Borderlands 6

by Thomas F Monteleone

  At the New and Shiny Big-Box Store there’s an old fellow who greets you when you come through the doors . . .

  The Architecture of Snow

  David Morrell

  If our final story were science fiction or fantasy, it might be taking place in an alternate dimension or a parallel universe where everything is almost just like here . . . but is definitely not. However, that description would not aptly describe David Morrell’s intensely personal examination into the life of a writer who may appear familiar to some of you. Narrated in clear, succinct prose, this novella à clef becomes a descent into a subtle, almost-gentle maelstrom of guilt—wherein lies its most quiet horror.

  On the first Monday in October, Samuel Carver, who was seventy-two and suddenly unemployed, stepped in front of a fast-moving bus. Carver was an editor for Edwin March & Sons, until recently one of the last privately owned publishing houses in New York.

  “To describe Carver as an editor is an understatement,” I said in his eulogy. Having indirectly caused his death, March & Sons, now a division of Gladstone International, sent me to represent the company at his funeral. “He was a legend. To find someone with his reputation, you need to go back to the 1920s, to Maxwell Perkins and his relationships with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe. It was Perkins who massaged Hemingway’s ego, helped Fitzgerald recover from hangovers, and realized that the two feet of manuscript Wolfe lugged into his office could be divided into several novels.”

  Standing next to Carver’s coffin at the front of a Presbyterian church in Lower Manhattan, I counted ten mourners. “Carver followed that example,” I went on. “For much of the past five decades, he discovered an amazing number of major authors. He nurtured them through writers’ blocks and discouraging reviews. He lent them money. He promoted them tirelessly. He made them realize the scope of their creative powers. R. J. Wentworth’s classic about childhood and stolen innocence, The Sand Castle; Carol Fabin’s verse novel, Wagon Mound; Roger Kilpatrick’s Vietnam War novel, The Disinherited; eventual recipients of Pulitzer Prizes—these were buried in piles of unsolicited manuscripts that Carver loved to search through.”

  Ten mourners. Many of the authors Carver had championed were dead. Others had progressed to huge advances at bigger publishers and seemed to have forgotten their debt to him. A few retired editors paid their respects. Publishers Weekly sent someone who took a few notes. Carver’s wife died seven years earlier. They didn’t have children. The church echoed coldly. So much for being a legend.

  The official explanation was that Carver stumbled in front of the bus, but I had no doubt he committed suicide. Despite my praise about the past five decades, he hadn’t been a creative presence since his wife’s death. Age, ill health, and grief had worn him down. At the same time, the book business had changed so drastically that his instincts didn’t fit. He was a lover of long shots, with the patience to give talent a chance to develop. But in the profit-obsessed climate of modern publishing, manuscripts needed to survive the focus groups of the marketing department. If the books weren’t trendy and easily promotable, they didn’t get accepted.

  For the past seven years, George March, the grandson of the company’s founder, loyally postponed forcing Carver into retirement, paying him a token amount to come to the office two days a week. The elderly gentleman had a desk in a corner where he studied unsolicited manuscripts and read newspapers. He also functioned as a corporate memory, although it was hard to imagine how stories about the good old days could help an editor survive in contemporary publishing. Not that it mattered—I was one of the few who asked him anything.

  Eventually, March & Sons succumbed to a conglomerate. Gladstone International hoped to strengthen its Film and Broadcast Division by acquiring a publisher and ordering it to focus on novels suited for movies and TV series. The trade buzzword for this is “synergy”. As usual when a conglomerate takes over a business, the first thing the new owner did was downsize the staff, and Carver was an obvious target for elimination. Maybe he felt that his former contributions made him immune. That would account for his stunned reaction when he came to work that Monday morning and got the bad news.

  “What am I going to do?” I heard the old man murmur. His liver-spotted hands shook as he packed framed photographs into a flimsy box. “How will I manage? How will I fill the time?” Evidently, he decided that he wouldn’t. The box in one hand, his umbrella in the other, he went outside and let the bus solve his problems.

