“Have you considered the Peace Corps?” he will say. “Or the hospital volunteers?” Your eyes will sigh. “Which college?” he will ask you. You will tell him the name of the college, its location, what kind of school it is, the subject you teach. “How did you happen to be in Little Rock?” he will ask. You will explain that too. You will point out that both you and your wife are natives of Little Rock. Then you will boast,
“I’ve written three books about Arkansas. Maybe you’ve heard of them.” And you will name your books.
“My wife reads,” he will say, as if that explains or excuses anything. And then he will say, “I don’t think you know what you’re asking to get into, frankly, sir. And you strike me as rather presumptuous, if I may say so. You’re saying, in effect, ‘The New York police can’t find her, and the best detective agency on the east coast can’t find her, but I can find her.’ And you don’t even have any asparagus.”
“Asparagus?” you will say.
He will look at you oddly. “Experience, I said.”
“Oh,” you will say, and brush back your hair to indicate the button in your ear. “I’m hard of hearing,” you will point out.
Mr. Stoving’s shoulders will slump. You should realize, G, although he will never have told you so, that he has persuaded himself, by this time, that you are part of a diabolical plot. That because you come from the east, from New England, you have some knowledge of his daughter’s whereabouts, which you intend to keep secret until the appropriate moment when you can collect your big reward. He will decide that perhaps his only hope of seeing his daughter again would be to “play along with” your little deception about becoming a private detective.
So he will say, “Very well. I’ve got nothing to lose, have I? If you want to amuse yourself, playing ‘I spy,’ and if, as you say, you aren’t even going to charge me anything….”
You will brighten. “Then you mean you’ll let me do it?…”
“What if you do find her? Then, how much are you going to take me for?”
“Well,” you will say, giving the matter some thought, “if you’d care just to reimburse my expenses or something, if I have any unusual expenses, or traveling expense, or like that….”
Mr. Stoving will grip his desk and lean abruptly toward you. “Listen. I’m a businessman. Let’s not beat around the bush. Let’s talk in round figures, sir. How much do you want? Let’s put it down on paper. Fifty? A hundred? Two hundred?”
“Well, I suppose perhaps two hundred ought to cover the gas and oil.”
“I was speaking in thousands, Mr. G.”
“Oh,” you will say. “Oh, good heavens, please, I told you, I don’t want any profit….”
Mr. Stoving will push a button on his intercom and speak into it: “Louise. Bring your pad.” Then he will turn to you and say, “Now I want my secretary to draw up a little document, which you will sign, and I will sign, and she will sign as a witness, and I want this little document to stipulate exactly and precisely the total amount of cash money that will be transferred from my hand to yours upon the successful completion of your little adventure.”
“Dead or alive?” you will say. You will hate to be so blunt, but it is a minor technicality that has given you some thought.
He will stare at you. “If she’s dead,” he will say coldly, “forget it.”
“Of course. Let me say, Mr. Stoving, that I hope very much to find her alive and in good health. I was only asking.”
The secretary will come in and sit beside him. Mr. Stoving will begin to dictate a string of legal-sounding phrases which you will not be able to follow, catching only a random “party of the first part,” “in good faith,” “whereupon,” “notwithstanding,” “thereunto,” and then he will pause in his dictation. “Now mush, Mr. G.”
“Pardon?” you will say.
“How much?” he will say. “Name your figure.”
“Well…” your mind will have been trying swiftly to calculate the number of miles, the number of meals, the number of motels you might conceivably need. “Would two thousand sound all right?”
He will laugh and swat his secretary on her shoulder. “Bargain basement, isn’t he, Louise?” Then he will suggest to you, “Let’s call it thirty.”
“Dear me, no,” you will protest. “What about five?”
“Twenty,” he will say.
“Ten,” you will say.
“Fifteen,” he will say.
“It doesn’t matter,” you will say. “I really don’t care.”
To Louise he will say, “Make it fifteen.”
