by Louis Bayard
I admit I resisted at first. I had read enough of his poetry by now to consider myself immune to it. It came down to this, I suppose: he insisted. And so I took the paper from his hands, and I read:
’Mid the groves of Circassian splendor,
In a brook darkly dappled with sky,
In a moon-shattered brook raked with sky, Athene’s lissome maidens did render
Obeisances lisping and shy. There I found Leonore, lorn and tender,
In the clutch of a cloud-rending cry. Harrowed hard, I could aught but surrender
To the maid with the pale blue eye To the ghoul with the pale blue eye.
“Of course, it’s unfinished,” he said. “For the time being.”
“I see.” I handed the paper back to him. “And why do you believe this poem is connected with Leroy Fry?”
“The air of concealed violence, the—the suggestion of unspeakable duress. An unknown woman. The timing of the thing, Mr. Landor, that can surely be no accident.”
“But you might have woken up any morning and written this.”
“Ah yes, but I didn’t write it.”
“I thought you—”
“What I mean to say is that it was dictated.”
“By who?”
“My mother.”
“Well, then,” I said, a current of laughter bubbling in my voice. “By all means, let’s ask your mother up. I’m sure she’ll be able to shed no end of light on Leroy Fry’s death.”
I will always remember the look he gave me then. A look of the deepest surprise, as if I’d forgotten something that should have been as known to me as my own name.
“She’s dead, Mr. Landor. Dead nearly seventeen years.”
Narrative of Gus Landor
10
November 1st
“No, over here . . . that’s right . . . a little more . . . oh, that’s fine, Gus. . . . Mmm. . . .”
When it comes to the female mystery, there’s nothing like a measure of instruction. I was married for some twenty years to a woman who gave me little more in that regard than a smile. Which was, of course, all a man needed in those days. Patsy, by contrast—well, she makes me feel, at the age of forty-eight, a bit like those cadets who are forever mooning after her. Takes me by the hand. Straddles me as straightforwardly as a teamster mounts his mule and draws me in entire. There’s something tidal in her motion—it has that feeling, I mean, of something that’s been going on forever. And at the same time, she’s so terrestrial in person—a big girl with sprouts of black hair on her arms, strong haunches—heavy in the breast and hips, short in the leg—you can wrap your hand round her and feel, for a moment, that this thigh, this soft floury belly are yours and can’t be taken away. Only, I would say, in her eyes, which are large and the color of butterscotch and lovely, only there is anything held apart.
Reader, I confess it now: Patsy was the reason I was so eager to leave Poe behind that Sunday. She and I were to meet back at my cottage at six, and she was to stay or leave, depending on how she felt. That night she felt like staying. When I woke, though, around three in the morning, there was no one on the other side of the bed. I lay in the half-glow of the night lantern, feeling the straw where it bunched beneath me, waiting . . . and soon enough I heard:
Scroonch. Scroosh.
By the time I got out of bed, she’d scooped out all the ashes and swept the fireplace clean, and she was sitting on the edge of the sawbuck table in the kitchen, scrubbing the life out of an iron kettle. She’d thrown on the nearest thing to hand—my nightshirt—and in the blue kitchen light, her creamy breast, flopping through the vent, was the closest thing to a star. And that sweat-licked aureole, yes, the midnight sun.
“You’re out of pine wood,” she said. “Brush, too.”
“Would you kindly stop?”
“And I’ve given up on the brass. It’s too far gone. You’ll need to hire someone.”
“Stop. Stop.”
“Gus,” she said, lifting her voice into a singsong as she sent the horsehair brush dancing. “You were snoring to wake the dead. It was either go home or see to this room. Which is a disgrace, you know that. Don’t worry,” she added, “I’m not moving in.”
That was the refrain she always fell back on: I ’m not moving in, Gus. As if that were the thing I feared most in the world, when in fact, there could have been worse things.
“You may like setting up house with spiders and mice,” she said, “but most people prefer them out of doors. And if Amelia were here—”
The other refrain.
“If Amelia were here, she’d be doing the same, believe you me.”
So funny to hear Patsy go on this way, as though she and my wife were old comrades working toward a common end. I should resent it, probably, hearing Amelia called by her given name, seeing her mantle snatched up so easily (if only for an hour or two every week or two). But I can’t help thinking how much Amelia would have liked this young woman: her industry and calm, her delicate ethics. Patsy thinks through all her positions. Lord knows how she aligns herself round me.
I went back to the bedroom, found myself a tin of snuff, and carried it back to the kitchen. Her brows angled up when she saw me.
“How much you got left?” she asked.
She took a single dip. Her head tipped back as the powder turned to vapor and filtered through her sinuses, and she stayed like that for a while, drawing in the air and releasing it in a long stream.
