“Well,” Marsh snarled. “Bleats is better than Whatworth, Doltridge, and Jelly. That much I’ll give you. Let’s see, we’re now thirty-seven kilometers from Salisbury, so we should be there in approximately—”
“Five minutes,” suggested Theo from the capacious, leathery backseat of the yellow sedan.
“Isn’t he a demon?” Mole cheerfully agreed. Jonas Marsh clearly took his own advice and drove the major motorways at “one hundred kilometers an hour, easily.” On the other hand, he was a far better driver than Dame Winifred Throckmorton had been, or than Mole, who loved to talk and liked to look at people, even those in the back seat, when behind the wheel.
It was the seventh of September. Theo Ryan was again in England, on his way with his friends to Devon, to Dame Winifred Throckmorton, and the great estate of the Earl of Newbolt. With them in the car was a locked attaché case; in the case were two leather-bound books printed in the early seventeenth century, along with one folio of miscellany written in a seventeenth-century hand. The printed books really had been printed in the seventeenth century.
That he should be in this car with these men and these books felt to Theo both destined and yet impossible to connect with the arrangements of his past life. In early September, for example, he was always in Rome, North Carolina, preparing to teach his fall classes. He was always in his house near the campus, everything in its familiar place, every day nearly the same. For years at a time, he’d gone nearly nowhere; yet here in one summer, he’d flown twice to England, twice to New York, and once, for a single day, all the way to Texas; and there were new people in his life who were changing it in disconcerting ways. For years at a time, he hadn’t written anything at all, and now, since spring…
“We’ll stay the night in Honiton, at the Crown and Mitre,” Marsh called over his shoulder. “Drive to Bourne once it’s good and dark. The vicar should tottle out of Saint Michael’s the minute evening prayers say Amen. You didn’t forget those torches, did you, Mole?”
“No, nor the tool kit. You needn’t keep fussing so.”
“Planning is not ‘fussing.’” Marsh passed an immense shipping lorry on whose side were painted gargantuan boxes of tea biscuits, shortbreads, cookies, and cakes, and below them the huge letters, “fontwell’s. of course.” As Marsh went flying by, he beeped the horn in a merry rhythm, earning quite a scowl from the startled driver. “Ah, Grandpapa!” he waved at the truck. “Bless him, Mole.”
“Bless you, Grandpa,” Mole agreeably called out the window. “And you’re not ‘planning.’ For the last two months we were planning. He really worked feverishly while you were in the States, Theo.”
“Yes, you’ve both done an incredible job.”
“Now he’s fussing. Is he so fussy in Rome?”
“Worse.” Theo yawned. “But I’m not feeling very calm myself.”
“Well, I feel quite exhilarated,” said Mole, his black eyes glittering beneath the dark bang of hair that kept falling into them. “And confident. The skiff will be where I left it, the key will be where the vicar left it, and the chest will be where time has left it for the proverbial lo these many centuries.”
Jonas twitched at the wheel. “And where it may sit for a few bloody more if we’re not right about their pulling out that choir stall.”
“How can they shore up a wall without removing what’s in front of it?” Mole settled cheerfully in his seat, and reopened his book. “Right then. On we go. Now, which would you chaps rather hear, more ‘Autumn,’ or ‘Grecian Urn’?”
“Alexander Pope,” growled Marsh.
“‘Autumn’ it is.”
“Please! No more bah-bah oozy-woozy John bloody Bleats!”
Theo leaned his head back against the soft leather, while in the front seat of the speeding car, Jonas and Mole returned convivially to arguing the merits of the Romantic poets. He closed his eyes and thought about the last two months.
•••
Two months exactly since Ford’s death. And death had certainly not put an end to the demands the man made on anybody foolish enough to love him, or the chaos and pain, or for that matter, the plain downright irritation and discomfort he could cause.
“I can’t believe we’re doing this!” Bernie Bittermann had complained to Theo and Ruth Rexford across the entire Atlantic Ocean, jolted out of his characteristic patience by all the disruptions of his tranquil habits.
