the cafeteria with the windows weeping and the secretaries clattering their coffee and buns around us, but it is not his whole story. I know his whole story. I saw him enter the park early one winter evening with a young lady—it was probably the day he left work—and although I don’t know for certain what happened, I can very well imagine their walk across the park, the young woman silent, Irvin slipping a little on the icy path, turning about perhaps to look at the apricot sky in the west—though, as June Kramer said, natural phenomena never got much notice from him. I can guess—although I did not actually know—how Irvin’s true love opened her automatic arms to him in some secluded, snowy part of the park, perhaps between a stone wall and the leafless trees. I can see her fade away against the darkening air, that black coat that holds nothing, that black scarf that adorns nothing, her iridescent hat become an indistinguishable part of the evening sky, her legs confused with the tree trunks, and her eyes—those wild, lovely, violet eyes!—kindling brighter and brighter, radiant as twin planets, brilliant as twin pole-stars, out of a face now grown to the hue of paper. I can see them melting, flattening, and diffusing into a luminous freezing mist, a mist pouring out from sockets that are now sockets in nothing, doing God only knows what to poor Irv Rubin, who was found the next morning (as the janitor of my apartment building tells me) flat on his back in the snow and frozen to death.
A few days afterwards I saw Irv’s ladylove across Central Park West, on a bright February afternoon, with the traffic plowing the snow into slushy furrows within ten feet of her and the dogs of twenty blocks around being walked up and down to leave their bright pats in the snow. She was reading a book, turning the pages effortlessly with her gloved fingertips. I was even able to make out the title of the book, though I rather wish I hadn’t; it was Ovid’s Art of Love, which seemed to degrade the whole affair into a very bad joke.
But of course by the time I managed to get across the street, she was gone.
H.P.L.
GAHAN WILSON
I was far from home, and the spell of the eastern sea was upon me.
—H.P. LOVECRAFT
And it was, it was!
Smelling deeply the rich, time-abiding scent of the coastal marshes, I greedily read juicily exotic names at random from the road map clutched in my hand—Westerly, Narragansett, Apponaug—and to the north, drawing nearer every minute as the bus trundled efficiently along the upward curve of the coastal road, was Providence!
There could be no doubting it at all—absolutely incontrovertible evidence was all about me in the form of swooping gulls and salty surf and bleached piers in varying states of Innsmouthian decay—I, Edward Haines Vernon, born and bred in and frustrated by the flat, flat flat-lands of the Midwest, having grown up by one shore of Lake Michigan with the sure and certain knowledge that its other, opposite shore was only a sunny day’s excursion away, and that it would only be another boring Midwestern shore with more boring people talking about more boring things if I’d bothered to go there—that I, the aforementioned Edward Haines Vernon, was now actually on the coast of the great Atlantic, the eastern sea itself, on whose other coast would be nothing less magnificent than Europe, for God’s sake!
I sat back, letting a bone-deep, noisy sigh of satisfaction escape simultaneously from my mouth and nostrils and shook my fist in the air before me with triumph; then I saw I’d alarmed the thin, grey lady sitting next to me. But after being irritated with her for the tenth part of a second, I realized that—of course—she was a fine, old New England lady and would be upset by the crude, uncultured ways of a clumsy, ill-bred Midwesterner such as myself, God bless her withered old heart, God bless her pale blue, disapproving eyes!
“Excuse me,” I said, gently, “but I am new to your country and do not fully understand its ways. Please be kind enough to pardon my outburst.”
She regarded me steadily for a long moment over the steel rims of her glasses, then sniffed and turned back to her perusal of Prevention magazine, God bless her again, as I, in turn, turned back to my wide-eyed gazing out of the window of the bus.
It had not—I realized that now—it had not really so far hit me that all of this was actually happening! I had dreamed of it and planned and schemed for it so many long years, for such a large part of my life, that I had grown entirely accustomed to thinking of it as lurking (I hoped) in the future. It was always going to happen later on, but suddenly it was happening now! Suddenly it was all here! And so was I!
Carefully, so as not to alarm my dear New England lady once more with any further gaucherie, I pulled my little overnight bag (though I planned to stay in these regions far longer than overnight—by God, I planned to live here!) from under my seat and zipped it open and carefully lifted out the neatly folded letter which rested inside it on top of everything else. Reverently, like a priest with some holy artifact, I opened the precious thing and scanned its tiny letters penned in that spidery, small hand, and the words swam in my eyes for a moment before I blinked the tears away and I could reread that golden first paragraph for the thousandth, perhaps the ten thousandth, time.