  Because Carver and I seemed to be friends, the new CEO put me in charge of whatever projects Carver was trying to develop. Mostly, that meant sending a few polite rejection letters. Also, I removed some items Carver forgot in his desk drawer: cough drops, chewing gum, and a packet of Kleenex.

  “Mr. Neal?”

  “Mmmm?” I glanced up from one of the hundreds of emails I received each day.

  My assistant stood in my office doorway. His black turtleneck and sports coat gave him the appearance of authority. Young, tall, thin, and ambitious, he held a book mailer. “This arrived for Mr. Carver. No return address. Should I handle it for you?”

  In theory, it was an innocent suggestion. But in the new corporate climate, I doubted there was any such thing as an innocent suggestion. When my assistant offered to take one of my duties, I wondered if it was the first step in assuming all of my duties. After Carver was fired, three other editors, each over fifty, got termination notices. I’m forty-six. Mr. Carver. Mr. Neal. I often asked my assistant to call me Tom. He never complied. “Mister” isn’t only a term of respect—it’s also a way of depersonalizing the competition.

  “Thanks, but I’ll take care of it.”

  Determined to stake out my territory, I carried the package home. But I forgot about it until Sunday afternoon after I worked through several gut-busting boxes of submissions that included two serial-killer novels and a romantic saga about California’s wine country. The time-demanding tyranny of those manuscripts is one reason my wife moved out years earlier. She said she lived as if she were single, so she might as well be single. Most days, I don’t blame her.

  A Yankees game was on television. I opened a beer, noticed the package on a side table, and decided to flip through its contents during commercials. When I tore it open, I found a manuscript. It was typed. Double-spaced in professional format. With unsolicited manuscripts, you can’t count on that. It didn’t reek of cigarette smoke or food odors, and that too was encouraging. Still, I was bothered not to find an introductory letter and return postage.

  The manuscript didn’t have the uniform typeface that word processors and printers create. Some letters were faint, others dark. Some were slightly above or below others. The author actually put this through a typewriter, I realized in amazement. It was a novel called The Architecture of Snow. An evocative title, I decided, although the Marketing Department would claim that bookstore clerks would mistakenly put it in the Arts and Architecture section. The writer’s name was Peter Thomas. Bland. The Marketing Department preferred last names that had easily remembered concrete nouns like King, Bond, or Steel.

  With zero expectation, I started to read. Hardly any time seemed to pass before the baseball game ended. My beer glass was empty, but I didn’t remember drinking its contents. Surprised, I noticed the darkness outside my apartment’s windows. I glanced at my watch. Ten o’clock? Another fifty pages to go. Eager to proceed, I made a sandwich, opened another beer, shut off the TV, and finished one of the best novels I’d read in years.

  You dream about something like that. An absolutely perfect manuscript. Nothing to correct. Just a wonderful combination of hypnotic tone, powerful emotion, palpable vividness, beautiful sentences, and characters you never want to leave. The story was about a ten-year-old boy living alone with his divorced father on a farm in Vermont. In the middle of January, a blizzard hits the area. It knocks down electricity and telephone lines. It disables cell-phone r
elays. It blocks roads and imprisons the boy and his father.

  “The father starts throwing up,” I told the Marketing/Editorial Committee. “He gets a high fever. His lower-right abdomen’s in terrific pain. There’s a medical book in the house, and it doesn’t take them long to realize the father has appendicitis. But they can’t telephone for help, and the father’s too sick to drive. Even if he could, his truck would never get through the massive drifts. Meanwhile, with the power off, their furnace doesn’t work. The temperature in the house drops to zero. When the boy isn’t trying to do something for his father, he works to keep a fire going in the living room, where they retreat. Plus, the animals in the barn need food, the cows need milking. The boy has to struggle through the storm to reach the barn and keep them alive. With the pipes frozen, he can’t get water from the well. He melts snow in pots near the fire. He heats canned soup for his dad, but the man’s too sick to keep it down. Finally, the boy hears a snowplow on a nearby road. In desperation, he dresses as warmly as he can. He fights through drifts to try to reach the road.”