“Did I mention, Gus? You’re out of cigars. And the chimney’s smoking again. And the root cellar’s got squirrels.”
I braced myself against the wall and sank down until I was sitting on the stone tile. It had the same effect as jumping into a lake. A splash of cold rising through the tailbone and scalding my spine.
“While we’re awake, Patsy . . .”
“Yes?”
“Tell me about Leroy Fry.”
She swept her arm across her brow. In the candlelight, I could just make out the lines of sweat along her jaw, around her collarbone, and the blue veins of her breast. . . .
“Oh, I’ve talked about him before, haven’t I? You must have heard me.”
“As if I could sort out every beau of yours.”
“Well,” she said, scowling a bit, “there’s nothing to tell. He never said a word to me, never so much as grabbed. Couldn’t hardly stand to look at me, that’s how bad it was. He used to come in nights with Moses and Tench, and they’d be telling the same jokes, and he’d be laughing the same way. That’s what he was there for, to laugh. Kind of a peeping sound, like a wren makes. He drank only beer. Now and again I’d glance over, and he’d be looking at me, and he’d just yank his head away. Like this, Gus. Like someone had a noose round him—”
Too late she caught herself. Her brush froze. Her lips folded in.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You know what I meant.”
“ ’Course.”
“He was, I think, the fastest blusher I ever saw. But maybe I only say that because he was so fair.”
“A virgin?”
Oh, the glare she gave me then. “Now, how would I know?” she asked. “No good test for a man, is there?” She grew quiet then. “I could just about see him with a cow, maybe. A big, motherly, pushy kind of cow. With a fat udder.”
“Don’t go on,” I said. “You’ll make me miss Hagar.”
She began to dry the pot with a cotton towel. Round and round her arm went, and I found myself staring at those hands of hers, the tiny undulations of skin that the soap and the friction had made. An old woman’s hands on a young woman’s bare rich arms.
“It seems Fry was going to meet someone the night he died,” I said.
“Someone?”
“Man, woman, we’re not certain.”
Without raising her head, she said, “Are you going to ask me, Gus?”
“Ask you . . . ?”
“Where I was the . . . what night was it?”
“Twenty-fifth.”
“Twenty-fifth.” She eyed me tightly.
“I wasn’t going to ask, no.”
“Well, never mind, then.” Down her eyes went. She plunged the towel into the pot’s center and gave it a fierce turn and then mopped her face one more time and said, “I spent the night at my sister’s. She’s getting those terrible headaches again, and someone has to stay with the baby till his fever passes, and the husband is no earthly use, so . . . that’s where I was.” She gave her head an angry shake. “I should be there now.”
But if she were there now, she wouldn’t be here, and that would be . . . what? Did she want me to say what that would be?
I took another dip of snuff. Such a clean feeling racing through my head. A fellow in such a state could make affirmations, couldn’t he? On an autumn night, to a young woman standing not five feet away? But there was something hard and clotted in my head. I didn’t know what it was until the image came back to me: two hands clutching the window lintel at the Cozzens hotel.
“Patsy,” I said. “What do you know about this Poe fellow?”
“Eddie?”
That was a shock. Hearing him reduced to that little endearment. I wondered if anyone had ever called him that before.
“Sad little thing,” she said. “Beautiful manners. Beautiful fingers, have you noticed? Talks like a book but holds his liquor like a leaky pail. Now there’s your virgin, you ask me.”
“Something odd about him, that’s for sure.”
“Because he’s a virgin?”
“No.”
“Because he drinks a bit?”
“No! He’s—he’s full of the most senseless fancies and . . . superstitions. Imagine this, Patsy. He shows me a poem, claims it has something to do with Leroy Fry’s death. Claims it was dictated to him in his sleep by his dead mother.”
“His mother.”
“Who I’m sure has better things to do in the afterlife—assuming it exists—than go whispering bad poetry in her son’s ear.”
She drew herself up then. Placed the pot on the wood-block counter. Proudly drew her bosom back inside my nightshirt.
“I’m sure, if she’d known it was bad, she’d never have whispered it.”
She was so very solemn I thought she was having me on. She wasn’t.
“Oh, Patsy,” I said. “Don’t. Not you. Please.”
“I talk to my mother every day, Gus. More than I did when she was alive. In fact, we were having just the pleasantest chat on the way over here.”
“Christ.”
“She asked me what you were like. And I said well, he’s a bit on the old side, and he talks a lot of bunkum, but he’s got these lovely big hands, Mother, and these ribs. I do love feeling his ribs.”
“And she—what?—listens? Talks back, does she?”
“Sometimes. When I need her to.”
