The Book of Marie

by Terry Kay

  Let me give you a perspective, she said. I think that experience has haunted you for a long time, but I think it doesn’t have as much to do with the picture as people might suspect. There was something else, wasn’t there?

  Yes, he said after a moment.

  Does it have anything to do with Marie? she asked.

  He picked up his coffee cup, touched it to his mouth, drank from it, then put it back on the table. In a way, he said. Yes. In a way.

  When was the last time you saw the picture, Cole?

  It’s been years, he answered.

  That’s right, she said. Years. And the truth is this: once it was a headline, now it’s a footnote, and I think there’s a simple explanation for its fading into obscurity. You weren’t a mover and a shaker, Cole. A lot of other pictures were made after that one and the people in them were movers and shakers. That’s what we see today in all those retrospectives.

  He settled back in his chair, thought of what she had said. It made sense, and maybe he had always known it was the reason the picture—The Photograph—was no longer as important as it had been.

  I don’t disagree, he said after a moment.

  But you will write about it, won’t you? she asked.

  It’s part of what happened, he answered.

  Then you need to put it in words, she said.

  He looked at her. Or maybe it’s time I stop thinking about it. Maybe it’s time for a hobby. I’ve been considering a bonsai garden. It would be relaxing, I think. What’s your opinion?

  She laughed.

  Now I have a question for you, he said.

  Ask, she replied.

  Are you really Jewish?

  Her laughter turned to merriment. One of the things I’ve learned in reading about Marie is how easy it is to toy with you, she said. She leaned forward. No, Cole, I’m Presbyterian. I think I’d like to be Jewish. I like their spirit, their sense of pride. I like Jewish women. They’re not eaten up with guilt, at least the ones I know aren’t.

  She stayed until noon, making an early lunch for the two of them from the leftover of Christmas dinner. She said nothing else about the writing, or about Marie, or about the killing. The talk, upbeat, funny, was about the party of the night before—of Mark’s anxiety over some football game, of Quentin Hargrove’s endless litany of obscene email jokes showered on him by friends, of Janice Spencer drinking too much and making suggestive remarks to David Goodlove while John Spencer, her husband, watched and steamed. The night, she reported, was what she had expected it to be—a disaster performed as a comedy. She told him he had been fortunate, being sick. Next year, I’m going to find my own germ, she vowed.

  Before she left, she embraced him gently and said to him, Your friendship means a lot to me, Cole. I want you to think about doing something that could bother you.

  What? he asked.

  Write to her, she said.

  He frowned quizzically.

  Marie, she said. Write to Marie.

  Where did that come from? he asked.

  I think it would help you.

  How?

  She let her gaze hold on him for a moment, a studying expression. Then she said, Do you know what I say about you to other people?

  No, he replied.

  I tell them you’re a man of many shadings. I tell them that you can be as funny as Billy Crystal when you’re relaxed and as serious as Bill Clinton in denial when the occasion calls for it. But I’ve never said that to you, have I? When I’m talking to you, rather than about you, the distance between us is closer. It makes me want to tell you things I would never tell anyone else. I believe that’s important.

  He did not reply.

  Will you think about it? she asked gently.

  He nodded.

  In early afternoon, after a short, dreamless nap, he went again into his office and opened his laptop and read the last segment of his writing. It had been a seminal moment in his life, his last meeting with Marie Fitzpatrick, yet the memory of it—even the writing of it—seemed incomplete. And it was. The other part of the story—the killing—was necessary.

  He began to write.

  December 26, afternoon

  I want this to be right, or as right as my memory of it permits. Even now, before I put the words on paper, I see it happening, hear the voices of it.

  My memory of the day of the killing is very much like a recurring dream that never ages, never changes.

  It began in Wade Hart’s apartment, a shared late breakfast of cold cereal after a night of study. It began in the kind of college-wit bantering that Wade and I often exchanged—light-hearted hyperbole, meaningless, the one-upmanship of young men who are friendly enough to take jabs of insult. In those days, I was good at such repartee. It is something I have lost, or tempered, over the years.