When Louise will return to her desk to type up the document, you will point out, “There are some things I’ll need to know. May I ask you a few questions?”
“Fire away,” he will say. But then he will glance at his watch, and say, “No, wait. I’ve got a meeting in five minutes. Why don’t you come to dinner tonight? I’m sure the little lady would be delighted to meet you too.”
8
You will meet her that night, G; you will meet my Annie…although she will not be exactly delighted to meet you, or at least her reserve will not permit her to express whatever delight she might feel at meeting the man who is going to find her lost daughter. I suspect she will be more suspicious of you than Mr. Staving will have been. That’s the way with ex-country girls: they have devoted so much of their energy to adapting themselves to city life’s Proper Society that they have overdone it, have become even less tolerant than natural city people of anything remotely unconventional or outside their ordinary purview, and you, G, will certainly be the most unconventional dinner guest she has ever entertained in her home before.
Her home. It is on Edgehill Road, which gets its name from being the crest of the Heights, the upper crest/crust of the Pulaski Heights as one ascends the steep wind of Cantrell Road. It is an older part of the Heights, much closer to town than the spanking new suburbs, but still the most fashionable address in town, and it is old enough to have enormous trees and lush shrubs, with greenhouses and gardeners. The house itself is a tasteful and authentic reproduction of an antebellum southern plantation house, with high columns and verandas and all. You will wonder why a family with only one child would need that many bedrooms—eight in all. I wondered too, and was sorely inconvenienced, trying to find, in the middle of the night, which of the eight rooms the little girl-child was sleeping in.
Mrs. Stoving, you will discover, does read books, but she has not read yours, nor heard of you, and you will doubt that she really believes you are an author, because, as she will say, she has never entertained an author before, has in fact never met one, unless you count Agnes Roundtree Mazzarelli, the well-known Arkansas poetess, and you do not count Agnes Roundtree Mazzarelli. Mrs. Stoving will ask you to tell her what your books are about, but you will find them hard to describe. Upon learning that you and your wife are native Little Rockians, she will want to know what your father and your wife’s father are in. Your father is in retirement; your wife’s father is in his grave.
You will find her a rather charming woman, nonetheless. There would be a fragility about her which you will find curiously endearing; you will feel that her shell is so thin you could crack it with your fingernail. And she is a lovely woman, for her years: very light blonde hair just beginning to turn white, high cheekbones, pointed chin, deep-set hazel eyes which seem continually wistful and baffled, as if she is not at all certain just where she is, or how she has come to be there, or what is now or ever going to come of it.
From the beginning, you will recognize that she is Mr. Stoving’s plaything, his pet, his slave. He dominates her completely. During the conversation at the dinner table, he will interrupt her so frequently and rudely that you will be tempted to cry in protest, “Please give her a chance to finish!” You will feel that you could learn more about what certain sort of person Diana Stoving had been if you got Mrs. Stoving’s analysis. But you will never have the chance. As soon as the dinner is finished, Mr. Sto
ving will literally dismiss her, and draw you alone into his study, where the butler will serve you Cognac and Cuban cigars, and Mr. Stoving will say, “Well, what else do you need to know, Sherlock?” He has had four whiskey sours before dinner, much wine at dinner, and now the Cognac, which he will keep pouring. But you have not been exactly abstemious yourself, old Guzzler.
“Would you happen to have an extra grotophaff—photograph—of her, which I could keep?”
“Sure thing,” he will say, and fetch a manila envelope from his desk. He will give you a 5 × 7 photograph. “That’s her latest college picture.”
You will study it, enraptured. “She’s beautiful,” you’ll sigh.
“You bet,” he will agree.
“May I ask, if it’s not too personal, why she didn’t have any brothers or sisters? If you’d rather not—”
“That’s okay. Nothing special. Why overpopulate the country? I don’t think Anne—my wife—needed to spend the best years of her life bringing up children. One’s enough. Nothing personal intended; if you and your wife wanted three, that’s your affair.”
