by Peter Straub
“To you, maybe,” Max said. “You’d accept two sides as long as they were both printed in The Nation.”
“Anyhow,” Bill said, “please tell your friend that the next time she cares to visit this hospital, we’ll try to remember what she said about decency.”
“What makes you think she’s going to come here again?”
“She seemed very fond of you,” Tony said.
“The lady mentioned your limitations.” Chippie finished assembling his assortment of treats and at last refastened his gaping robe. “I’m surprised you have any interest in seeing her again.”
Tony’s cheeks turned a deeper red. “All of us have limitations, I’m sure. In fact, I was just remembering…”
“Oh?” Chippie lifted his snout and peered through his little lenses. “Were you? What, specifically?”
“Nothing,” said Tony. “I shouldn’t have said anything. Sorry.”
“Did any of you know Mrs. LaValley, the lady in 21R-12?” Bill asked. “She died last night. Apart from us, she was the only other person on the floor.”
“I knew Edie LaValley,” Chippie said. “In fact, my friend and I dropped in and had a nice little chat with her just before dinnertime last night. I’m glad I had a chance to say goodbye to the old girl.”
“Edie LaValley?” Max said. “Hold on. I seem to remember…”
“Wait, I do too,” Bill said. “Only…”
“I know, she was that girl who worked for Nick Wheadle over at Viking, thirty years ago, back when Wheadle was everybody’s golden boy,” Tony said. “Stupendous girl. She got married to him and was Edith Wheadle for a while, but after the divorce she went back to her old name. We went out for a couple of months in 1983, ’84. What happened to her after that?”
“She spent six years doing research for me,” Traynor said. “She wasn’t my only researcher, because I generally had three of them on the payroll, not to mention a couple of graduate students. Edie was very good at the job, though. Extremely conscientious.”
“And knockout, drop-dead gorgeous,” Tony said. “At least before she fell into Nick Wheadle’s clutches.”
“I didn’t know you used so many researchers,” Max said. “Could that be how you wound up quoting all those…?”
“Deliberately misquoting, I suppose you mean,” Chippie said. “But the answer is no.” A fat, sugarcoated square of sponge cake disappeared beneath his nose.
“But Edie Wheadle,” Max said in a reflective voice. “By God, I think I…”
“Think nothing of it,” Traynor said. “That’s what she did.”
“Edie must have looked very different toward the end,” said Tony. He sounded almost hopeful. “Twenty years, illness, all of that.”
“My friend and I thought she looked much the same.” Chippie’s mild, creaturely face swung toward Tony Flax. “Weren’t you about to tell us something?”
Tony flushed again. “No, not really.”
“Perhaps an old memory resurfaced. That often happens on a night when someone in the vicinity dies—the death seems to awaken something.”
“Edie’s death certainly seemed to have awakened you,” Bill said. “Didn’t you ever hear of closing your door?”
“The nurses waltz right in anyhow, and there are no locks,” Traynor said. “Better to be frank about matters, especially on Floor 21. It looks as though Max has something on his mind.”
“Yes,” Max said. “If Tony doesn’t feel like talking, I will. Last night, an old memory of mine resurfaced, as Chippie puts it, and I’d like to get it off my chest, if that’s the appropriate term.”
“Good man,” Traynor said. “Have another of those delicious little yummies and tell us all about it.”
“This happened back when I was a little boy,” Max said, wiping his lips with a crisp linen handkerchief.
Bill Messenger and Tony Flax seemed to go very still.
“I was raised in Pennsylvania, up in the Susquehanna Valley area. It’s strange country, a little wilder and more backward than you’d expect, a little hillbillyish, especially once you get back in the Endless Mountains. My folks had a little store that sold everything under the sun, it seemed to me, and we lived in the building next door, close to the edge of town. Our town was called Manship, not that you can find it on any map. We had a one-room schoolhouse, an Episcopalian church and a Unitarian church, a feed and grain store, a place called the Lunch Counter, a Tract House, and a tavern called the Rusty Dusty, where, I’m sad to say, my father spent far too much of his time.
