“That’ll be fine. If you had mentioned it we could’ve picked up a bottle on the way over.”
“I’m not much of a drinker.” Mr. Hershey filled a boiler pan with water from the tap, and I sat down in a deep leather chair. I was a little surprised by the Spartan simplicity of the room. There was a couch, which doubled as a bed, set below the row of back windows, and covered with a yellow spread, a pine table, and two ladder-backed maple chairs. There was a red-enamel, apartment-sized refrigerator, a white, two-burner electric stove next to the sink, and that was just about it. There were no pictures on the walls, and there were no rugs on the gleaming terrazzo floor. A pile of old magazines stacked neatly in one corner, near the foot of his couch-bed, and a portable typewriter on the table, were the only personal touches. Another door in the wall probably led to a dressing room-bathroom, and I imagined that his clothes were arranged on the racks like a soldier’s for Saturday morning inspection.
Mr. Hershey brought two unmatching cups and saucers to the table, put them down, and generously spooned powdered coffee into them. I moved over to the table, and sat in one of the ladder-backed chairs across from him.
“How long have you been writing, Mr. Hershey?” There was an inadvertent patronizing note in my voice, and the old man picked it up quickly. He looked at me sharply, and then smiled, his blue-gray choppers gleaming beneath the naked bulb above the table.
“Thirty-seven years. You’ve never heard my name, and that worries you, doesn’t it?”
“No, sir. A lot of people write on the side. I do a little writing myself.”
“Well, I don’t write on the side, Mr. Hudson. I’ve earned my living, such as it is—” he smiled sardonically, and made a sweeping motion with a long thin arm to point up the simplicity of the room “—for thirty-seven years as a full-time writer.”
I whistled softly. “That isn’t easy to do in America. I’d like to read some of your books, Mr. Hershey.”
“I’ve never written a book. Only stories. And the highest sum I ever got for a story was six hundred and fifty dollars. That was back in 1940 from the American Legion magazine. You see, Hudson, I’ve got the craftsmanship, but not the talent for big-money writing.”
“If you can earn a living freelancing, I’d say you had plenty of talent, Mr. Hershey.”
“No, there’s a difference, and it took me a good many years to accept this difference as a fact. I have a facility, a knack, and I learned craftsmanship by writing for the pulps; westerns at a half-cent and a penny a word. That kind of writing takes facility, and a subconscious knowledge of formulas. I like to think, now, that I made the Depression a little easier to get through by giving fans a few dreams—and we did, all of us, in those days. Readers wrote long letters to the editors. They identified themselves with these tough hombres with the two, low-slung forty-fives. There was never any Depression in a western story. If a hero needed money he held up a stagecoach, or he shot a desperado for a five-hundred dollar reward. All the books ran personal columns, and the editors answered the fan letters in print.” Mr. Hershey smiled, and shook his head slowly from side to side. “‘Dear Waddy,’ the editors all wrote.”
“Today it’s just about the same,” I said. “We have television westerns.”
“Yes, and no pulps. But it isn’t the same, nothing like it used to be. During the depression, the readers wanted to be western heroes. Today, the kids and adults alike; they want to be western actors with their own TV series!”
I laughed appreciatively. “I suppose you’re right. I used to read the western pulps, but I don’t remember your name though.”
“I used pen names, mostly. Clint Ridgeway and Red Butler were my favorites. Depended on the story I wrote. If a story didn’t turn out well enough to be a Clint Ridgeway yarn, and yet it was still salable, I’d make up a new name for it, and send it to my agent. Today, though, I write under my own name…
“That water’s hot now, boy. You pour it in the cups. I can lift a pot of cold water easily, but as soon as the same pot of water gets hot I have trouble with it. I get a little nervous and my hand shakes.”
“You’ve written too many potboilers, Mr. Hershey,” I said, smiling, as I crossed to the stove. I clicked off the burner and poured the water into the waiting cups.
