by Alex George
Thanks to Reverend Gresham’s letter, Teddy’s interview was a formality. Within two months my brother was installed as the new minister of First Christian Church. And so the boy with the college degree—with the passport to anywhere—came home.
Once I had recovered from my initial indignation at Teddy’s unfathomable decision to return to Beatrice voluntarily, I was as pleased as anyone that he was back. I began a campaign to re-form the quartet. I cajoled and nagged my brothers until they agreed—with varying degrees of enthusiasm—to sing together again. By then, of course, we all had commitments elsewhere, so we only met once a week, gathering around the piano to learn new songs, just like old times. Sometimes we performed in public, but most of the time we just sang for ourselves. We no longer needed an audience. The simple act of making music was enough. The sound of our four voices melding sweetly together was like coming home to a warm fire blazing in the hearth.
Ayear or so after I had given up all hope of my novel ever being published, I quietly pulled my typewriter back out from beneath my bed and began to write again. I had kept one copy of the first manuscript, and I placed that huge brick of words, its edges meticulously aligned, in sight at all times. It stood sentry over my efforts, its physical heft a reassuring reminder that I had done this once, so I could surely do it again.
I’m not sure what prompted me to start writing another book. Rosa had been right; there was certainly nothing to be gained by feeling sorry for myself. But it was more than that. I missed my nightly communion with Buck Gunn and his friends. Telling stories was still a means of escape. And so I put a fresh sheet of paper into the machine, ready to flee once again. This time I no longer thought about getting published, but just wrote for my own amusement. The journey, not the destination, became the thing, and I rediscovered the simple satisfaction of seeing my ideas materialize before me, sentence after sentence.
My second novel was a thriller that centered around a plot to assassinate the U.S. president. The hero was a humble detective who, on a hunch, was trying to piece the puzzle together before it was too late. (His adored wife, a beautiful but callous redhead, left him halfway through the book, only to be ravaged by a rare and unspecified wasting disease that sentenced her to a long and painful death with nobody by her side.)
I vacillated for weeks when it was time to write the climactic scene—I couldn’t decide whether the assassination attempt should succeed or not. The president was to be shot with a single bullet, but it was up to me whether or not the marksman hit his target. It was strange, having the fate of the leader of the free world in my hands. Finally, with a heavy heart, I decided that the president should die.
I wrote the final scene in one frenzied weekend in the late summer of 1963. The plotters were a nefarious gang of malcontents and Communists, directed from behind the scenes by a sinister mastermind, who, in a stunning denouement, was revealed to be the venal and ambitious vice president. The villains killed their man during an open-air presidential motorcade in Kansas City. Once again Rosa was my first reader, but she did not like it as much as my first effort. Still, I was pleased with my work, and decided to submit the manuscript to the same publishers as last time, just in case. Once again my aunt and I collated copies and addressed envelopes together. We dropped them in the mailbox toward the end of October.
About a month later, during a busy Friday lunch, the door of the diner was flung open and Buddy Steinhoff appeared, panting and red-faced. He glanced around the room, and then ran to the jukebox and ripped the power cord out of the wall. The song came to an abrupt stop in mid-verse. Everyone turned toward Buddy, who was standing in the middle of the room, his eyes wild.
“The president’s been shot!” he cried.
There was instant uproar. Men got to their feet and started shouting; some women began to cry. My father bustled into the back room and retrieved the transistor radio that he sometimes listened to. He placed it on the counter and turned the volume up high. The news from Dallas crackled through the room, and everyone fell still and silent. The horror that I saw on people’s faces was nothing compared to the flat-out terror that was coursing through me. Somewhere in the mailrooms of several New York publishing houses lay fat yellow envelopes, date-stamped one month prior to the killing, setting out exactly how it was all going to go down. There was page after page of irrefutable evidence of my complicity in the crime.
We closed the diner early as people scattered home to watch the tragedy unfold in front of their television sets. I hurried to Rosa’s school where the children had all been dismissed. My aunt sat at her desk, a haunted look on her face. She looked up when I walked in.
“You’d better lock that door behind you,” she said. I did as I was told and then sat down opposite her.
“What are we going to do?” I whispered.
“Nobody’s going to believe that you just made this all up,” she said flatly.
“I chose Kansas City, not Dallas.”
Rosa shook her head. “They won’t care about that.” She sighed. “All it will take is for one person to read your book. They’ll notice the date the packet was mailed, and that will be that.”
Suddenly those yellow envelopes had become death warrants. I swallowed. “Can we get the manuscripts back?”
“I wouldn’t know how,” said Rosa gloomily.
That night we hunkered down in front of the television set and watched events unfold, wondering what on earth we had gotten ourselves into. The mug shot of Lee Harvey Oswald stared out at us from the screen. I wondered what he knew. The awful thought occurred to me that perhaps I’d been right, all along, that this was all Lyndon Johnson’s doing. If he ever got wind of what I’d written . . . it didn’t bear thinking about. After all, he was in charge now. I wondered fearfully what lengths he would go to in order to silence me.