“Well then, my next personal question: did you know whether or not your daughter might have been taking any drugs?”
“All of ’em ask me that,” he will say, shrugging. “It’s the first thing they want to know. All I can say is, she never took any that I know of, when she was here at home. And she visited here sometimes for long periods. I mean, if you’re hooked, you can’t go without the stuff for long periods, can you?”
You will look at the photograph again. Her hair was not unusually long. “Would you say she was ever inclined to be a hippie-type, or do you know if she ever consorted with hippies?”
“Not Diana,” he will say. “Not in Little Rock. And not in Bronxville, New York, either.” When you will not pursue the point, he will ask, “Any more questions?” You will have the feeling that perhaps he is impatient to get you off his hands.
“Could you sort of fill me in on any information, however insignificant, that the other detectives managed to dig up?”
Mr. Stoving will sigh and pour himself another glass of Cognac. Then in a bored and businesslike way he will tell you all he knows. You will take careful notes in your indecipherable longhand on 3 by 5 index cards. He will conclude, “…so that’s where the trail stops. Garfield, New Jersey. The service manager who fixed her car there said that she asked him how to find Passaic, or West Passaic, he couldn’t remember which, and he told her how to find it, and that’s the last anybody saw of her. It’s like…it’s like maybe a flying saucer swooped down and picked her up in Passaic or West Passaic and lifted her off the face of the earth. But you don’t believe in flying saucers, do you, Professor?”
“No,” you will say.
“Well, good luck,” he will say, and will begin struggling to lift himself up out of his deep leather armchair.
You will motion for him to stay. “There’s just one more question,” you will tell him. “If you don’t mind. Perhaps my most important question.”
“Well—?” he will say, not really settling down into his chair again. “Ask it.”
“Mr. Stoving, can you think of any reason, or reasons, why your daughter perhaps could be refusing to communicate with you, if she is alive somewhere?”
He will sink back into his chair, rub his hand over his eyes, and reach for the Cognac bottle again. He will pour and drink and begin talking, but he will not be talking to you; he will be mumbling, or grumbling, to himself. What little talent you have for lipreading will catch fragments of word formations on his muttering lips: “enough of this shit…” “more than a man can…” “how long am I…” “snotty little bitch….” Then he will stop for a long moment, and at length he will look up at you with glazed eyes, and will say, “That’s one they haven’t asked me.” Then he will straighten his shoulders a bit and answer your question.
“Who knows?” he will say. “Ask her that, when you find her, will you? I’d like to know. I really would. Maybe she thinks she’s too good for us. Maybe that thirty-thousand-dollar education she got at Sarah Lawrence put ideas into her head. It was her mother’s notion, sending here there. Personally I don’t see why the fucking hell she couldn’t’ve gone to U. of A. or Hendrix or even goddamn U.A.L.R. Spoiled brat! But damn it all, it’s not just her! No, sir! Not just my Diana! It’s her whole fucking generation! By God, a man can’t even pick up his newspaper these days without reading about some new stupid sonofabitching thing that these kids have done. They murder people for kicks, and don’t give a blessed shit for society and institutions, or trying to earn a living or anything! No, I can tell you, mister, Diana was sure one girl who didn’t need to earn a living! Oh boy, she was fixed for life! So now what do I read in the papers that these motherfucking psychiatrists are telling us? They’re telling us that the problems of the younger generation are our fault! They say we haven’t been strict enough, we haven’t been firm enough, we haven’t given our kids enough serious attention! Do you believe that bullshit? Do you? Not me, brother! I’m not buying that crap for one minute. Don’t you try and lay that one on me! I was a good father, goddammit! A good father! All a girl could ask….” Mr. Stoving’s shoulders will be shaking, his eyes will be wet, he will seem about to break down. He will begin mumbling to himself again. You will take leave of him now, G. You will thank him for the dinner, and tell him that you hope very much to be able to return his daughter to him in the near future. But as you are leaving, you will be thinking, I don’t really feel much sympathy for him. Whatever sympathy you will be feeling will be entirely for Diana. And you will suddenly realize that you have no intention, if you do succeed in finding her, of returning her to this world that she came from.