“It’s been a nightmare,” the accountant had moaned to Theo’s parents, who’d rushed to Kennedy to be with their son for the short span of his stopover, and to pick up their plane tickets for Miami, where they were to start their Panamanian cruise ship jobs. “Benny, Lorraine, don’t go,” Bittermann had gloomily advised them. “There’s bad luck in the air.”
“They’ll never get here, it’s a disaster,” the accountant had groaned in the Dallas airport before they’d finally located first Rhodora, then (two flights later than he’d told them) Pawnee Rexford.
“We’re crashing!” Bittermann had whimpered nonstop in the little rattling private plane that had flown the five passengers and the casket through an electrifying thunderstorm to Bowie, Texas.
“The heat!” he’d griped when he’d crawled out of the limousine at the cemetery. “The dust! It’s all over you in a second! Here’s where Ford had to make us bring him from five thousand miles away? There’s nothing here! There’s a thousand miles of dirt here!” And he’d turned to tell Ford’s first wife (who, with her husband, had been driven over from the next county by their granddaughter), “Ford was always a terrible driver.”
“I haven’t seen him in forty-some years,” the woman replied, “but Sam here thought we oughta come for Ruth’s sake.”
Pawnee Rexford, son of the third wife, a taller, darker replica of his young father, kicked his boot through some of that dirt. “I told you fuckin’ Josh wouldn’t fuckin’ show,” he said, in reference to his half brother, son of the second wife. He put his sunglasses back on and pulled a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his suede vest. “Let’s get this shit over with. Where’d that fuckin’ preacher go?”
Rhodora jerked her own sunglasses off. Her legs like fast scissors below the black minidress, she strode over, grabbed Pawnee’s arm, and shook him. “Get it together, you hear me? Stop talking like trash ’round Miss Ruth and her friends before I crack open your goddamn head.”
“You’re not my mother, so don’t fuckin’ give me orders.”
“That’s enough, Pawnee.” Theo pushed between him and Rhodora.
“She’s the same age I am! Can you believe my fuckin’ father, man?”
Sweat poured from Bernie Bittermann’s bald head. His jacket was soaking wet, and red dust stuck to his face. “Why, why are you doing this to me?” he asked the sky or the grave or the endless plain of dirt.
As Theo stood in that bare, windswept cemetery watching the red dusty earth trickle down the sides of Ford’s grave, a breeze suddenly blew against the back of his neck and dried the sweat there so it stung him. He slapped at the sweat, and with the slap he heard:
“Mark me.”
“What?”
It was Ford’s voice. “Mark me.”
Theo turned around; no one was behind him. Everyone else stood staring into the dusty hole, listening to the singsong of the minister. Theo closed his eyes.
“I am thy father’s spirit,” Ford said, “doomed to walk—”
Cut it out, thought Theo. He opened his eyes and saw Ford on the other side of the cemetery, leaning against a tombstone. “Stop waving at me.”
Bernie Bittermann looked at Theo. “What’d you say?”
“Nothing.”
Ford laughed. “It’s called beckoning, kid. I’m beckoning you. That’s what I was doing all along.”
Theo thought, You’re scaring me.
“That’s a start,” he heard Ford say, but w
hen he glanced over at the tombstone, there was no one there.
•••
After the ceremony, the funeral party split up. In the middle of it (despite its extreme brevity), Pawnee had kicked a path back to the limousine and leaned against it, chain-smoking. The travelers gave Miss Ruth her first moment of relief in days by telling her goodbye. They then flew back to Dallas and told each other good-bye. (Well, Pawnee didn’t exactly say good-bye, but he did lift his hand and even apologized to Rhodora for “taking it out on you instead of the fuck in the coffin.”) Hunch-shouldered, he walked off onto his plane to Santa Fe while Bernie Bittermann was trying, again, to explain to him that he’d inherited several million dollars.
“It’s in the genes, it’s got to be in the genes,” Bernie muttered. He shook Theo’s hand, said, “If you’re not lying the way he did, if you’ve actually got that play Aesthetic Distance, you’ve got to hand it over, Theo. There’re contractual obligations involved here. Even if what there is of it is a miserable mess, which I’m already sure is the case, so don’t think you’ll be disappointing me. Ford had lost hold, Theo, we have to face that.”