  Wade did not believe anyone named Bevo Francis from Rio Grande College had scored one hundred points in a basketball game. He called me ridiculous, said I knew nothing about sports. The only man who ever scored one hundred points in a college basketball game was Frank Selvy from Furman University, he contended confidently.

  I challenged him with a ten-dollar wager.

  His come-back was: “You’re on.” He added, with a touch of arrogance, “You may be the golden boy of literature around here, but you don’t know the first damn thing about sports.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” I said.

  Wade cackled a mocking laugh.

  “No, I mean it,” I added. “You’re talking to a former high school quarterback, and a basketball wizard. They used to call me Zippy, after Zippy Morocco at the University of Georgia. We ran the Bishop Offense. It was unstoppable.”

  “Yeah, and what was that?”

  “When we crossed the centerline, I shot the ball,” I told him.

  “Sounds like you,” he scoffed. “Sounds like that school for retards you attended. What classification was it? D? F?”

  “It was C,” I said. “Poor, but proud. We were humble folk.”

  He exhaled a great, painful sigh. “Jesus H-for-Holy Christ. Humble? What a word. Especially coming from you. What a great word. How many games did you win?”

  “I can’t count that high,” I answered. “They used to triple-team me, and that’s when we were on defense. When we had the ball, they had everybody on me. Sometimes, when we got forty or fifty points ahead, we’d let them play with six or seven guys, and they still couldn’t stop me.”

  “God, Cole, you never let up, do you?” he cried in desperation. “I doubt if you can even dribble a basketball.”

  I waved away the insult. “Bevo Francis,” I said, “actually scored one hundred and thirteen points for Rio Grande. My ten dollars against your ten. The Golden Boy of Literature against the Urine-Stained Jock Strap.”

  “Let’s go to the library,” he snapped.

  “Bring money,” I said.

  I liked Wade Hart, liked the give-and-take of our talks, always sharp-bladed and quick, like fencers twirling foils or epees or sabers in ballet steps that made poetry out of slaughter. It was the language of clever college show-offs of the early 1960s, and it fit us perfectly. Wade was a history major and a superb athlete. He was on the Upton University tennis team and played intramural basketball with both fury and finesse. There was a rumor he had rejected an offer to play baseball at Georgia Tech, a rumor Wade would not discuss. He believed that superb athletes did not need to promote themselves—a far cry from the athlete of today. He said only that baseball bored him. Too much standing around, waiting to do something.

  In 1962, Wade was in his senior year of undergraduate study at Upton and I was in my final year of the Masters program. We had become friends because we both had apartments in a private boarding facility called Morrow House near the university. Wade was the scion of a prominent and wealthy Atlanta family—his father a doctor, his mother a bank official—and I thought of him as a reluctant blueblood. There was nothing pretentious about him. He was tall and handsome in the fair Germ
an way of blonde hair and blue eyes and chiseled chin. He did not own a car, did not want one. He wore neat, but conservative clothing. His room was spare and uninviting. The only thing to suggest that Wade Hart had access to money was an expensive record player and an astonishing collection of records. He favored folk music, loved the Kingston Trio.

  Wade also loved argument. It was in his disposition, in his fierce sense of discipline, in his passion to learn. Argument had fashioned our friendship, and always there was a pitying remark about my background. As I believed Wade was a reluctant blueblood, Wade believed I was a dreamer trying to pull myself from the mire of rural poverty.

  Our argument over one-hundred point basketball games had begun with a casual conversation of Wilt Chamberlain’s hundred-point game earlier that year.

  “My favorite one-hundred point man was Bevo Francis,” I had said casually. “I like that man’s name.”

  “Who?” he had asked.

  “Bevo Francis.”

  “Okay, Cole, I’ll bite,” he had said. “Where did you dig up Bevo Francis? And, for God’s sake, don’t tell me it’s out of Shakespeare. Not even Shakespeare would come up with a name like that.”

  “Bevo Francis was a basketball player for Rio Grande College,” I had explained.