  “So basically it’s a young adult book,” the head of marketing interrupted without enthusiasm. Young adult is trade jargon for kid’s story.

  “A child might read it as an adventure, but an adult will see far more than that,” I explained. “The emotions carry a world of meaning.”

  “Does the boy save the father?” the new CEO asked. He came from Gladstone’s Broadcast Division.

  “Nearly dying in the process.”

  “Well, at least it isn’t a downer.” The head of marketing shook his head from side to side. “A couple of days on a farm in a storm. Feels small. The book chains want global threats and international conspiracies.”

  “I promise—on the page, those few days feel huge. The ten-year-old becomes the father. The sick father becomes the son. At first, the boy’s overwhelmed. Then he manages almost superhuman efforts.”

  “Child in jeopardy. The book won’t appeal to women. What’s the title mean?”

  “The epigraph indicates that The Architecture of Snow is a quote from an Emerson poem about how everything in life is connected as if covered by snow.”

  The CEO sounded doubtful. “Has anybody heard of the author?”

  “No.”

  “A first novel. A small subject. It’ll be hard to persuade the book chains to support it. I don’t see movie potential. Send the usual rejection letter.”

  “Can’t,” I said, risking my job. “The author didn’t give a return address.”

  “A typical amateur.”

  “I don’t think so.” I paused, about to take the biggest risk of my career. But if my suspicion was correct, I no longer needed to worry about my job. “The book’s beautifully, powerfully written. It has a distinctive, hypnotic rhythm. The punctuation’s distinctive also: an unusual use of dashes and italics. A father and a son. Lost innocence. The book’s style and theme are synonymous with . . . ” I took the chance. “They remind me of R. J. Wentworth.”

  The CEO thought a moment. “The Sand Castle?”

  “We’ve sold eight million copies so far, a hundred thousand paperbacks to colleges this year alone.”

  “You’re suggesting someone imitated his style?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Then . . . ?”

  “I don’t believe it’s an imitation. I think Peter Thomas is R. J. Wentworth.”

  The room became so quiet I heard traffic outside.

  “But isn’t Wentworth dead?” a marketer asked. “Wasn’t he killed in a car accident in the sixties?”

  “Not exactly.”

  October 15, 1961

  Three disasters happened simultaneously. A movie based on one of Wentworth’s short stories premiered that month. The story was called “The Fortune Teller”, but the studio changed the title to “A Valentine for Two”. It also added a couple of songs. Those changes confirmed Wentworth’s suspicions about Hollywood. The only reason he sold the rights to the short story was that every producer was begging for The Sand Castle and he decided to use “The Fortune Teller” as a test case.

  He lived with his wife and two sons in Connecticut. The family begged him to drive them into Manhattan for the premiere, to see how truly bad the film was and laugh it off. En route, rain turned to sleet. The car flipped off the road. Wentworth’s wife and two sons were killed.

  The film was more dreadful than anyone imagined. The story’s New England setting became a cruise ship. A teenage idol played the main character—originally a college professor, but now a dance instructor. Every review was scathing. Nearly all of them blamed Wentworth for giving Hollywood the chance to pervert a beloved story. Most critics wrote their attacks in mock Wentworth prose, with his distinctive rhythms and his odd use of dashes and italics.

  Meanwhile, his new book, a collection of two novellas, Opposites Attract, was published the same day. March & Sons wanted to take advantage of the movie publicity. Of course, when the date was originally chosen, no one could have known how rotten the movie would be. By the time rumors spread, it was too late to change the schedule. Reviewers already had the book in their hands. It was charming. It was entertaining. In many places, it was even meaningful. But it wasn’t as magnificent as The Sand Castle. Anticipation led to disappointment, which turned to nastiness. Many reviewers crowed that Wentworth wasn’t the genius some had reputed him to be. They took another look at The Sand Castle and now faulted passages in it.