“Not you, Bernie. I don’t want to hear you gave up on him.”
“I know I’ve missed my plane,” said Bernie and left for New York.
Rhodora put her arms around Theo, and the two stayed that way a long time, standing there by the airport security check, crowds streaming on both sides around them like a current. Some of the travelers glared at them, annoyed, but others looked kindly at the young couple quietly hugging.
“I love you. Hang on,” Rhodora said, and she left for Nashville.
Theo went home to North Carolina. There were two things he had to do there. One was to try to persuade his new chairman, Marcus Thorney, and the provost, Buddy Tupper, to let him take a year’s paid leave a year before Cavendish owed him one. He wasn’t sure he could do it. He wasn’t sure he could do the other thing, either; or that he should. But in the airport, realizing that even Bernie Bittermann had lost faith in Ford, Theo had made a vow. He had to at least try to do something. He had to try to write the last half of the last act of Principles of Aesthetic Distance. He had to try to make people believe that Ford Rexford had left behind him at his death a finished play.
Tupper and Thorney were easier about the leave than Theo had thought they’d be. The play was harder. To work on it, he’d locked himself inside the lodge at Tilting Rock, high above the winding kudzu-tangled road at the top of Rhodora’s Mountain. Rhodora had never tried to sell the chalet or even rent it; the cleaning woman whom Theo had hired in May had kept coming once a week to air it out, dust off the furniture, and, it appeared, polish off the contents of the freezer, the liquor cabinet, and the woodpile. The place smelled stale, but was otherwise the same, just empty.
Rhodora hadn’t understood why Theo’d wanted to go there while she was in Nashville. They’d argued about it in the Dallas airport. He told her he had a lot of work to do on the biography, that the chalet would be the best place to do it; it was convenient, free, and isolated; he liked it there this time of year, with the summer sky filled with shooting stars.
“Remember, Rhodora, how he’d sit on the porch and watch those stars in the summer?”
Rhodora flung her black-and-gold jacket over her shoulder. “Umhm. And I remember how he fell off it drunk, and I had to lug him to the car and cart him to the hospital with a broken collarbone. But you go ahead, get over it however you got to.” She unhooked the key from a silver ring and gave it to him.
Theo had told himself that he needed to hide out in Tilting Rock because he didn’t want to risk anybody’s learning (including Rhodora) that he was trying to finish Ford’s play. And he didn’t want to talk to people while he was doing it. His friends at Cavendish had been kind and sympathetic (including Maude Fletcher, with whom he’d had lunch several times since his return). But he didn’t want to talk about Ford now. He wanted to talk to Ford. The truth was, he needed all the help from Ford he could get, and he figured the playwright might be hanging around the lodge—might be in the porch rocker with his feet up on the rail, or at the oak door of the desk he called Sharon, or squatting by the fireplace beneath the yellow pine beams of the big vaulted living room. He might be skipping all over the barn roof or dancing around on the pond. He might be sitting up in a bough of Lavinia, the slim white birch outside his study window that he’d named after his mother.
But there was no sight or sound of the dead playwright anywhere around, at least none that Theo could sense in the days after he moved in.
True to their word, UPS had flown the black army locker to Asheville by the time Theo’d arrived at the airport. “Anything that involves his work, you should always bill the estate,” Bernie Bittermann had said, and when Theo saw the shipping costs, he’d been glad to know it. His last plane ticket had already done in his Visa card. “Ford, you’re killing me,” he’d muttered, lugging the scratched and dented old trunk up the porch steps of the lodge. He’d brought in his groceries and two cases of beer. Then he’d hauled out from the study Rexford’s lumpy, stained, cigarette-scarred writing chair, Chester. He’d built a fire, sat down, and opened the trunk.