  “Wait a minute, let me guess,” he had countered. “Zane Grey. You got him out of Zane Grey. He was one of those cowboys that massacred Indians and slept with horny horses out on the lonesome trail.” He had paused, cocked his head, furrowed his brow in thought. “Or, maybe not. No, I’d say Hemingway. Sounds like Hemingway to me. Bevo. That’s the kind of name Hemingway would love, and unless I’ve misread you, you’ve been wandering around Paris in that misguided mind you think of as an imagination, sniffing the seat of every bar stool that poor bastard ever sat on.”

  “I’m telling you, Bevo Francis was a basketball player,” I had insisted.

  “And you forget who you’re talking to, Cole. I’m the jock. You’re the bullshit artist. And I’m also the one who’s put up with your bullshit for a year. Frankly, it’s amusing, as long as you stay out of my field.”

  “Believe me, Wade, I know what I’m talking about,” I had replied.

  It was a clean April day—sun-bright, with high, spinning coils of bleached-white clouds, with sweet, honeysuckle air. In Atlanta, the greening of spring had unfolded in a rush, in a blink of pale green leaves pushing from the tips of bare, swollen limbs, in the bowed heads of jonquils raising their yellow faces to light. The blinding white blossoms of dogwoods had exploded like popcorn and purple strands of thrift covered patches of ground like ribbons dropped by small, enchanting girls at play. Azaleas blazed in red and pink and white.

  Our bantering continued as we crossed the campus to the library. It is like a song in my memory, one stuck there, somewhere in the gray web of brain matter.

  “God, I love this weather,” Wade cried. “And I love this place. I love everything about it. Except you, Cole. You’re the only blight I know in Camelot.”

  “Speaking of Camelot,” I said, “did you know that one of my ancestors was a knight?”

  “Sure,” he answered brightly. “I’ve heard you talk about him. Sir Cockroach. I thought you were lying, so I looked him up. He was a deserter. Took up with the Italians. Ran a whorehouse in Rome. I know about stuff like that, Cole. I’m a history major, you know.”

  “I’m serious,” I said. “Actually, he did get wounded in battle and had to hang up his armor, but he was very famous.”

  Wade laughed cynically. “And you’ve never told me about him? There’s a redneck hero in your family, and I don’t know about it? That’s hard to believe.”

  “It’s kind of embarrassing,” I said.

  “Embarrassing?” he bellowed. “Cole, you’re embarrassing. What in the name of God could have happened to an ancestor that would bother you?”

  “It was his wound,” I confessed.

  “His wound?”

  “In history, he’s regarded as the world’s first accidental eunuch. Caught a sword right in the tiara of the family jewels,” I said.

  He laughed like a child.

  “You know what’s on the family coat-of-arms?” I asked.

  He shook his head, slowed his stride to listen.

  “A sword buried to the hilt in the groin,” I told him. “Some people have mistakened it for a decorated penis, but it’s not; it’s the handle of a Roman sword. Now, I ask you, would you go around telling people you descended from a eunuch? In the first place, who’d believe it?”

  “Since it’s you, I would,” he said. “God, you’re impossible. You know who you sound like? You sound like that idiot you hang around with. Jack Alewine. The two of you sound exactly alike.”

  “Thank you,” I replied. “Jack’s brilliant.”

  “Where has he been, anyway?” he asked. “I haven’t seen him around for a couple of days.”

  “I don’t know where he’s been, but I know where he is,” I answered. “He went to check on joining the Peace Corps. He’s a Kennedy man, through and through.”

  “He’s a fool,” Wade mumbled.

  “We all are,” I said.

  Wade stopped walking and turned to me. “Do either of you know what’s going on in the world, Cole?” There was no teasing in his voice.

  “I think we do,” I answered evenly. “We’re not Laurel and Hardy, if that’s what you mean.”

  He shrugged. “No, that’s not what I mean.” He looked across the quadrangle. A small gathering of men dressed in the rough clothing of laborers, their faces hard and unsmiling, mingled near the Administration Building. “Wonder what’s going on?” he said. “Looks like some of your kin, Cole.”