  “All on the same day,” I told the Marketing/Editorial Committee. “October 15, 1961. Wentworth blamed everything on himself. His fiction echoes transcendental writers like Thoreau, so it isn’t surprising that he followed Thoreau’s example and retreated to the countryside—in this case, Vermont, where he bought a house on two acres outside a small town called Tipton. He enclosed the property with a high fence, and that was the end of his public life. But the myth started when Time put him on its cover and told as much as it could without being able to interview him. College students began romanticizing his retreat to the countryside—the grieving, guilt-ridden author, father, and husband living in isolation. When the paperback of Opposites Attract was published, it became a two-year bestseller. More than that, it was suddenly perceived as a minor masterpiece. Not The Sand Castle, of course. But far superior to what critics first maintained. With each year of his seclusion, his reputation increased.”

  “How do you know so much about him?” the head of marketing asked.

  “I wrote several essays about him when I was an undergrad at Penn State.”

  “And you’re convinced this is a genuine Wentworth manuscript?”

  “One of the tantalizing rumors about him is that, although he never published anything after 1961, he kept writing every day. He implied as much to a high-school student who knocked on his gate and actually got an interview with him.”

  “Those essays you wrote made you an expert? You’re confident you can tell the real thing from an imitation?” the CEO asked.

  “The book’s set in Vermont, where Wentworth retreated. The boy limps from frostbite on his right foot, the same foot Wentworth injured in the accident. But I have another reason to believe it’s genuine. Wentworth’s editor, the man who discovered him, was Samuel Carver.”

  “Carver?” The CEO leaned forward in surprise. “After more than forty years, Wentworth finally sent his editor a manuscript? Why the pseudonym?”

  “I don’t have an answer. But the absence of a letter and a return address tells me that the author expected Carver to know how to get in touch with him. I can think of only one author who could take that for granted.”

  “Jesus,” the CEO said, “if we can prove this was written by Wentworth—”

  “Every talk show would want him,” the head of marketing said. “A legendary hermit coming out of seclusion. A solitary genius ready to tell his story. PBS would jump at t
he chance. The Today show. Good Morning, America. My God, I bet he could get half of Sixty Minutes. He’d easily make the cover of Time again. We’d have a guaranteed number one bestseller.”

  “Wait a second,” a marketer asked. “How old is he?”

  “Seventy-eight,” I answered.

  “Maybe he can barely talk. Maybe he’d be useless on television.”

  “That’s one of a lot of things you need to find out,” the CEO told me. “Track him down. Find out if he wrote this manuscript. Our parent company wants a twenty-percent increase in profits. We won’t do that by promoting authors who sell only fifty or a hundred thousand hardbacks. We need a million seller. I’m meeting the Gladstone executives on Monday. They want to know what progress we’re making. It would be fabulous if I could tell them we have Wentworth.”

  I tried to telephone Wentworth’s agent to see if she had contact information. But it turned out that she had died twelve years earlier and that no arrangements were made for anyone else to represent the author, who wasn’t expected to publish again. I called Vermont’s telephone directory assistance and learned that Wentworth didn’t have a listed phone number. The Author’s Guild couldn’t help, either.

  My CEO walked in. “What did he tell you? Does he admit he’s the author?”

  “I haven’t been able to ask him. I can’t find a way to contact him.”

  “This is too important. Show some initiative. Go up there. Knock on his door. Keep knocking until he answers.”

  I got a map and located Tipton in the southern part of Vermont. Few people live near the town, I discovered. It was hard to reach by plane or train, so the next morning, I rented a car and drove six hours north through Connecticut and Massachusetts.

  In mid-October, Vermont’s maple-tree-covered hills had glorious colors, although I was too preoccupied to give them full attention. With difficulty—because a crossroads wasn’t clearly marked—I reached Tipton (population 5,073) only after dark and checked into one of its few motels without getting a look at the town.