by Wesley Stace
“Yet still alive in this house,” I said as casually as I could, aware of a constriction in my throat that I had to cough away.
“Yes, as you see.” He told me what I feared. “And in yours?”
“Gone but not forgotten,” Frankie said.
Ansalone considered this, looked at me, and turned his attention back to the photo. “And if you know him, then you know this one,” he said, pointing to George as Frankie smiled. “And then perhaps you can guess this one here?” He pointed, with the edge of the nail of his little finger, to the boy. I stood back and watched like a hawk, considering the best course of action. “This piccolo Ettore.” They had met. He’d lied about this before, but now he seemed ready to reveal everything.
“It can’t be — yes, yes, I can see!” said Frankie. “Well, of course you want George. I understand everything.”
Ansalone took the rest of the tour exquisitely slowly, unlocking cases and cooing over treasures, demanding a response Frankie was in the mood to provide. I stood off. It was taking far longer than it needed. The air was close, and I wished I had an ornate silver wristwatch I could glance at and insist that we had to be getting along.
“It is a rare pleasure to have an appreciative audience,” said Ansalone in conclusion as he adjusted the dial on the humidifier and turned off the lights. “It is so sad not to share it more often.” He locked the door behind him. We went back downstairs, where George was waiting for us at the kitchen table.
“I wonder where is Chiara,” he said, and excused himself.
“He’s an obsessive,” whispered Frankie with enthusiasm. “Take the money and run.” I couldn’t answer. “Are you all right, Georgie?” I smiled but could say nothing. “Sad to see him go?” I nodded.
Ansalone returned momentarily with some sheets of paper and a pen. “Before you go, two things: we need to make a receipt for George, acknowledging that you agree to pass ownership to me, after the payment, naturally. I would like also, if I may, to ask you to write out an invoice for me for his sale, for Italian-tax purposes; perhaps you could give as many details of the . . . provenienza . . .”
“Provenance?” suggested Frankie.
“The provenance, as you know. Perhaps Signorina Fisher would like to take a walk through the front gardens while you do this. I can show her some most beautiful fruits.” He offered her his arm graciously.
“How could I resist some fruit?” said Frankie.
Still unsure of Ansalone’s motives, I hesitated, not knowing what to do. I didn’t want the two of them together, but it was clear that he was leaving me alone on purpose.
“Mr. Fisher,” said Ansalone seriously. “I can assure you that Miss Fisher is quite safe with me. In my protection.” Frankie raised an arch eyebrow in recognition of this overly courteous proclamation, putting it down to imperfect English. He bowed to me and took her through the front door.
I knew where to go. The moment the door closed, I walked to the terrace at the back of the house. Stepping outside, I saw the profile of the man who had been peeling potatoes, his saucepan now set down next to a colander of peelings. His hand was on a walking stick propped against his chair, his other holding an unopened book. A deep scar, partly lost in the folds of age, marked the left side of his face, stretching as far down as his neck, as permanent as the fissures on the face of the mountain at which he was staring. Chiara sat next to him, twirling her hair, stroking his arm.
“Joe,” I said. He didn’t answer, eyes obscured behind sunglasses. He swallowed too often.
“No,” said Chiara firmly. “Salvatore. Turi.”
He took his hand from his stick and firmly clasped her upturned wrist. Turi. I’d only ever seen the name once before — the dead brother they had buried in the back garden so they could still collect his food rations.
“I’m Frankie’s son, your grandson,” I said, disbelieving my own calm, as though I were dreaming, as though I had somehow stepped back into the pages of the diary that only I had read, as though I were finishing it. “Named after George. I read your books: card tricks, escapology, disappearing acts, voice throwing. I found George’s memoir.”
He nodded, without turning to me, and said nothing. A smile crept across his lips, a remorseful smile not meant for me. Still there were no words. I filled the silence with his imagined thoughts: the life lost to him, the family he had fled, the lie in which he had taken refuge, the ghost he had become, the grandson he had imagined and to whom he had spoken across decades. Here I was by his side, his sole reader.
He gestured with his right hand. Chiara scampered off and returned with a pen and paper: she couldn’t be insisting on the transfer of ownership and the receipt? That had surely been Ansalone’s diversion so he could remove my mother.