“When he came home loaded, as happened just about every other night, he was in a foul mood. It was mainly guilt, d’you see, because my mother had been slaving away in the store for hours, plus making dinner, and she was in a rage, which only made him feel worse. All he really wanted to do was to beat himself up, but I was an easy target, so he beat me up instead. Nowadays, we’d call it child abuse, but back then, in a place like Manship, it was just normal parenting, at least for a drunk. I wish I could tell you fellows that everything turned out well, and that my father sobered up, and we reconciled, and I forgave him, but none of that happened. Instead, he got meaner and meaner, and we got poorer and poorer. I learned to hate the old bastard, and I still hated him when a traveling junk wagon ran over him, right there in front of the Rusty Dusty, when I was eleven years old. 1935, the height of the Great Depression. He was lying passed out in the street, and the junkman never saw him.
“Now, I was determined to get out of that godforsaken little town, and out of the Susquehanna Valley and the Endless Mountains, and obviously I did, because here I am today, with an excellent place in the world, if I might pat myself on the back a little bit. What I did was, I managed to keep the store going even while I went to the high school in the next town, and then I got a scholarship to U. Penn., where I waited on tables and tended bar and sent money back to my mother. Two days after I graduated, she died of a heart attack. That was her reward.
“I bought a bus ticket to New York. Even though I was never a great reader, I liked the idea of getting into the book business. Everything that happened after that you could read about in old copies of Publishers Weekly. Maybe one day I’ll write a book about it all.
“If I do, I’ll never put in what I’m about to tell you now. It slipped my mind completely—the whole thing. You’ll realize how bizarre that is after I’m done. I forgot all about it! Until about three this morning, that is, when I woke up too scared to breathe, my heart going bump bump, and the sweat pouring out of me. Every little bit of this business just came back to me, I mean everything, every goddamned little tiny detail…”
He looked at Bill and Tony. “What? You two guys look like you should be back in the ER.”
“Every detail?” Tony said. “It’s…”
“You woke up then too?” Bill asked him.
“Are you two knotheads going to let me talk, or do you intend to keep interrupting?”
“I just wanted to ask this one thing, but I changed my mind,” Tony said. “Sorry, Max. I shouldn’t have said anything. It was a crazy idea. Sorry.”
“Was your Dad an alcoholic too?” Bill asked Tony Flax.
Tony squeezed up his face, said, “Aaaah,” and waggled one hand in the air. “I don’t like the word ‘alcoholic.’ ”
“Yeah,” Bill said. “All right.”
“I guess the answer is, you’re going to keep interrupting.”
“No, please, Max, go on,” Bill said.
Max frowned at both of them, then gave a dubious glance to Chippie Traynor, who stuffed another tiny cream cake into his maw and smiled around it.
“Fine. I don’t know why I want to tell you about this anyhow. It’s not like I actually understand it, as you’ll see, and it’s kind of ugly and kind of scary—I guess what amazes me is that I just remembered it all, or that I managed to put it out of my mind for nearly seventy years, one or the other. But you know? It’s like, it’s real even if it never happened, or even if I dre
amed the whole thing.”
“This story wouldn’t happen to involve a house, would it?” Tony asked.
“Most goddamned stories involve houses,” Max said. “Even a lousy book critic ought to know that.”
“Tony knows that,” Chippie said. “See his ridiculous coat? That’s a house. Isn’t it, Tony?”
“You know what this is,” Tony said. “It’s a trench coat, a real one. Only from World War II, not World War I. It used to belong to my father. He was a hero in the war.”
“As I was about to say,” Max said, looking around and continuing only when the other three were paying attention, “when I woke up in the middle of the night I could remember the feel of the old blanket on my bed, the feel of pebbles and earth on my bare feet when I ran to the outhouse, I could remember the way my mother’s scrambled eggs tasted. The whole anxious thing I had going on inside me while my mother was making breakfast.