The next three days had been spent methodically sorting out the papers; a trunk full of them, scrambled as if Ford had jumped around in there like a child in a pile of leaves. And the trunk would be only the first part of Ford’s pack-ratting to put in order. Theo knew that the playwright, with ridiculous claims of being “responsible for Bernie’s sake,” had tossed every scrap of paper he’d ever written on (including unidentified phone numbers) and every piece of mail he’d received (including junk circulars) into file cabinets (not in the files, just in the cabinets). And when these were filled, he’d dumped the contents into cardboard boxes that were still stacked against walls at the ranch in Mexico, at the house in Florida, and maybe (if his fourth wife hadn’t thrown them away) in the penthouse in New York. All waiting for Theo Ryan to sort them out. But, then, it was what Theo had been trained to do. And the process had a peaceful, soothing satisfaction to it. So for days, he drank the beers and stacked the papers in rows around the chair.
The papers in the trunk were the ones Ford most cared about. A few dozen old letters. And the rest, his plays. Handwritten plays, typed plays, galleys of plays, notes on characters, lists of place names and titles and dates. There were opening scenes that stopped in midline. There were paragraphs describing sets, sketches of plots, scraps of paper with single phrases on them; mysterious, disconnected sentences like, “She sleeps where she can see the moon.” And, “Billy: Hell, honey, only time will tell. Ava: Most likely, tell a lie.”
Also in the trunk were the original manuscripts of Rexford’s sixteen three-act plays and his twenty-two one-act plays, as well as innumerable revised versions of many of these and revisions of the revisions. He’d apparently never stopped making changes. He’d reworked lines, whole scenes, in plays that had been performed for decades in standardized editions. In fact, he’d scribbled rewrites in the printed texts themselves; had sometimes scrawled “Cut” or “Blew it” across the page. It was troubling. Such authority had the printed word for a scholar like Theo, such familiar inevitability had the official version, that Ford’s changes upset and confused him. Did even Ford have the right to change Miss Rachel’s final monologue after she’d been saying it one set way all over the world for thirty years? After Theo, and hundreds of thousands of others, had been reading it one set way? As literary executor, should he insist that these changes be incorporated into new productions, new editions, or not? It was very troubling.
And what about A Waste of Spirit? For, yes, as Jenny Harte had claimed, there was a partial manuscript of that play extant. It was in the trunk, as were two copies of Aesthetic Distance—the same unfinished text as Theo had in his suitcase, but each with dozens of penciled changes, and one with a scrawled, elliptical outline for several possible end
ings.
The problem with A Waste of Spirit wasn’t that it was incomplete, however, but that it wasn’t any good. It was so bad it was almost impossible to believe Ford had had anything to do with it, much less that he hadn’t known it wasn’t any good. At least Theo thought it wasn’t. But had he any right to suppress it because he thought so, and because Ford had bequeathed him “authority for the disposal of all manuscripts, correspondence, and other papers at the discretion of said executor”? Maybe Ford would want him to do what he’d claimed his fourth wife had done—thrown A Waste of Spirit away. After all, he had said it was gone for good, whereas he’d never said that about Aesthetic Distance. With this thought, Theo actually got out of the chair, walked over to the wide fireplace, and held the Waste of Spirit manuscript near the burning logs. But he couldn’t do it. Adolphus Mahan had been right. He of all people couldn’t destroy a Rexford text.
Oh sure, Theo, he told himself, setting the script down on one of his neat stacks of papers. Sure. You’re willing to forge things right and left, but you’re too scrupulous a scholar to throw away something that should have been thrown away?
Taking a beer out on the porch, he sat in Ford’s rocker and looked out over the mountains and black pines, at the sky of stars. A soft summer wind was cool in his hair. “What?” he said.
Silence.
“Okay, what? Burn it?”
“That bad, hunh, big guy?” Ford said.
“Yeah.” The sound of his own voice startled Theo. He rocked forward out of the chair and stood to look out from the porch.
The stars winked in the trees. “Must of suspected it when I came up with a title like A Waste of Spirit, hunh?”
“You can laugh.” Theo shook his head, rolled the cold bottle against his temple, then he sat back down in the rocker.
Ford said, “So save my ass. Give the manuscript to Cavendish with the rest of the stuff. Stick it with something boring. Like Bernie’s letters. One of these days, some graduate student’ll get a job out of it. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
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