“That’s all I write today, all right,” Mr. Hershey continued, “and I work pretty hard at it besides. But I’ve still got the knack, the touch. Every day, Monday through Friday, I write a story, and each story is exactly twelve hundred words. On Saturday morning I reread them. Two are usually impossibles and I discard them. Then I go into town and mail the other three to my agent in New York. Out of the three he usually sells at least one. Sometimes two, and sometimes none of them. They sell to a news syndicate for fifty dollars apiece. After he keeps ten percent, I get the rest, and at the end of the year I average about forty dollars a week. So that’s why—in case you’re interested—I teach creative writing. That ten bucks a week is for certain, and I keep it in a separate fund for stamps, typewriter ribbons and supplies.”
“At least you’re your own boss—say, why don’t you try Mr. Curtis with some of your rejects? He’s our M.E. and he used to be on the New York Sun. Maybe he—”
“The town’s too small, son. In New York City, where the daily papers have circulation in the millions, they can run a fiction short-short once in awhile and still hit a reader percentage. For my kind of stories, the percentage of the readers, in a small town like this, wouldn’t be big enough to interest your Mr. Curtis. My newspaper shorts are good only in the big metropolitan dailies—New York, L.A., Toronto, Chicago.”
“Has the paper ever done a feature on you, Mr. Hershey? I think our readers would definitely be interested in some of the things you’ve been telling me. I could come out here with a photographer, and—”
“No, I don’t care for publicity. Not only would it not help me in any way, I’d be bothered by a gaggle of would-be writers bringing me their junk to read, or trying to get me to collaborate with them.”
“A new story every day,” I said admiringly. “That’s really something. I don’t see how you do it.”
“Remember, boy, only one out of five sells. And yet, they’re all the same type of story. Five times I strike the flint,” he tapped the portable typewriter case with a long bony forefinger, “and I get only one spark of fire.”
“Can you give me an example?”
“If you don’t mind listening. I like to be alone, but I’m alone too much, maybe, and I sort of like talking to you, Mr. Hudson.”
“Richard.”
“They ever call you Dick?”
I shook my head. “Not since the Eisenhower administration.”
“You must be a little sensitive.”
“Not really, sir. Tell me a story.” I grinned.
“For a sensitive young man, you take well to torture. But all right. I wrote a story this morning, and if I don’t miss my guess, it’ll be the one to sell this week. A man and his wife are sitting in their kitchen, arguing about what kind of a present to get for their son’s impending fourteenth birthday. The mother wants to buy him a good wristwatch, but the father’s against it. He’s bought the boy three different wristwatches already, cheap ones, but every time the boy has either lost the watch, or broken it, gone in swimming with it on, and so forth. So the father is adamant, saying that until the boy learns how to take care of an expensive gift like a wristwatch, he doesn’t intend to buy him another.
“The boy, who has been delivering newspapers on his route, comes into the house right in the midst of the discussion. Proudly, the son rolls his sleeve back and shows off a new wristwatch to his parents. Unknown to them, he had been saving a dollar a week from his paper route to buy his own watch.
“The father is proud of the boy, knowing his son has grown old enough, at last, to accept responsibility. But the mother is saddened by the very same knowledge; she didn’t want her son to be burdened with responsibilities so soon. As she
prepares dinner, after the father and son go into the living room, she makes a little prayer that the boy will either break or lose his new watch before his birthday so that she can buy him one to replace it.”
“You got all of that into twelve hundred words?”
“Twelve hundred and ten, to be exact.”
“What’s the title?”
“No Time For Mother. It’s not much of a title, but newspaper editors usually change them anyway.” He shrugged indifferently, and noisily finished his coffee.
“I like the story, Mr. Hershey,” I said truthfully. “And it seems a shame to sell a story that good for only fifty dollars.”
“That’s all it’s worth, Richard. Now any one of those female writers with three names who write for the slicks could take the same little plot and write a story that would move the readers emotionally. But I am merely a competent writer; I can’t get emotion into my work. Any mother or father who reads my tale will understand it intellectually, but they won’t have their emotions involved. And that’s the difference between a newspaper syndicate story and a story in the Saturday Evening Post. And the difference between fifty dollars and a thousand arouses my emotions, but I can’t get that into my stories either.”