“I was going to go off by myself in the woods. That was all right with my mother. At least it got rid of me for the day. But what she didn’t know was that I had decided to steal one of the guns in the case at the back of the store.
“And you know what? She didn’t pay any attention to the guns. About half of them belonged to people who swapped them for food because guns were all they had left to barter with. My mother hated the whole idea. And my father was in a fog until he could get to the tavern, and after that he couldn’t think straight enough to remember how many guns were supposed to be back in that case. Anyhow, for the past few days, I’d had my eye on an over-under shotgun that used to belong to a farmer called Hakewell, and while my mother wasn’t watching I nipped in back and took it out of the case. Then I stuffed my pockets with shells, ten of them. There was something going on way back in the woods, and while I wanted to keep my eye on it, I wanted to be able to protect myself, too, in case anything got out of hand.”
Bill Messenger jumped to his feet and for a moment seemed preoccupied with brushing what might have been pastry crumbs off the bottom of his suit jacket. Max Baccarat frowned at him, then glanced down at the skirts of his dressing gown in a brief inspection. Bill continued to brush off imaginary particles of food, slowly turning in a circle as he did so.
“There is something you wish to communicate,” Max said. “The odd thing, you know, is that for the moment, you see, I thought communication was in my hands.”
Bill stopped fiddling with his jacket and regarded the old publisher with his eyebrows tugged toward the bridge of his nose and his mouth a thin, downturned line. He placed his hands on his hips. “I don’t know what you’re doing, Max, and I don’t know where you’re getting this. But I certainly wish you’d stop.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He’s right, Max,” said Tony Flax.
“You jumped-up little fop,” Max said, ignoring Tony. “You damned little show pony. What’s your problem? You haven’t told a good story in the past ten years, so listen to mine, you might learn something.”
“You know what you are?” Bill asked him. “Twenty years ago, you used to be a decent second-rate publisher. Unfortunately, it’s been all downhill from there. Now you’re not even a third-rate publisher, you’re a sellout. You took the money and went on the lam. Morally, you don’t exist at all. You’re a fancy dressing gown. And by the way, Graham Greene didn’t give it to you, because Graham Greene wouldn’t have given you a glass of water on a hot day.”
Both of them were panting a bit and trying not to show it. Like a dog trying to choose between masters, Tony Flax swung his head from one to the other. In the end, he settled on Max Baccarat. “I don’t really get it either, you know, but I think you should stop, too.”
“Nobody cares what you think,” Max told him. “Your brain dropped dead the day you swapped your integrity for a mountain of coffee sweetener.”
“You did marry for money, Flax,” Bill Messinger said. “Let’s try being honest, all right? You sure as hell didn’t fall in love with her beautiful face.”
“And how about you, Traynor?” Max shouted. “I suppose you think I should stop, too.”
“Nobody cares what I think,” Chippie said. “I’m the lowest of the low. People despise me.”
“First of all,” Bill said, “if you want to talk about details, Max, you ought to get them right. It wasn’t an ‘over-under shotgun,’ whatever the hell that is, it was a—”
“His name wasn’t Hakewell,” Tony said. “It was Hackman, like the actor.”
“It wasn’t Hakewell or Hackman,” Bill said. “It started with an A.”
“But there was a house,” Tony said. “You know, I think my father probably was an alcoholic. His personality never changed, though. He was always a mean son of a bitch, drunk or sober.”
“Mine, too,” said Bill. “Where are you from, anyhow, Tony?”
“A little town in Oregon, called Milton. How about you?”
“Rhinelander, Wisconsin. My dad was the chief of police. I suppose there were lots of woods around Milton.”
“We might as well have been in a forest. You?”
“The same.”
“I’m from Boston, but we spent the summers in Maine,” Chippie said. “You know what Maine is? Eighty percent woods. There are places in Maine, the roads don’t even have names.”
“There was a house,” Tony Flax insisted. “Back in the woods, and it didn’t belong there. Nobody builds houses in the middle of the woods, miles away from everything, without even a road to use, not even a road without a name.”