“Non parla,” she said, and put her hand over her mouth. The old man reached out for the pen and paper and looked for something to lean on. He didn’t talk? Since when? Since the war, the war in which he hadn’t died? Since illness, cancer, old age? He was younger than Queenie but seemed twice her age, his skin spotted and wrinkled by the sun. Chiara handed him a magazine.
“My mother is here. She knows nothing.” I saw my face reflected in his sunglasses.
Four or five different thoughts danced on the end of his pen, but he could commit to none of them. I wouldn’t have recognized him from the old pictures. It was not just the scar and the deep clefts: he was changed, wrung out, a faint echo. Was this what he had always wanted, to be emptied out, everything exterior to him? He had won. He had escaped. But now he couldn’t project at all — he was dying, unburdening himself of his dying words. Even his own daughter, who knew the same photos, wouldn’t have known him. Nor would she have the chance.
He hushed Chiara, who was trying to speak. Because I couldn’t say it out loud, even in front of his uncomprehending wife, I snatched the pen and paper from his hand and wrote: “You have been dead for many years. You can’t speak through me. We have been happy without you.”
I put the pen and paper back in his hand.
He had been a dead grandfather, a missing father, a cowardly husband, a spineless son, an AWOL entertainer. He couldn’t exist now.
He handed me a piece of paper, written on it: “Tell them I’m sorry.”
How could I when he was dead? I shook my head and walked away.
The empty house was murky, echoing like a tomb. The sunlight beyond was a relief, and when I saw my mother and Ansalone walking arm in arm down the drive on their way back, I ran towards them.
“Georgie!” shouted Frankie, who was holding a basket of fresh fruit. “You should see Ettore juggle oranges!” She unhooked herself from her companion. “Thank you so much, Ettore. A lovely walk.”
“It’s all done,” I said. “Time to go.”
“Do you know the way home?” asked Ansalone. “Downhill diretto,” he said, slicing the air with his hand. “Always straight. Always down.”
I saw Frankie into the sidecar, allowing her a fond good-bye with our host and indicating that I had some final business with him.
“Thank you,” he said, walking me off to a safe distance. “One final thing: I think you are a magician yourself, practising a little sleight of hand. Some papers are missing.”
“I removed them myself, not knowing they were of interest to you. But now I see that they belong with George. I will send them to you with some books for . . .”
“. . . my brother? If so, God, and il dottore, advise speed. May I visit you at the hotel before you leave to complete the transaction?”
“No, you will never see us again.” I couldn’t rid myself of the image of the old man’s hand crawling across the page. His writing had been childish, spidery, like his mother’s when she had arthritis. “Go to the hotel on Sunday evening after our departure and pay our bill. That’s all I want.”
“You are sure?”
“That’s more than he’s worth. My family is happy to be rid of him.”
“But you speak in haste
. If you have second thoughts, you know where we live. We are in your debt.”
I got on the motorbike and revved the engine. Frankie squealed as we took the first corner downhill.
As the last sorbet melted away into a puddle of mint and lime, I wrote Sylvia the note I had been composing for years, and Brenda the postcard that would arrive long after I saw her. I ordered a final bottle of Prosecco from a gliding burgundy coat.
“There’s one free in the fridge in the room, you know,” tutted Frankie. I had thought she was asleep.
“I’m down here, though.”
“Very swish.” She hadn’t opened her eyes.
“Anyway, Ansalone is paying for the hotel,” I said. “I drive a hard bargain.”
“He was such a nice man.”
I thought about this for a moment.
“Yes, he was. Actually, he’s just paying for the hotel: that’s the deal I gave him.”
“What about the five thousand pounds?” she asked without great concern.
“I told him this was all we wanted. He said I could reconsider.”
“You haggled him down?” She didn’t care either way. It had always been ridiculous: Fishers knew that money didn’t grow on trees. “Ice-cold negotiation,” she said, balancing her glass on the flattest piece of grass available. “Reg’ll be disappointed, though,” she added and laughed.
“Anyway,” I thought aloud, “if the money was going anywhere, it should really go to that poor old git who runs the Armed Forces Museum. He’s the one who thinks he bought George.”
Frankie wasn’t listening. “Easy come, easy go. We had this lovely holiday. I could get used to this. I feel invigorated. Something’s going to pop up — I just know it.” Around us, the staff efficiently closed large sunshades, securing them with velvet sashes. Places were set for dinner beneath the striped marquee. “How about you, Georgie?”
