I close my eyes seeing Annie’s red hair, the color of passion, but a persistent Eddie Scissons again elbows his way into my dreams.
“Do you believe in a hereafter?” he asks.
“Seems to me that’s getting into religion,” I say softly. “I try never to discuss religion or politics—I don’t have enough friends that I can afford to.”
“I’m a very religious man,” says Eddie, spreading his large hands on the maple tabletop at the Friendship Center. My dream is an exact videotape replay of a conversation we have had.
“When I go, I’ll have them bring my body down here to the Friendship Center, and my baseball boys will come down and look at me laying there, and they’ll say, ‘Yep, that’s Eddie, and he’s dead as Billy-be-damned, so you can put the lid down on the coffin now and drive in the nails,’ and they’ll carry me over to the graveyard where I got a plot not far from my Ellen, and not very far from the Black Angel.”
“The baseball boys?” I say. And I think of Eddie’s plot being near the Black Angel, a twelve-foot bronze monument of a dark angel with wings spread in a protective gesture. She has stood for over half a century above the grave of a much-loved son of a Czech immigrant woman. The angel has become part of Iowa City folkways, and one of the many rumors about it is that if you kiss a virgin girl beneath the shadow of the angel’s wings at midnight, the statue will turn white.
“The baseball boys,” Eddie repeats. “Kept in touch with my teammates over the years, I have. They’re all gone now, but their sons are around. We exchange cards at Christmas.” And he smiles and shakes his head up and down as if stirring memories up from darkness. “I’ve asked some of them, one of Heinie Zimmerman’s boys; and Wildfire Schulte, why one of his grandsons was here to see me not three years ago, lives in Chicago and has a season ticket to the Cubs, took me there for a three-game series against St. Louis and I slept in his guest room, a very successful boy he is; and King Cole, he come from out around Toledo, Iowa, his son’s gonna be one of my pallbearers. They all are. They’re my baseball boys, and they like to hear about the old days and about their daddies and their granddaddies.” Eddie’s eyes move far away, and he stares over my head, far beyond the window that overlooks Gilbert Street, perhaps at a varnished coffin being wheeled out onto the diamond at Wrigley Field. Perhaps he sees the flag at half-mast, and the players, hats in hands, standing solemnly at attention as a bugler plays taps in feeble memory of the oldest Chicago Cub.
In the morning, while Jerry goes for a haircut and to buy a clean shirt, I head for the Chisholm Public Library, where I immerse myself in yellowed issues of the Chisholm Tribune-Herald, picking my way through the town’s long-dead past, feeling as if I have just entered an attic untouched for three-quarters of a century.
Almost immediately, I uncover a baseball-sized nugget.
POPULAR DOCTOR CUPID’S VICTIM
Miss Alicia Madden and A. W. Graham Take Solemn Vows. Wed at Rochester.
The popular Dr. A. W. Graham left Chisholm on Monday, ostensibly to attend a clinic at the Medical and Surgical Center at Rochester, but from a clipping taken from the Rochester Daily Bulletin, which follows, the clinic is entirely the doctor’s own. He is still enjoying it, having left immediately for a honeymoon trip to the far eastern states. The boys are waiting for his return.
“Amid the most charming autumnal decorations, fifty guests assembled at Silver Creek Farm to witness the nuptials which united Miss A. V. Madden and Dr. A. W. Graham of Chisholm. The ceremony took place at the parsonage of St. John’s Church, the officiating priest being Rev. Fr. Murphy.”
The remainder of the clipping lists the guests and bridesmaids, and discusses the attire of the bridal party. What is interesting is that none of Doc’s relatives were present.
I meet Jerry and suggest we start the long process of interviewing people. I imagine we will work together. Jerry has purchased a stenographer’s notebook, and I assume he will studiously make notes of conversations while I lurk in the background.
“I work alone,” says Jerry, holding the closed notebook against his chest.
“You sound like a detective in a 1947 B movie,” I say, trying not to appear offended.