“Instead of writing a story every day, why don’t you work all week on just one story? Maybe the extra time will help you.”
“I’ve tried it, and do you know what happens? You refine and rewrite, and you end up without any feeling whatsoever. What it all boils down to, Richard, is this: I’m unwilling to share my real feelings with some anonymous reader. And there are very few writers who’ve got that kind of guts. If they did, they’d be rich and famous.”
“You’ve given me something to think about, Mr. Hershey. But it’s getting late. If you’ll let me take Mrs. Huneker’s story with me, I’d better get going.”
“By rights, her story should be turned over to her husband. But I’m unwilling to do this because I don’t think he should see it. Can you promise me that?”
“Yes, sir. Although I—”
“You’ll see why after you read it. I usually type a page or so of commentary on student stories before I return them, but I never got around to critiquing this one. I didn’t know exactly what to say, for one thing. And for another, it isn’t really a story —I don’t know what it is. Sometimes these people who decide to write, and sign up for a course, are really looking for a sort of self-therapy without knowing it. I wasn’t going to read this story in class, though. At least, I wasn’t planning on it without having a little talk with Marion first.”
He unzipped his briefcase and searched through a dozen or so manuscripts before he found Mrs. Huneker’s. It was enclosed in a manila envelope. As I got to my feet he handed it to me.
I cleared my throat. “Would you mind very much, Mr. Hershey, if I dropped around some evening and showed you the play I’ve been working on?”
He let his breath out audibly. “You, too?” he said sorrowfully.
I laughed. “Never mind. I’ll see that you get this manuscript back, Mr. Hershey.” I tapped the envelope with my palm.
“I don’t want it back, Richard. When you get through with it, just tear it up and drop it into your wastebasket.” He walked out to the car with me. As I started to open the door, he clasped me lightly by the shoulder. “I’ll be glad to have you come around any evening, Richard. And bring your play if you like. The winter season’ll be on us soon, and perhaps we can split a bottle of that wonderful California tokay. A little wine warms old bones when it’s cold.”
I didn’t return to the office. Instead, I pointed the Chevy for the Sealbach Hotel.
For some reason, talking to Mr. Hershey had reminded me of Mr. Adamski, the old man who had wanted a “write-up” about a nonexistent anniversary. Both of these old men were the same age, seventy-six. Of the two, Adamski was far better off financially, having worked steadily for most of his life for a giant corporation. With his company pension, savings, social security, and his own home, Adamski was now able to settle down and enjoy his so-called golden years—without a worry in the world.
But not the old writer. He still struggled along every day, barely getting by, following the hopeless American Dream, still trying, and still not making it. And I supposed that Mr. Hershey was reconciled by now to the almost certain knowledge that he would never make it. Why, then, did I feel only pity for Old Man Adamski, when I felt a respectful admiration for Old Man Hershey? To be fair, it had taken an equal amount of determination for Adamski to stick it out for forty years in a dead-end job as it had for Hershey to come up with a new idea for a short-short story every morning.
Ahh, Hudson, I thought disgustedly, you think too much; and you have a long way to go before you sleep.
Chapter Twelve
Every person who lives in a city, even a small city like Lake Springs, needs at least one secret place where they can go at any time and truly be alone. In the office there were people and a phone that rang; at home there was a wife and a child. But I had found my little secluded spot where I could stay for as long as I liked and know, with confidence, that I wouldn’t be interrupted or disturbed. Astrology is supposedly a false science, but I was a Capricorn, and astrologists say that men born during the Month of the Goat have an affinity for cabalas, conundrums and clandestine hiding places.
Dave Finney, who was also a Capricorn, told me once that when he wanted to get away from people he drove down the highway to the Bird Farm eighteen miles from Lake Springs, and talked to the parrots and macaws for a couple of hours. These wise birds had the right answers for everything, he said. To a question such as, “What is life really all about?” his favorite bird, a blue-and-yellow macaw would reply: “Hello, Kiddo,” “Toast and coffee,” or “You’re a sweet bird, you are,” and then go into paroxysms of laughter. Dave maintained that these were all valid answers to the perplexities of life; and perhaps he was right.
