In short, G, you will be like—I grope, I grovel, for the just-right metaphor—you will be like a town which is on the verge of becoming a ghost town.
5
By late February, after a blizzard which will dump three feet of new snow on top of four feet of old snow, you will have had enough: enough of yourself, if not quite enough to embolden the hand to tie the knot in the rope on the beam in the attic; enough of that house, enough of bachelorhood, enough of listening to and talking to such a dull, vain, obnoxious fool as yourself. Your wife will not come home. Very well. But you will be missing your children, you will lack those three lovely little ladies, the oldest of whom, at ten, will seem to be the only person in the world who would answer your letters. Mightn’t their mother be persuaded to permit you, perhaps, to spend a brief sweet moment or two in their company? You must see. You must go. To Arkansas.
Leaving an entrenched home requires not merely heart but also a head for attending to practical matters: you will have to have your Volvo checked and greased and oiled for the long trip; you will have to give the college secretaries a forwarding address; you will have to notify the post office and the milkman to stop deliveries; you will have to haul loads of garbage and trash to the town dump; and then a full day’s labor will be required to close the house itself: shut off the electricity, close the flues, drain the pipes, put antifreeze in the toilets and drain traps, lock the windows. Kill the furnace.
At the close of the day you will be tired, covered with cobwebs and dust, and feeling both satisfied that the house is sealed in good hibernation and slightly dejected that you will have cut off its vital functions, when you will hear a knocking noise and wonder if you have overlooked one of the pipes or if the house itself is barking in protest against this abandonment. You will turn up your aid and try to locate the source of the knocking. It will occur to you that it might be coming from the door. The door? Who would knock upon the door? Nobody knocks upon your door.
You will open the door. There will be standing a student of yours, or, rather, a former student of yours, Cassandra Laigle, wearing her most gracious smile.
“Sorry to bother you, Dr. G,” she will say. “But I guess you might’ve heard that Yellow House burned down yesterday.”
“No,” you will say. “I hadn’t heard. Won’t you come in.”
She will come into your house, for the first time [rarely, if ever, would you condescend to invite students to your home], and will glance around her at the furnishings of the living room: the exposed ceiling beams, your works of art, your enormous bookcase, although, with the electricity shut off, these things perforce will be illuminated only by the pale light of dusk, which perhaps enhances them. “Beautiful,” she will say. You will not offer her a chair; you will have no time for socializing at the moment. “Are you really living here all alone?” she will ask.
“I was,” you will say.
“Well, the reason I asked,” she will say, “was that, I mean, I don’t have anywhere to stay. The dorms are all filled up, and Yellow House is just a shell, you ought to see it, I think they’re just going to bulldoze it down. I was wondering if, you know, since you’ve got all this room, and nobody here but you, if you would consider letting me…I mean, I would pay you, if it’s not too much, and I wouldn’t be any trouble, just put me anywhere you like….”
Now, it happens that Cassandra Laigle is not at all a bad-looking girl, in fact quite pretty, breasts too small perhaps but otherwise most shapely, and more than once, in the past, G, you have coveted her in your fantasies. And the prospect that she will now be offering is fantastic. You are not a humorous man, G, rarely even smiling, but now you will laugh uproariously.
She will look at first puzzled, and then hurt. “Well, I was just wondering,” she will protest. “I mean, I didn’t know what you would think of the idea, and I certainly didn’t mean to intrude on you or anything.”
“No intrusion,” you will say, controlling yourself and letting your laughter trickle off. “Forgive me. You see, Cass, it’s just the irony. All day I’ve been working to close this place up, so I can get out of here. If you had come to me yesterday, or even this morning, I would have been more than happy to consider it. But now—”
“Oh,” she will say. “You’re leaving? Well, maybe…would you think about letting me keep your house for you while you’re gone?”
“The house could keep you, but you couldn’t keep the house. The furnace is impossible; I can’t manage it myself. Part of the reason I’m leaving.”