  “Cousins,” I said in the fake voice of put-on pride. “They’re contributors to Upton. Big contributors. The only man who gives more to old Upton than my cousins is your daddy, and he’s just trying to buy you an education. Not my cousins. They give because they love real college men, like me, and they’ve got it to give, Wade. Lots of it. They probably put on the sidegates of the pickup and loaded it with cash and drove it over.”

  “Good. Maybe we can get a new gym,” he mumbled. Then: “Come on, you’ve got to prove to me that Bevo Francis is real.” He again inhaled deeply from the sweet April air. “God, I love this time of year,” he crowed. “Love this place. Love everything about it. Everything but you, Cole. You’re a wart on perfection.”

  I have always been at ease in libraries. In libraries, I discover stories that astonish me, stories that make me want to cry out in exhilaration and to worship the minds of those writers who took words and, like oil drops from the palettes of great painters, created visions so vivid they burn the eye of the reader. I like to walk the rows of bookshelves and run my fingers over the spines of books, brushing them lightly, reverently. I like the smell of books, the musk of paper and bindings, the slightly dusty odor of human touch. To me, libraries are like great restaurants and books are the food of my gluttony.

  The library at Upton was far grander than any library I had ever toured. A wealthy man named Donald Byers, in a philanthropic whim prior to his death, had bequeathed millions to the Upton library in a steady, but generous flow, and the library was regarded as one of the finest among the nation’s universities. It was the principal reason I had elected to stay at Upton for graduate study. I knew, in the library, I would be happy.

  I also knew exactly where to find the fact of Bevo Francis’s one hundred and thirteen points—in the Sports Book of Facts: Bevo Francis, February 2, 1954, against Hillsdale College. Thirty-eight field goals, thirty-seven free throws.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Wade whispered. “For once in your irritating life, you were right. I’ve never heard of Bevo Francis.”

  “He was my inspiration,” I said, “the reason I was a great basketball player. I was a junior in high school that year.”

  “Who the hell were they playing?” he grumbled. “Hillsdale? What was it? A girl’s team?”<
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  “Wade, I don’t care if was a girl’s team, a traveling band of midgets, or three blind mice. Bevo Francis scored one hundred and thirteen, and you owe me ten,” I said.

  “How about a little one-on-one?” he countered. “Double or nothing.”

  “You’re younger than I am,” I said seriously. “And you’re sensitive and spoiled. You’d be totally crushed. You’d probably drop out of school and become a derelict. Your father would become so despondent he’d wind up a recluse, and withdraw every nickel of support to this place you love so much. I couldn’t be responsible for that. I’d never forgive myself.”

  He pulled his billfold from his pocket and fingered two five-dollar bills from it. “I’d rather pay you than listen to you,” he said wearily. He handed me the money. “I need to do some reading for a while. You staying or leaving?”

  “Leaving,” I told him. “I’m working on a paper back at the house, and Jack’s coming back. Said he’d stop at the Varsity and bring some hotdogs.”

  “See you later,” he said.

  “Maybe we can shoot some hoops,” I suggested.

  He smiled. “I can’t wait, Cole. Bring money.”

  “Zippy,” I said. “Call me Zippy. And, don’t worry, I’ve got money. Just earned it, in fact.”

  I saw the marchers nearing the Administration Building as I left the library and I stopped under the umbrella shade of an oak to watch. I estimated there were fifty of them, mostly young, mostly black, with a few whites reluctantly following, trying to blend, but not blending well. They were sing-chanting, but I could not understand the words.

  Across from them, the group of men Wade and I had seen earlier were huddled together, like migrant workers looking for pick-up jobs. They were glaring at the marchers.

  Near them were three policemen and a few photographers. One of the photographers was Ernie O’Connor, who worked for The Atlanta Chronicle. I knew Ernie from my part-time job as a copy editor. Ernie was a throw-back to the journalism of the 1940s and 1950s, a hard-drinker, a hanger-on. There was never anything spectacular about his photographs, and his assignments were mainly for civic clubs or social functions or high school sports events.