Then Oswald was murdered by Jack Ruby, and we didn’t know what to think. Was Ruby paid to silence the killer, stop him from telling the world what he knew? More important, would they be coming for me next? I waited anxiously for dark-suited FBI agents to pull up in front of the house in an unmarked car. Visions of cold, subterranean rooms crowded my imagination. Interrogators would slam their fists down on the table and scream at me, demanding to know where I’d gotten my information.
For the first time I could remember, my aunt appeared genuinely rattled. Every shadow held sinister secrets, every unexplained noise promised doom. She changed the locks on her front door, and bought a small pistol that she kept in the small table by her bed. We didn’t dare tell anyone else what was going on, in case they, too, were whisked away for knowing too much. I lay awake at night and listened for the telltale sounds of approaching government spooks.
I desperately began to hope that my second book would suffer the same ignominious fate as my first. There was nothing I would have liked more than for those manuscripts to rot, unopened and forgotten, at the bottom of a pile of unsolicited submissions.
Luckily for us, the publishing industry held steady in its continued indifference to my work. My manuscript remained mercifully unread. There was no late-night knock on the door, no clandestine hush-up. As the months passed, Rosa and I slowly allowed ourselves to hope that we might get out alive.
FORTY-FOUR
In 1965 my father hung up his apron and retired from the diner. He was sixty years old, and had cooked enough eggs by then. His back ached pretty much constantly from all those days leaning over the grill, and he was ready for a break from the early mornings.
The restaurant business was changing, too. It seemed that nobody had time to sit down and eat anymore. The nation had climbed into its car, and was reluctant to get out again. Identical drive-through establishments were sprouting up at every highway intersection, a sinister proliferation along America’s arteries. Mammoth corporate franchises competed for market share, coldly slashing prices until smaller restaurants we
re forced to close down.
Luckily for me, none of the big fast-food companies yet had their greedy eyes on our little rural paradise back then. Still, I knew that it was only a matter of time before the grinning colonel and his secret recipe came calling for my customers. One day I would wake up to see those dumb golden arches glinting nearby, ready to run me off. I couldn’t see that there was much point in worrying about it unduly; what would be would be.
My father and I continued to live together in our little house, as content and domesticated as two long-term bachelors can be. Joseph decided that he needed a hobby to occupy him during the long, empty days that he was suddenly facing, and to my bemusement he signed up for a correspondence course in taxidermy. Before long he had transformed the sitting room into a macabre workshop. There were boxes of eyeballs and claws, bags of feathers and false teeth, swatches of variegated pelts. Tacked up on a large board were photographs of deer, otters, and pheasants. An eyeless fox stood in the corner of the room. I found this frozen menagerie rather unsettling, especially since many of the animals were in various stages of either composition or decomposition—I could never quite tell which.
During this time I continued to write, although after the excitement surrounding the president’s assassination, I resolved to stay away from topical themes in the future. My next book was a comedy about a publishing executive from New York who, thanks to a faulty transmission in his rental car, ends up stranded in rural Missouri on his way to Colorado. The publishing executive is accompanied on his travels by his wife, a beautiful but vacuous redhead. The couple unwittingly patronizes and offends the locals, who are good, honest, unpretentious folk. They decide to teach the stuck-up out-of-towners a lesson or two, with, as they say, hilarious results. At least, I thought the results were hilarious. It was certainly deeply cathartic. I inflicted a succession of grotesque humiliations on my fictional nemesis, who suffered on behalf of the entire publishing industry. (Predictably, the redhead got her fair share of grief, too.) Rosa chuckled her way through it, although she would not be drawn into a discussion as to who was funnier, me or P. G. Wodehouse. We performed the now-traditional ritual of sending out the packages to New York, but this time I didn’t even bother waiting for a reply before I began my fourth book, a heartrending coming-of-age tale about a young chess prodigy whose genius goes unnoticed in his small, rural hometown.
Chess was on my mind a lot back then. When I wasn’t writing, I was usually over at Rosa’s house, listening to her complain about her latest ailments and doing battle over the chessboard. We spent the summer of 1972 glued to the television set, watching Bobby Fischer beat Boris Spassky in Reykjavik to become the World Chess Champion. Every day we tuned in to Shelby Lyman on PBS, set up a board, and followed along with the moves. I was hopelessly out of my depth, baffled by the brilliance of the chess and enthralled by the spectacle of it all. Spassky was reserved, chillingly unemotional—a Soviet machine, Rosa and I agreed disapprovingly. Fischer, in contrast, was a neurotic jangle of tics and twitches. He gazed at the board with alarming ferocity. We were looking at the same board, but I knew he was seeing whole universes in those sixty-four squares that I could never imagine.
While I frowned over the chess pieces, Rosa swooned and sighed over Bobby Fischer like a teenager with a first crush. She became quite besotted with him. She was charmingly daffy about it. She wrote him long, impassioned letters of support, addressed simply to “Bobby Fischer, Reykjavik, Iceland.” As the weeks went by and Fischer brilliantly clawed his way back into contention after a disastrous start, Rosa became increasingly partisan in her support. Though she had lived through two world wars, it took a brooding, sociopathic chess genius for her to buy a flag and hang it outside her front door.