“I have my own assignment to complete, remember. I’m the only one who knows how to do it.”
Jerry walks away, his shoulders slightly stooped, and I am left alone in the middle of Lake Street, the main street of Chisholm, Minnesota.
People are friendly and eager to talk about Doc Graham, but a pattern soon develops. “Oh, I don’t know much about him,” they say, “but you should talk to so-and-so.” I conscientiously write down the name of so-and-so. This scenario is repeated several times until the names of the first people I talked to start reappearing at the top of the list. After I discover this, I press each person for a memory of Doc.
“Do you remember anything special, or funny, or wonderful, or awful?” I ask again and again. And much to my surprise, I come to life more with each interview, become happy as a boy selling magazine subscriptions to long-suffering neighbors.
At the motel we compare notes on what we have found, but Jerry is careful not to let me see what he has written in the notebook. I read Jerry the most interesting quotes I have gathered:
“He never missed a baseball or football game. My daughter was a pretty hefty girl. Doc took a look at her sitting in her slip on the wooden chair in his office and he said, ‘Too bad she’s a girl. She’d make a great tackle for the football team.’ Doc was the kind of man who could get away with saying something like that—why if anybody else had said that, we’d have both been really offended.”
“We all went to a tournament in Minneapolis once. Doc found out some of us didn’t have a place to stay, so he sneaked us into his room until there were eleven or twelve of us. When he realized there were so many of us he just shook his head and walked off and got himself another room.”
“Doc didn’t drink or smoke, but he used to chew up paper and spit it out wherever he went. If you were around Doc very long, you learned to duck. Doc was at a convention in Chicago and I guess they gave out sample cigarette packages. He didn’t approve of my smoking, but he sent me the sample anyway. Just addressed it to my name with ‘NORD SIDE OF TOWN‘ for an address.”
“What are you guys doin’ here anyway? It’s just like you got shovels and are diggin’ Doc Graham up.”
“Alicia Madden was teaching school here when she met Doc. When I was a little girl, she was my teacher. We just held our breath when she walked into the room, she was so beautiful. We used to call her Miss Flower. I don’t know if she knew that or not.”
“Doc used to play for the New York Giants. Oh, for several years, I think. He never talked about it. I never heard of him being called Moonlight.”
That night I sleep more peacefully; my only dream is of Shoeless Joe Jackson and the phantom White Sox standing silently in left field staring down at something, sadly.
By the time I get to the nearby Country Kitchen Restaurant for breakfast, I find Salinger surrounded. Like the Pied Piper, he has accumulated a flock of followers. Several tables have been pushed together, and he sits at the head drinking coffee and making notes. As I squeeze in beside him, I can feel the room get quiet. Salinger gulps the last of his coffee, excuses himself. Those around the table are mostly men past retirement age. I have not been introduced, but the men obviously know I am connected with Salinger, and after a long, uneasy silence, they begin talking to me.
“Everybody’s talking about you two,” says Louis, a stalky, balding man with a broad face and bent nose. “Mario and Frank,” and he waves his hand to indicate two others at the table, “came over to my place last night, and we told Doc Graham stories until after midnight. I bet it was the same all over town. I have some stories to tell you. I even wrote some of them down.” He drags from the pocket of his plaid shirt a lined paper ripped from a coiled-ring scribbler, the left edge ragged.
“Memory’s a funny thing,” he goes
on. “It’s like all those memories we have of Doc Graham had gone to sleep and sunk way down inside us.” He pats his ample tummy. “But once you started asking about him and started us talking about him, why they swum right up to the surface again. It’s almost like you brought Doc back to life.
“This morning while I was walking down here, I looked south from Lake Street, down Third toward the school, and I thought I seen him, his white hair bobbing along, his black overcoat open, like it always was even if it was fifty below zero, and him carrying an umbrella, like he always did. He claimed he carried it out of habit, for something to hang on to and ‘to beat away all my lady admirers,’ and he used to laugh about that. Only the umbrella he was carrying must have belonged to his wife, because it was all pale blue and silky and had little flowers growing out of it. She always wore blue—I bet you didn’t know that. My wife was a student of hers. Anyway, you see what you’ve gone and done. I’m seeing Doc Graham walking down the street like he was, oh, thirty years ago. And him wearing his overcoat in June. The memory sure does you strange sometimes.”