I sat up. They were lighting candles to keep the early-evening mosquitoes at bay. “I’m going to go and see my grandfather. I need career advice.”
“It’s nice you finally having a grandfather, isn’t it? Two, in fact. Can’t wait to see Queenie and Reg. Let’s buy them something nice from the hotel shop.”
“Put it on the room.”
“Anything else you’d like, sir?” enquired a previously inconspicuous employee.
“Mum?”
“No,” she said. “Everything is perfect. Simply heaven.”
The sun was sinking. By this time tomorrow, we’d be home.
Acknowledgements
Particular thanks to Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, Judy Clain, Olivia de Dieuleveult, Dan Franklin, Christopher Stace, Nigel Hinton, Mark Linington, Lid Paris, Edoardo Brugnatelli, Anik LaPointe, Rachel Cugnoni, Nick Hornby, Amanda Posey, David Grand, Melanie Stace, and Molly Townson. Thanks also to Tracy Fisher, Eugenie Furniss, Alicia Gordon, Caroline Michel, and everyone at William Morris; Michael Pietsch, Sophie Cottrell, Amanda Erickson, Betsy Uhrig, and everyone at Little, Brown; Patrice Hoffmann, Camille Germain, Charlotte Ajame, Gilles Haeri, and everyone at Flammarion; and everyone at Jonathan Cape and Vintage.
My grandfather Clifford King Townson died in 1954. He was a ventriloquist and a member of ENSA; his dummy (who survives and is pictured on the front cover) was called George; there the similarities with Joe Fisher end. My mother provided me with clippings about my grandfather’s life, his various copies of Magical Digest, The Demon Telegraph, and Goodliffe’s Abracadabra, as well as a journal that contained some of his scripts and performance notes. The Longfellow quotation was printed on his brochure.
Of the books mentioned in by George, the following are real: The Life and Adventures of Valentine Vox the Ventriloquist by Henry Cockton, first published in 1840 and a massive bestseller; Bunter the Ventriloquist by Frank Richards, a late flowering of the same tradition. All mention of Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland has been edited out, but the influence of this bizarre ventriloquial text remains, all the more bizarre for being “the first published novel by the first native-born American author to make a profession of, and a living by, writing” (from Jay Fliegelman’s introduction to the Penguin paperback, which pairs it with Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist). The Ventrilo ad appeared about five times (in various guises) in a 625-page Johnson Smith & Co. catalogue. All other books mentioned are fictional.
The literature of ventriloquism is a mixed bag. Particularly useful were Dumbstruck by Steven Connor, I Can See Your Lips Moving by Valentine Vox (no relation), and Stanley Burns’s beautifully illustrated but catastrophically copyedited Other Voices: Ventriloquism from B.C. to T.V. Ventriloquial advice, mostly to do with the upkeep of George himself (who turns out to be a Quisto, rather than an Insull, on whom the character of Romando was very loosely based), was kindly given by Alan Semok and Lisa Sweasy (curator of the Vent Haven Museum, Fort Mitchell, Kentucky).
It’s Behind You by Peter Lathan and Oh Yes It Is! by Gerald Frow were both helpful as references for Frankie’s pantomimes; a selection of my sister’s e-mails was best of all. For Vox and Echo’s world, I turned to the sturdy literature of the music hall, including Music Hall Parade by M. Willson Disher, Working the Halls by Peter Honri, and A Hard Act to Follow by Peter Leslie. For the Drolls and variety beyond, all I needed were the collected works of Bill Pertwee: Promenades and Pierrots, Beside the Seaside, and his autobiography, A Funny Way to Make a Living. Of particular use for Joe’s World War II were Fighting for a Laugh by Richard Fawkes, As You Were by Douglas Byng, Stars in Battledress, also by Bill Pertwee, and the reminiscences and letters of Joyce Grenfell: The Time of My Life, Darling Ma, and Joyce Grenfell Requests the Pleasure.
Thanks, most of all, to Abbey and Tilda Stace.
About the Author
Born in 1965, in Hastings, Sussex, and educated at Cambridge University, Wesley Stace writes and performs music under the name John Wesley Harding. His first novel, Misfortune, was published by Little, Brown in 2005. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.