I jumped to my feet. The chill had worked its way right up to my chin now, and I had to walk about the kitchen a few circuits, chaff the blood back into my arms.
“The people we love are always with us,” she said, quietly. “You should know better than—”
“I don’t see anyone else here,” I said. “Do you? As far as I can tell, we’re all alone.”
“Oh, you can’t believe that, Gus. You can’t stand there and tell me she’s not here.”
The sky that night was a deep-roasted purple, and the hills couldn’t be seen except where a single light winked from Dolph van Corlaer’s farmhouse. And somewhere a cock, roused too soon, was in the midst of a long tapering crow.
“It’s a funny thing,” I said. “I never could get used to sharing my bed. The elbow in my face and, I don’t know, someone’s hair in my mouth. But now, all these years later, I can’t get used to having it to myself. Can’t even bring myself to take up the whole bed. I just lie there, on my side, trying not to use up too much blanket.” I pressed my hands against the window-pane. “Well,” I said, “she’s been gone a long time now.”
“I wasn’t speaking of Amelia, Gus.”
“She’s gone, too.”
“That’s what you say.”
No point in arguing. My daughter was gone, that was plain to see. For all anyone could tell, she’d never been there in the first place, and even I, in those days, tended to remember around her. I’d recall, for instance, how often my wife used to apologize for never having given me a boy. And how I’d always comfort her by saying, “A daughter suits me better anyway.” For who else would fill up the silences so well? The quiet of an evening like this, when I’d be lost in my usual pursuits—my “bachelor moods,” Mattie used to call them—and I’d look up suddenly . . . and there she would be, on the far side of the room. My daughter. Slim and straight, her cheeks turned to coral from sitting so near the fire. She’d be, oh, sewing up a sleeve or writing to her aunt or smiling at something Mr. Pope had once written. Once my eyes had found her, they would never permit themselves to leave her again.
And the longer I looked, the more my heart would crack, for it seemed to me I was already losing her. Had been losing her from the day I first held her in my hands, violet and squalling. And there was nothing, in the end, that could stop her from being lost. Not love. Not anything.
“The only one I miss right now is Hagar,” I told Patsy. “My coffee could use some cream.”
She watched me. Very studiously, like someone poring over a deed.
“Gus, you don’t take cream in your coffee.”
Narrative of Gus Landor
11
November 1st to November 2nd
Four o’clock is the closest thing West Point has to a magic hour. The afternoon recitals are finished, the evening parade hasn’t yet been called, and the cadets have a brief gap in the day’s long march, which most of them use to storm the female citadel. At four o’clock on the dot, a regiment of young women, gallantly fitted in pink and red and blue, are already pacing Flirtation Walk. Within minutes come an invading horde of “grays,” each offering his arm to a pink or a blue, and if things are very far along—say, a day or two—you may see a gray removing the button nearest his heart and exchanging it for a lock of the pink’s hair. Eternal troth is pledged. Tears are shed. It’s all over in half an hour. Nothing to beat it for efficiency.
On this particular day, it had another useful result. It cleared the remaining grounds of cadets and left me quite alone, standing by the northern entrance to the icehouse, facing an empty Plain. The leaves fell in a steady draft, and the light, which had been a naked glare until today, lay soft and muted on a rising crest of mist. I was alone.
Then there came a rustle . . . the snapping of a twig . . . the barest of footfalls.
“Ah, good!” I said, still in the act of turning. “My note reached you.”
Not stopping to reply, Cadet Fourth Classman Poe danced round the side of the icehouse, wrenched open the door and dropped inside. A gust of cool air spilled after him.
“Mr. Poe?”
From somewhere in the dark came a long croaking whisper: “Did anyone follow me?”
“Well, let me . . . no.”
“You’re certain?”
“Yes.”
He consented then to move closer to the doorway—until the planes of his face were back in the light. A nose. A chin. The glacier of his brow.
“I am baffled by your conduct, Mr. Landor. You demand utter secrecy, and then you call me out in full daylight.”
“There was no help for it, I’m sorry.”
“But suppose I am seen?”
“A very good point. I believe it might be best, Mr. Poe, if you started climbing again.”
I pointed to the thatched dome of the icehouse, silhouetted against the sky like a squashed arrowhead. Poe twisted his head round to follow the line of my finger, until at last he stood squarely in the light, squinting into the sun.
“It isn’t so high,” I said. “Fifteen feet, I’d say. And you’re so good at climbing.”
“But . . . whatever for?” he whispered.
>
“Now, I should probably give you a leg up, will that do? You might then try grabbing the top of the door frame—right there, do you see? And from there, you should have no problem reaching the cornice. . . .”
He looked at me as if I were speaking in reverse.