“Oh,” she will say, looking forlorn and lost. You will nearly give in, G. You will very, very nearly decide to stay and have her live with you. Would she, in time, move into your bed? She would certainly be someone to talk with, the long nights. Cassandra is a bright girl; never less than B+ in your art history classes; and she is a senior, at least twenty-one. Oh, G, the book you might have written of her life with you! “I’m sorry,” you will say. “Why don’t you try the Huddlesons? I think they have a couple of spare rooms.”
“Well,” she will say, “all right,” but it will be clear that she is disappointed; that she really desires to stay with you. You fool, G! Maybe Yellow House hasn’t even burned down. Maybe she is just looking for an excuse to move in with you and cure your loneliness. Maybe she has had a secret crush on you all these years. Maybe—“Where are you going?” she will ask.
“Arkansas,” you will say.
“Oh,” she will say, and smile. “Are you going to write another book about it?”
You will smile; you will feel flattered; you will remember that Cassandra has been one of the very few students who has brought copies of your books to you for your autographs. “Maybe,” you will say.
“Well, have a good time,” she will say.
“The same to you, Cass. And I hope you find a place to stay. Try the Huddlesons.” She will turn to go. “Oh, wait,” you will say, and as she pauses, you will ask, “Would you like some lettuce?”
“Lettuce?” she will say.
“Yes, I’ve been growing lettuce in pots on my windowsill, and I hate to leave it. If you keep it watered, you might have some big crisp heads in a few more weeks.”
“I don’t have a windowsill…yet,” she will say, almost apologetically, and once more you will waver in your resolve, but recover. “And no kitchens to fix salads in,” she will add, looking beyond you toward your kitchen. “And I wouldn’t much care to just munch on it plain. Thanks just the same.”
You will leave the lettuce to wilt in the window.
Driving out of town that night, you will notice that, sure enough, Yellow House has been consumed in flames.
6
No, Cassandra, thanks just the same, but he isn’t going home to write a book; that isn’t what he is going home for; there will be no more flyleaves for him to ballpoint “For my dear student Cassandra, with fondest regards and best wishes, G.” He is going home to die. You couldn’t have saved him, Cassandra; you must never fault yourself, girl. The salmon at sea, when it feels the time is ripe, fights its way inland to its birthplace, there to spawn and die. But no, dear, he will not spawn another book.
It is merely a question of whether he will be able to wait long enough to let nature take its course, or will have to give nature a little boost, say, by selecting an acute replacement for his chronic suicide: he might drown himself in Lake Maumelle, as James Royal Slater did, or in the Arkansas River, as Margaret Austin tried to do, or he could gain some long-wanted notoriety by being the first to leap from one of Little Rock’s new bank-building skyscrapers. The prophet without honor in his own country opts for dishonor instead.
Once, on his trip home, on the superhighway in western Tennessee, so close to the state line that he can already smell the muddy Mississippi, he will feel such a sudden and unusual tremor in his chest, a queer fibrillation, that he will have to pull the Volvo up quickly by the roadside and stop, and wonder if the final irony would be that he will die here in this alien stat
e before being permitted to cross the state line into his homeland. But it will pass, and he will drive on, and cross the line. Even the squalid ugliness of flatland eastern Arkansas will seem lovely, lovely, to him.
You have wondered, Cass, why a man so infatuated with a rather backward and sparsely populated state that is too far north to be truly southern, too far south to be truly mid-western, and too far east to be truly southwestern, would have chosen to live, instead, in exile as it were, in a New England state so far removed from his homeland. I can’t give you a good answer, but I, who have lived in four different communities in four different states for long periods each, and have pondered much longer than your Dr. G the question of a sense of home, a sense of the right place, can tell you this much, although I’d hate to trample on your tender young sensibilities: the only right place, the only home, for any of us, is that place from whence we originated: nowhere, namely, nonbeing, namely, death. That, perhaps, is what he is going home to. One is never disappointed in going there; one never feels disappointment there, or, for that matter, feels anything. I can tell you, Cass. I’ve been there. The only alternative to that right place is, for as long as you care to stay, some other place. And some other place is never home. Does that answer your question, child? And does it, please tell me, explain why so many of your generation killed themselves with drugs?