“Of course you must come and visit me, Edwardius—by all means. And please do stay in my house, a handsome structure which I am sure one gifted with your knowledge and admiration of the antique will be able to appreciate fully. In the past, because of painfully reduced circumstances, I was not able to play the host to favored correspondents in the style I would have wished. Perhaps the greatest pleasure attendant to my present state of prosperity is that now I can fully indulge myself in grandfatherly welcomings!”
This totally unanticipated invitation had come in response to a wistfully timid outburst in my preceding letter to him wherein I’d confessed I dreamed of one day walking the streets which he and Poe had walked, and told him how I indulged myself sometimes with fantasies of sitting on some tomb in St. John’s Churchyard, during an appropriately Gothic night of fog or lightning flashes, and building poems and stories with him about the worms which c
rawled and fed in the mouldy ground beneath our feet.
After that first, dazzling paragraph, he made a little joke to the effect that the Churchyard was really a very pleasant place, not mouldy at all, and then went on to practical specifics as to my visit, even volunteering to pay for my transportation, if that should present a problem.
“Please do not take offense at this offer,” he wrote. “You know, being familiar with my history, that I am only too well acquainted with the perils and varied embarrassments which poverty afflicts on those who, like yourself, affront the common herd by daring to value art above commerce.”
I sent back a reply in the affirmative as soon as I could get a proper one on paper—it took me about a week and, I think, about a ream’s worth of drafts!—and I was careful to explain that I had put aside sufficient funds to make the trip providing I employed economical means. His reply to that included a line or two of touchingly old-fashioned praise for my thrift and industry, and after a short exchange of correspondence, we had settled all the dates and details.
Suddenly my eyes widened and I shook myself from this reverie of past events, leaned forward in my seat, and found myself actually pressing my nose against the window (doubtless to the further horrification of my seatmate) because beyond the glass, before and above me, seeming to appear with the abruptness of a mystic’s vision of a paradise long deferred, unexpectedly loomed the hoary spires and domes of College Hill—lost in dreams of anticipation, I had, all unknowing, been driven into Providence itself!
I stared out nervously as we pulled into the bus station. He’d said I would be met but had not, I suddenly realized, given me any clues to help me identify the person he planned to send to fetch me.
Then my heart stopped and I actually gasped aloud (earning another audible sniff of disapproval from my neighbor), for there, in the flesh, standing with a positively jaunty air on the platform, was Howard Phillips Lovecraft, H.P.L., himself!
I had thought that, because of his enormous age, he would have the gravest difficulties in moving about, that it was highly likely he was now permanently housebound, or possibly confined to some beloved antique wingback, or even permanently ensconced in a quaint canopied bed, but it was quite obvious I had severely underestimated his durability. Though he did seem just a tiny bit stooped, and there was some small trace of that cautious slowness in his movements usually associated with considerable age, he leaned only lightly on his cane and stood his ground easily against the push and press of the crowd as he peered up into the windows of the bus with a lively curiosity sparkling in his eyes.
Of course his long, gaunt, Easter Island face with its aquiline nose and hollow cheeks and overpowering jaw was as instantly recognizable to me as that of my father or mother, since I’d lovingly studied every photograph of Lovecraft I could get my hands on over the years, going from those black-and-white snaps taken in the twenties and thirties and bound into the old Arkham House collections, all the way on up to the underexposed—and therefore humorously greenish—Polaroid he’d enclosed with his letter of invitation: “… in order to prepare you for the shock of seeing Grandpa in his present corpselike condition.”
I waved at him through the window with the eagerness of a child, and as his teeth flashed in a smile and he gave me exactly the sort of friendly little salute of recognition I had hoped for, I clumsily hauled my bag for the last time from its lair under the seat, and emerged from the bus directly behind my New England lady.
And then she stepped primly away from before me, leaving me exposed in full view, and I turned suddenly from the happiest of young men to one of the most miserable wretches in the world, for though he did his gentlemanly best to hide it, I caught the almost instantly extinguished, kindly amusement in Lovecraft’s eyes as he took me in from head to toe, and, for the first time, standing before this man who had been my idol through the bulk of my formative years, the full extent of the incredible idiocy, the grotesque absurdity, the horrible presumption of my short, plump, silly self, affecting the mode of attire he’d taken up in his later years—the black cape and wide-brimmed hat—dawned on me with a fierce, merciless clarity which threatened to crush me to the ground, then and there, under its weight.