After the chess book, I tried my hand at an old-fashioned whodunit, a complicated saga about the murder of the beautiful heiress to a Midwestern cured-meat empire (who just happened to have red hair). On I went in this fashion, producing a new novel every three or four years, with my loyal readership of precisely one. I would have been happy not to even bother the publishers with my manuscripts, but Rosa insisted. I still have copies of each book, stacked neatly side by side on shelves in my spare bedroom. There my words sit, slowly gathering dust, silent testament to thousands of lonely evenings. Sometimes I’ll pull a block of paper down at random and flick through the pages. I do this without rancor or regret. I enjoyed every moment at my typewriter, staging my nightly escapes.
But when Rosa died, I put my typewriter away.
There was nobody left to write for.
My aunt had inherited Jette’s strong political convictions, and she was appalled when Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980. She scoffed at the matinee idol in the White House. She thought him a buffoon. America was doomed, she was fond of telling me, when it chooses movie stars to run the country.
When the president authorized the invasion of Grenada in October 1983, Rosa’s simmering dislike of the man crystallized into full-fledged loathing. America, she seethed, had no right to attack another sovereign state when not a single one of its citizens was under the slightest threat of danger. This was imperialist lunacy. Reagan was just a bully, looking for a fight. Rosa was convinced that he’d approved the aggression in order to deflect attention away from his failing domestic policies. (Since our close brush with the Kennedy assassination, she’d not lost her appetite for juicy conspiracy theories.) She became so obsessed with the president’s wrongdoings that she even stopped discussing her gloomy diagnoses of her latest illnesses with me, preferring instead to rant and rage about the iniquities being perpetrated in Washington.
Looking back, I can’t help wondering if my aunt had some presentiment about what would happen next, whether her anger at Ronald Reagan was a deft piece of legerdemain to distract herself from impending catastrophe. The moment my aunt stopped discussing her poor health, I should have started to worry that she was getting sick.
Rosa died of a heart attack in the summer of 1984. She was seventy-seven years old.
I discovered her body on the kitchen floor. Only the shattered plate that lay close by hinted at the violence of the myocardial infarction that had ripped the life out of her. In the oven was an untended casserole. It had been charred black. The mess would have dismayed her, I knew. I swept up the broken pieces of china and scrubbed the pan clean before picking up the telephone.
After a lifetime of expecting to be struck down by rare and exotic diseases, I knew that Rosa would have been galled to be killed by something as mundane as a heart attack. But perhaps an overburdened heart was appropriate, in the end.
I’d expected a small handful of guests at the visitation, but to my astonishment, half the town was there. I stood at the door of the funeral parlor for three hours. With each sympathetic handshake came a new story about Rosa. It seemed that for every piece of chalk that she had hurled across her schoolroom, there was a quiet act of tenderness that had gone unnoticed by the rest of us. At some point everyone had seen my aunt’s softer side, and nobody forgot it. It didn’t take much: a gentle squeeze of the shoulder, a few whispered words of encouragement, a secretly tendered piece of candy. Over the course of that evening, the threads of a thousand small kindnesses grew into a tapestry, rich with affection.
Rosa had loved every child who ambled reluctantly into her domain. She was a maestro before an unruly orchestra, carving harmony out of chaos. She dragged her charges onward by the sheer force of her will, cajoling them with a pitch-perfect blend of public threats, private encouragement, and great big dollops of love. It had been a remarkable act of selfless devotion, sustained over generations.
That night I lay in bed and wondered whether Rosa had chosen to adore her charges to make amends for her own uneventful love life. It was only when I stood up to address the congregation at her memorial service the following afternoon, and surveyed the packed pews in front of me, that I realized I had it the w
rong way round. My aunt had simply never needed to seek out the uncertain delights of traditional romantic entanglements. Her heart was already full.
To my astonishment, Rosa left me her house in her will.
I won’t pretend that I was sorry to be moving out of my father’s home. After all, I was forty-seven years old and was still sleeping in my childhood bedroom. What was more, Joseph’s gruesome zoo was starting to take over the house. He was getting old by then, and forgetful, and often abandoned projects halfway through. Featherless birds were left to jostle for space with three-legged bobcats and the dismembered head of an elk or two. I had lost count of the number of times I had inadvertently impaled myself on some forgotten antlers. So it was with some relief that I carried my meager belongings down the street and installed myself in Rosa’s house. I had spent so many evenings there over the years that it already felt like home.
My typewriter lay silent in the spare room, surrounded by the forest of words that only Rosa had ever read. I often sat on the sofa and paged through her beloved encyclopedia of infectious diseases, wondering which illness she would have chosen next. The place was dreadfully lonely without her there. I bought two kittens for company. Rosa always hated pets, but I thought she would at least approve of their names—I called them Jeeves and Wooster. They quickly came to treat the place as their own. I left the chess set where it had always sat, its pieces arranged for just one more game.