“He’s been dead about twenty years. You should write about the living. To heck with the dead,” says a gruff voice from the end of the table. But he is quickly shouted down, and everyone present passes me one or more bits of information about Doc Graham.
“Alicia did like blue. Doc used to buy hats for her—most always blue ones with lots of flowers on them. I think the stores used to order in blue hats because they knew Doc would buy them. When they tore down the old school after Doc retired, why they found a half-dozen hatboxes in his closet with brand-new hats in them. I wonder if anybody ever told Alicia. It would tickle her to know—if she’s still alive.”
The man who said crossly that I should write about the living is now pacing up and down behind me, racking his brains, stopping frequently to put his hand on my shoulder.
“Let me tell you a story,” he says finally, tapping his glasses frames. “Doc gave me my first pair of glasses, but that’s not the story. Doc had as many pockets in his suit as a magician. Why, he’d reach in, and out would come an orange or a peanut or some candy, or there’d be a silver flash and he’d pop a dime into the hand of each child he’d meet. Doc had money in every pocket, and not just silver. He gave away more free glasses than any man in Minnesota. Can you imagine a doctor giving away eyeglasses today?”
“I thought of him like he was a Joe DiMaggio,” says a quiet man who declines to elaborate.
“He wrote by moving his paper up and down under the pen. And he used to chew up his prescription slips, so he was always looking for scraps of paper, and sometimes his patients used to have to dig into their pockets for a piece of paper so Doc could write a prescription.”
“I went with him to make a housecall up at one of the camps,” says a woman who has not spoken before. “The husband was sick and they had no heat—no stove. When we got back to Chisholm, Doc went to the hardware store and bought a stove for them and paid to have it delivered. And I bet that wasn’t the only time he did something like that.”
“He could show you every spot where there had ever been a hitching post in Chisholm. He had that kind of mind.”
“And that man had an arm on him,” says another. “ ‘Feel my muscles,’ he used to say to us boys. Never put on an extra pound in his life, and used to brag that he never let another doctor examine him. One day over at the ballpark, he wandered down from the stands after a game. ‘Let me see that ball,’ he said to us, and one of us tossed him the ball. He studied it for a minute, looked at it so long I thought he’d forgotten what he was doing with it, and then he walked over behind home plate, cranked up his arm in a kind of comical way, reared back, and fired that ball over the left-field fence, and it was still rising when it disappeared. He just smiled at us and nodded, and then he wandered off, shuffling along, looking kind of lost the way he always did. But what an arm. There ain’t many young men could have done that—three hundred thirty-five feet it was, and him at least fifty at the time. A hell of an arm.”
“Doc came here in 1909 just after most of the town burnt up. He just grew with the town. Chisholm’s a mining town, always has been, always will be. Whole area is called the Iron Range. Town used to have ten thousand people, but we’re down to four thousand now. All the underground mines are closed, just strip mining left. Needed a lot of men to dig in the old days, there was mining camps like sores all over the hills. But the mines were good to the town. Better than most big industries. They paid for the doctors to come here, and brought in the first teachers and built the schools. It wasn’t all take; they put back into the community. Even in the thirties there was a market for iron ore, so we hardly felt the depression up here.”
Back at the newspaper office, Veda Ponikvar hands me the small wallet-sized photo of Moonlight Graham in his New York Giant uniform. She passes it to me as a bishop might hand a religious object to a peasant—formally, hoping against hope that no harm will come to it. I hold it in both hands as if I am receiving the sacrament. I’m tempted to offer to leave my watch or wallet or belt as security—something tangible to prove that I intend to get it back to her safely. I carry it off to Chisholm’s only photo studio and order reprints, pay for them to be mailed to Iowa, and extract a solemn promise from the photographer to return the photo to Veda as soon as he is finished with it.