G will not have appreciated that I address these remarks to you, nor that, further, I revealed to you the depths of his lump-in-the-throat infatuation with that humble state, an infatuation which, more than anything else, will postpone the ultimate moment of his untimely demise. After a brief and tearful reunion with his three daughters, he will rent for himself, for one month, a room with closet-kitchen on the tenth floor of the Albert Pike Hotel, which had been the most elegant hostelry in Little Rock in the days of his boyhood, but will now, as the pittance he will pay for his room testifies, be faded into demidesuetude. Yet for him it will have its advantages: the enormous, high-ceilinged dining room still serves excellent southern food, and he will have it practically to himself; the elevator is not self-service but still patiently manned by Blacks in livery working their way through college and reading their algebra texts during the long, long waits for passengers, a friendly and most-accommodating assistant manager, Mr. Ruschmier, an ice-making machine right outside his door, full maid service, the morning Arkansas Gazette and the evening Arkansas Democrat delivered to his door, a convenient distance to the best of old Little Rock, that part of town which stubbornly refuses to follow the suburbs to the six-miles-away malls and plazas of the west end. The main public library is a short two blocks if he should ever choose to read a book again or seek inspiration for the writing of one. From his window he can see across the street the enormous Grecian temple of The Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, dedicated to the memory of the same man the hotel is named for, that great Confederate general and humanist who is one of G’s personal heroes.
He will live there a month, the month he will have paid for. The tenth floor is a suitable height for jumping out of, if the moment should ever have come. He will forestall that moment by reading carefully the morning and evening newspapers in search of anything interesting if not inspiring. He will spend as much time with his daughters as their mother will allow, taking them to the zoo, and for long drives in the country. Spring comes in March there, while his New England town is still buried beneath late snows. He will even take his wife to a movie, but it will be a John Cassavetes film that will bore them both to distraction with its ugly documentation of marital difficulties. He will invite his wife to the Albert Pike for a nightcap, but she will have to be in bed early to get up and take the girls for a dentist’s appointment in the morning.
The days and evenings of that month, he will walk a lot, by himself, down the old streets, and back, and meditate, much, about mortality. But most of the time he will stay in his room, occasionally watching local programs and news on television, but usually reading the morning and the evening papers cover to back, with considerable interest, for the most trifling item of Arkansas news has never failed to satisfy him with its newsworthiness, its sense of being of and by and for his people, his own people, though he is sometimes astonished to realize how few, how pitifully few, of these people he has ever personally known.
I tell you these things, Cass, to help you understand why he will have rejected the utterly beautiful offer of your sharing his hearth and his heart, in order that he could go home. I hope you will have found suitable accommodation at the Huddlesons’ house. If you are ever lonely or restless there, I will send to you this clipping, from one of the newspapers G will have been reading, to keep you company and whet your curiosity, until you have his ink on another flyleaf.
STOVING CASE CLOSED, NEW YORK POLICE REPORT
The search for Diana Stoving, 22, daughter of prominent Little Rock insurance executive, B.A. Stoving, has been discontinued by New York police officials, it was learned today by the Stoving family.
Miss Stoving, who disappeared shortly after her graduation from Sarah Lawrence College in June of last year, has not been in communication with her family or friends since that time.
New York police were asked to enter the case in September of last year, on the supposition that Miss Stoving may have taken up residence there.
The family also retained private detectives in the New York area, but without success. According to them, she was last seen, by her college roommate, in the New Jersey city of Garfield. From there, they were unable to trace her.
Miss Stoving, who grew up in Little Rock, was the only child of the President and Chairman of the Board of National Community Life Insurance Company, whose headquarters are in the Union Bank Building.