9
I wish I could enrich the comedy of your gallant chase, G, by tapping you on the shoulder and lightly pointing out to you that on the same day you will go roaring off out of Arkansas to begin your great hunt, on that very same day we will be crossing into Arkansas on our way to our final town. But the dates won’t coincide; there will be a gap of a week or so in between; we will already be settled in Arkansas before you will have first heard of Diana. As a little consolation, then, I’ll play on my fiddle this robust rendition of the “William Tell Overture,” as background music for your dauntless departure for places unknown. Tiddle-lump, tiddle-lump, tiddle lump lump LUMP!
First stop: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. You will locate Miss Susan Trombley, working in the steno pool of a large law firm. You will offer to take her to lunch, but Miss Trombley, a pretty redhead, will be at first reluctant to accept your invitation. “Look,” she will say, “I’ve told you guys all I know. I’m not hiding anything, really. I just don’t have anything else to say about Diana.”
“This is different,” you will say, mysteriously. “I’m different. I’m not one of those guys.” And you will take her to lunch, at a quiet and out-of-the-way coffee shop on Federal Street. During the meal, you will talk not about Diana but about yourselves. Upon learning that she had majored in printmaking at Sarah Lawrence, you will reveal that you are associate professor of art history at Winfield, and have done some printmaking yourself. You will discover that you are both admirers of the work of Antonio Frasconi; she will invite you to come up and see her wood engravings sometime. Then, over coffee after the meal, you will casually introduce your business: “I understand you were one of the last persons to see Diana before she disappeared.”
Well, she will say, yes, she was the last of Diana’s friends to see her after graduation. They were on the way home to Susan’s parents’ home in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, when Diana’s new car developed a problem in the shock absorber and they had to stop in Garfield. Susan had been concerned about being late for a dinner-and-theatre date she had set up for herself and Diana with two Princeton men, so Diana had urged her to go on home alone on the bus while she waited to have her car repaired.
“She told me she might go home, meaning Little Rock, or she might g
o into New York to audition with a dance group. But I just know she didn’t really want to do either one. Poor Diana. Maybe she did go into New York and maybe she got mixed up with some hippies and got murdered, for all I know. She was always an odd one. We were roommates the last year at Sarah Lawrence, and she was always doing funny little things, like going out on the lawn in the middle of the night to sit under a tree and ‘commune with the night,’ as she put it. The reason I know she didn’t really want to go to New York and join a dance group is that once, when we were talking about what we’d really like to do after graduation, if we could do anything we wanted, she told me a very strange notion she’d had to spend a year or more just driving along old roads that weren’t much used any more. She’d checked out this book from the Sarah Lawrence library, by J.R. Humphreys, I think it was called The Lost Roads of America, and she said she’d like to do something like that, traveling old roads.”
You will inform Susan Trombley that Diana’s father has mentioned to you that Susan had mentioned the book to the detectives from the agency he’d retained, and, at considerable expense, the agency has investigated the entire route described in the Humphreys book, from New Jersey to California, without finding anyone who had seen Diana or her car.
“Oh,” Susan will say. “Well, I could have told them not to bother. Diana was too…well, she was too original just to duplicate what somebody else had already done. She would have had to find her own roads.”
You will sigh, wondering which of the 132,796 roads of America Diana might be traveling on. But it is a lead, a slim lead, and you will have had no leads at all until now.
“Miss Trombley,” you will say, “I’d like to go over with you, sort of reconstruct, if you can, that last afternoon when you were with Diana. She intended to go with you to your home in Ardmore, but at some point during that afternoon, she changed her mind. Do you have any idea why she changed her mind?”
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 68