On the way to the motel I buy a newspaper, a Chicago Tribune, thick as a folded bath towel. On an inside page, above a two-column story the shape of a paperback book, is the headline: j. D. SALINGER MISSING. In summary, the story states only that a relative in California notified police after receiving no answer to repeated telephone calls. The piece concludes by saying that there are no known clues and that the police, for the moment, state that they do not suspect foul play.
I show the paper to Jerry.
He goes immediately to the phone and places a call to his son in California.
I decide to leave him alone, and head across to the Country Kitchen Restaurant for coffee and an apple dumpling. The apple dumplings may be addictive. I picture myself, years in the future, toothless, in rags, begging quarters in front of a Country Kitchen. “Spare change, sir? I only need thirty-five cents more for an apple dumpling. Sixty cents and I can have cinnamon ice cream with it. God bless you, sir.”
“My son says they’re camped in his driveway. Way out there. Can you imagine it?” explodes Jerry when I return to the room. “They’re probably breaking up my jeep and selling the pieces for souvenirs.” He laughs a little wildly and shakes his head.
“My son’s going to issue a bulletin. He’ll say he’s had a call from me and that I’m in a monastery in Peru eating goat cheese and contemplating the meaning of life. That’s what they expect. I told him to say that I’m thinking of changing my name to Dusty Chisholm because I’m planning to write a western novel. But he says that’s too silly. He has a level head, my son.”
“You must be getting lots of material out of this trip,” I say to Salinger late that evening as we linger over apple dumplings at the restaurant. I am on my second one. “I get abusive if I eat more than one,” says Jerry. “You wouldn’t want to have to bail me out, would you?” We smile. Then his expression changes.
“Material? Like what?” As he looks at me, the tension lines between his eyebrows deepen, and I realize that I have ventured over that mystical line into a writer’s domain, a place where I do not belong.
I can think of nothing to do with the stories I’ve gathered about Doc, except to tell them to Salinger, who, to my consternation, makes no notes. “Doc’s life. Couldn’t you write a wonderful story about Doc? I mean, sixty years the small-town doctor—pillar of the community …”
“Friend to those who have no friend; enemy to those who make him an enemy,” says Salinger, in a good imitation of a radio announcer.
“That’s cruel.”
“But accurate. Nobody cares anymore. Half the communities in North America have a Doc Graham. We’ve
come up here and spaded up people’s memories of Doc, but what we’ve uncovered is all good: no paramours, no drunken binges, no opium habit…”
“No illegitimate children.”
“No crazy wife locked in the attic.”
“No shady financial dealings.”
“No evicting orphans, or midnight abortions.” Jerry stops and shakes his head wearily. “It’s a sad time when the world won’t listen to stories about good men. It’s one of the reasons I don’t publish anymore.”
“Oh, but you should. You should. Look. I want to show you something.” I dig frantically through the compartments of my wallet. Past shining Master Charge and oil-company credit cards, past a picture of Karin, her baby face smiling from inside a white bonnet; past various pictures of Annie, her red hair shimmering: Annie in pigtails standing beside her father’s 1950 Ford; Annie as a cheerleader for West High in Iowa City; Annie pregnant, looking as if she is hugging a watermelon; Annie all in denim smiling at me in that way she has. From inside one of the plastic photo holders, I produce a ratty clipping and thrust it at Salinger:
You do something in your stories that few writers do well—especially today—and that is to make the reader love your characters. They exude a warm glow. They are so real, so vulnerable, so good, that they remind me of that side of human nature which makes living and loving and striving after dreams worth the effort. I, for one, came away with a delicious smile on my face and a soft little tear in my eye—and I felt pretty damn good about being alive for the rest of the day. Thank you.
“Have you ever seen that before?” I ask.
“No.”
“It’s an excerpt from a fan letter to you. I cut it out of the Saturday Evening Post in 1957, and I’ve carried it with me ever since. How can you not publish, when people love you so?”
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