Keep in touch, Cassandra.
7
It will have been an excuse, G, for riding up the elevator in Little Rock’s newest skyscraper, but now, sitting and waiting in a plush futuristic armchair in the opulent waiting room (Mr. Stoving is in conference, his secretary will say; you should have phoned for an appointment; but you are not able to use a telephone), you will begin to have misgivings. Would he laugh you out of his office? Or call the state asylum to come and get you? You have never had any dealings with gentlemen of his station, save perhaps a father or two briefly greeted on Parents’ Day at the college. You will feel quite out of place in this room, in this building, the business world. You will have carefully donned your only good suit, but it is the big blue-with-yellow-striped tweed you’d picked up in Ireland and quite inappropriate to the business world. His secretary will have taken note of your suit, your long hair, your beard, your gold-rimmed glasses, the button stuck in your ear, and will have asked awkwardly, “What was it you wish to see Mr. Stoving about?” to which you will have mumbled cryptically, “It concerns his daughter.”
You will have to wait for nearly thirty minutes, but even that will not be long enough for you to compose and rehearse your little pitch. When the big inner doors will finally open and out file a half dozen very expensively attired and groomed businessmen, and Miss Secretary will say, “You may go in now, Mr. G,” you will want to say, “I’ve changed my mind. Cancel the appointment.”
But you will go in, into the sumptuous sanctum as big as a dance hall and commanding a fine view of all Little Rock and environs, and when the man gives you his hand and then with the same hand wordlessly gestures you into a chair, you will sit, and size him up for a moment. He is the formidable epitome of Big Business; not even the sympathy you will be feeling for him can quite cleanse the reek of Mammon. He will sit in his own enormous spaceship chair, and will say, “What can I do for you, Mr. G? Or vice versa?”
You will clear your throat. “I know you’re a businessman—I mean a busy man, Mr. Stoving, so I’ll come right to the point. I saw the item in this morning’s Gazette about your daughter missing. I’m a father myself, Mr. Stoving, three lovely little girls, and I asked myself, ‘How would you feel if, when your daughters grew
up, one of them disappeared like that?’ And the answer was, I would feel pretty miserable. So I know how you must feel, Mr. Stoving. I’ve come to offer to find your daughter for you.”
“Yes,” Mr. Stoving will say, and begin giving his head a slow artificial nodding. He will take a Benson and Hedges cigarette from a package on his desk, tap the end of it on his wristwatch, put it in his mouth, then offer you one, but you will already have a Pall Mall burning between your fingers. “Yes,” he will say again, and slowly raise his desk lighter to his cigarette. “I see.” He will take a few puffs, inhale, and exhale: “How much do you propose to charge me?”
“I’m not interested in money, Mr. Stoving,” you will say. This is a grave mistake, G; if you discount the profit motive, you are not speaking his language; you are arousing his suspicions.
“What are you interested in?” he will ask.
“I told you, I have daughters myself, and—”
“Yes, three of them, you said. An improvement. The last guy who offered to find my daughter for me only had two of them.” Mr. Stoving will laugh at his wit, and say, “Now if I could only find somebody who has, say, six daughters, I might allow myself a little optimism. Ha! Yes, you said it, Mr. G, I’m a busy man, a very busy man, and I’ve already squandered untold hours of my time trying to find that girl. So now get your cards out on the table quickly, sir: who are you? Which agency are you from? What contract are you offering?”
“Mr. Stoving,” you will say, somewhat apologetically, “I know you’ll think this is most unusual, but I’m not from any agency or anything. I’m a free agent, you might say. I’m not even an ordinary detective as such, but I’d like to give it a try. I think I could find her. I’m not asking for any money because I don’t really need it. I’m on leave all semester from my college, at full pay, and I’ve sort of been at loose ends, you know. I need something to do. I need to get involved in something. I need a cause, you might say.”
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 67