My hiding place was the seldom-used Men’s Lounge on the mezzanine floor of the Sealbach Hotel. By entering the hotel via the parking lot side door and climbing a short flight of stairs, not even the man on the desk knew that I was ensconced in the lounge. There was a lobby lavatory that guests used, and another small men’s room beside the cocktail lounge, so the mezzanine lounge was rarely entered. The room was air-conditioned, and furnished with two deep leather chairs, a cigarette table, a floor lamp, and a threadbare, rose-colored carpet.
This was the perfect place, in my opinion, to read Marion Huneker’s short story. I lit a cigarette, opened the envelope, and pulled out a dozen typed sheets of light-gray monogrammed stationery. I remembered the stationery from my brief glimpse of her suicide note. I shivered slightly, as I started to read the story, but that was caused by the air-conditioned coolness of the lounge…
LITTLE MRS. LITTLE
By Marion Casselli
With a tiny gasp of fright little Mrs. Little turned over in bed and put her small hand to her mouth. Oh, but that had been such a bad dream! She wondered if she had cried out in her sleep. She guessed not. He still snored away beside her, a noisy, pink elephant covered with the blue electric blanket, although His half of the blanket wasn’t turned on. Mrs. Little felt in the dark for the switch to turn her side of the blanket down.
My, but she was warm! All of that walking and walking in her dream had made her perspire freely. She had been lost for two days, wandering in a strange city, and she had been frightened. She had wondered if her Husband would worry about her, but she knew that He didn’t care, or He wouldn’t be so mean about the checkbook.
Little Mrs. Little got out of bed, wrapping her quilted pink doll’s robe about her shoulders, and slipped her tiny little feet into pink slippers, all toasty warm with silky rabbit fur. Like always, when she awakened in the night, she had to go to the bathroom for a minute. In the bathroom, afterwards, she was drawn to the study of her heart-shaped face in the mirror. She looked at her rosy tongue, and fluffy pink hair, touching it up with the ti
ps of her fingers.
There was a faint network of tiny furrows on each of her temples, and one long deep frown line sliding across the middle of her otherwise smooth forehead. She frowned and the line deepened. Then she stamped one tiny foot on the tiled floor. “Oh, but I mustn’t frown, she said aloud to her face in the mirror, I mustn’t!” She smiled at her image in the mirror, nodding fatuously, and was immediately overwhelmed with an attack of the giggles. She clapped both hands over her mouth as her Husband groaned in bed and turned over. The tortured springs groaned back in protest at His movement.
“It’s all His fault that I can’t sleep,” she thought petulantly. “He insists that I balance my checkbook myself, and He knows perfectly well that I can’t do it!” But the hour was late and Mrs. Little was more tired than she realized and she couldn’t sustain her anger at her Husband at this ungodly hour in the early morning. She drank a little water, gargled with mouthwash to make her mouth taste better, and then went back to bed and to sleep. This time without any dreams.
The next morning over coffee, long after her Husband had gone to His office, little Mrs. Little hopelessly went over her accounts again. Somewhere, even though she had gone through both bank statements several times with the point of her tiny gold pencil, there were several checks that simply must be missing. She was proud of one important error she had caught, and all by herself too! She had numbered three of the cancelled checks all the same: #63. And that might be where the error lay. The lost checks still unaccounted for might also be numbered 64, or even 63 again. She had absolutely no head for numbers and her Husband knew it. In five minutes He could have had the account all in order but He had said, No!
“And until you get it balanced,” He had said, “I forbid you to write another single check!”
It wasn’t as though we were poor, Mrs. Little fumed helplessly. There is all kinds of money in the bank and He is making more and more every day! She felt like crying but she didn’t because once she let go she would go on and on and she would have to wash her face afterwards and then her coffee would be cold.
Understudy for Death Page 16