Frozen in my pose before the doorway of the bus, unable even to breathe, totally humiliated, I only barely managed to fight down a mad, desperate urge to turn and flee into the vehicle’s dark interior and cower there until it should drive me back to my hated flatlands.
Then Lovecraft’s face lit with that kindly radiance which one sees only rarely in his photos, and he moved toward me with his hand extended.
“I confess I am very touched, Edwardius,” he said, speaking quickly and precisely in a high-pitched, gentle voice. “It truly is—as I am only now able to appreciate fully for the first time—the sincerest form of flattery. Please accept my gratitude.”
He paused and gave my hand one brief, firm, friendly squeeze in what I realized must be a very Yankee form of handshake, then turned and waved his cane to indicate a large, black, very elegant old Rolls which, even under the gray, lowering sky, gleamed and glistened like a fine old British beetle in the parking lot by the side of the station.
“And now,” he said, giving my shoulder a light, comradely pat, and studiously keeping his eyes from mine so that I might have sufficient privacy to put myself together, “let us saunter forth from this hub of public transport, you and I, and enjoy a form of locomotion more suitable to the gentry.”
The driver’s door of the Rolls opened as we approached and a tall, thin, bearded man emerged gracefully. He was wearing a very elegantly tailored blazer, and his perfect ascot evoked my idea of Saint-Tropez more than Providence. He watched the approach of Lovecraft and myself in our identical capes and hats with no visible sign of hilarity save for a slightly ironic tilt to his head, but I came to learn that cranial attitude was habitual with him.
“This, Edwardius, is my valued associate, Mr. Smith,” said Lovecraft as we reached the thin man’s side. “Mr. Smith, please allow me to present Mr. Vernon, the young fantasist whose work we have discussed so much of late.”
Mr. Smith favored me with a shy, deeply wrinkled smile, and though his handshake was not particularly strong, he delivered it more along the lines of the heartier Midwestern style to which I was accustomed.
But then, from the unobtrusive alacrity with which he gently withdrew his hand and carefully placed it out of sight in the pocket of his blazer, I realized I had not managed altogether to cover my wince of distaste when I’d touched his flesh. It was singularly dry and oddly unyielding, and though he was so refined and physically delicate in every other aspect of his appearance that he put me instantly in mind of an Elizabethan dandy in some elegant portrait, the texture of his skin was shockingly coarse. It was obvious the poor man suffered from a hideously incongruous illness.
“I found myself particularly admiring your management of the worm king in ‘The Enshrouding,’ ” he said, speaking softly in an accent obviously foreign to this region, and, to all appearances, completely unaware of the little pantomime which had just taken place between us. “But I must confess my special favorite so far has been your notion of a displeased god presenting its followers with a poisoned idol made in its own image.”
As I thanked him for his gracious comments I found myself looking at him with an increasingly awed puzzlement because, even though I could not at this moment connect it with any specific association, I was now absolutely certain that I knew his face well and had seen its wise eyes looking out at me from their wrinkled settings many times.
By now Lovecraft had entered the back of the car—again with no visible sign that the burden of his great age was more than a trifling inconvenience—and he waved me in beside him as Mr. Smith arranged himself in the driver’s seat in order to play the chauffeur while H.P.L. gave us a brief tour of his beloved Providence. He pointed out various landmarks significant in the old town’s history and his own, spinning little stories a
bout them all with numerous brilliant asides, and I did not even try to deny myself the gleeful delight of anticipating the envy my telling and retelling of this adventure would produce in my listeners’ hearts down through the years to come. And so it has!
However, with each sidewise glance I stole at my host my astonishment at his remarkable preservation increased. Looking at him, one had no doubt that he was extraordinarily old, but there was also no doubt he was astoundingly—even eerily—fit and spry for a gentleman hovering around the century mark.
Also, the ravages of time seemed, in his case, to have followed some weird progression which differed significantly from the common patterns. He was not, for example, actually wrinkled, because instead of the deep fleshly canyons one is used to seeing, his face was covered with a sort of web of fine lines, thin as cobwebs and shallow as the cracklings in a quaint old doll. Also there were none of the standard grotesqueries associated with the very old, no enlargement of the ears, no wattling of the throat, and absolutely no thinning of the hair at all. The truth was that if you squinted your eyes, he looked very much as he had in those old photos taken back in the late thirties.
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