“This can’t be real,” Bill said. “I had a house, you had a house, and I bet Max had a house, even though he’s so long-winded he hasn’t gotten to it yet. I had an air rifle, Max had a shotgun, what did you have?”
“My dad’s .22,” Tony said. “Just a little thing—around us, nobody took a .22 all that seriously.”
Max was looking seriously disgruntled. “What, we all had the same dream?”
“You said it wasn’t a dream,” said Chippie Traynor. “You said it was a memory.”
“It felt like a memory, all right,” Tony said. “Just the way Max described it—the way the ground felt under my feet, the smell of my mother’s cooking.”
“I wish your lady friend was here now, Traynor,” Max said. “She’d be able to explain what’s going on, wouldn’t she?”
“I have a number of lady friends,” Chippie said, calmly stuffing a little glazed cake into his mouth.
“All right, Max,” Bill said. “Let’s explore this. You come across this big house, right? And there’s someone in it?”
“Eventually, there is,” Max said, and Tony Flax nodded.
“Right. And you can’t even tell what age he is—or even if it is a he, right?”
“It was hiding in the back of a room,” Tony says. “When I thought it was a girl, it really scared me. I didn’t want it to be a girl.”
“I didn’t, either,” Max said. “Oh—imagine how that would feel, a girl hiding in the shadows at the back of a room.”
“Only this never happened,” Bill said. “If we all seem to remember this bizarre story, then none of us is really remembering it.”
“Okay, but it was a boy,” Tony said. “And he got older.”
“Right there in that house,” said Max. “I thought it was like watching my damnable father grow up right in front of my eyes. In what, six weeks?”
“About that,” Tony said.
“And him in there all alone,” said Bill. “Without so much as a stick of furniture. I thought that was one of the things that made it so frightening.”
“Scared the shit out of me,” Tony said. “When my dad came back from the war, sometimes he put on his uniform and tied us to the chairs. Tied us to the chairs!”
“I didn’t think it was really going to injure him,” Bill said.
“I didn’t even think I’d hit him,” Tony said.
“I knew damn well I’d hit him,” Max said. “I wanted to blow his head off.
But my dad lived another three years, and then the junkman finally ran him over.”
“Max,” Tony said, “you mentioned there was a Tract House in Manship. What’s a Tract House?”
“It was where they printed the religious tracts, you ignoramus. You could go in there and pick them up for free. All of this was like child abuse, I’m telling you. Spare-the-rod stuff.”
“It was like his eye exploded,” Bill said. Absentmindedly, he took one of the untouched pastries from Max’s plate and bit into it.
Max stared at him.
“They didn’t change the goodies this morning,” Bill said. “This thing is a little stale.”
“I prefer my pastries stale,” said Chippie Traynor.
“I prefer to keep mine for myself, and not have them lifted off my plate,” said Max, sounding as though something were caught in his throat.
“The bullet went straight through the left lens of his glasses and right into his head,” said Tony. “And when he raised his head, his eye was full of blood.”
“Would you look out that window?” Max said in a loud voice.
Bill Messenger and Tony Flax turned to the window, saw nothing special—perhaps a bit more haze in the air than they expected—and looked back at the old publisher.
“Sorry,” Max said. He passed a trembling hand over his face. “I think I’ll go back to my room.”
4
“Nobody visits me,” Bill Messenger said to Tess Corrigan. She was taking his blood pressure, and appeared to be having a little trouble getting accurate numbers. “I don’t even really remember how long I’ve been here, but I haven’t had a single visitor.”
“Haven’t you now?” Tess squinted at the blood pressure tube, sighed, and once again pumped the ball and tightened the band around his arm. Her breath contained a pure, razor-sharp whiff of alcohol.
“It makes me wonder, do I have any friends?”
Tess grunted with satisfaction and scribbled numbers on his chart. “Writers lead lonely lives,” she told him. “Most of them aren’t fit for human company, anyhow.” She patted his wrist. “You’re a lovely specimen, though.”