by Ward Just
It was then that Ned Ayres liked to think he had been part of a golden age that was never to repeat itself in any recognizable form. That was the fact of the matter, and what Ned was trying to get down on paper, his memoir, was not as simple a chore as one might think. At the end of a day’s reading and writing Ned found himself in a wilderness. These many years later he discovered that his stories were stale. They did not flourish on the page. His beautiful symphony had gone sour, the musicians weary after such a long haul. The newspaper business reminded him of his manor house, still handsome but no longer stately. The lawn was ragged. The third floor had long since been closed off, so late at night Ned no longer heard the soft midnight sounds of Edgar Allan Poe trying to put things right. Earl Bosenquet was long gone and replaced by a middle-aged woman from town who did not mind preparing a light dinner now and again. The anatomy of the house, its skin and bones and marrow, continued to break down, and to restore all of the parts to anything like what they had been—well, that was a fortune squandered. That was the man standing under a cold shower tearing up thousand-dollar bills and calling it ocean racing.
Commodore Ayres.
Ned Ayres was a popular figure in the village, whose inhabitants he found wildly eccentric, reminiscent of the disheveled newsrooms of his youth. The watermen especially spoke in a tongue so slurred and accented, seemingly composed of vowels alone, that he found it difficult to parse. Any outsider was obliged to listen carefully, and so it was fortunate that listening carefully was an old Ned habit. The weekly newspaper had folded long ago and a coffee shop had taken its place, patrons arriving with news of the fire on Bass Avenue or the break-in at the filling station—or was it the other way around, a break-in on Bass Avenue and a fire at the filling station? In the mornings when the weather was iffy Ned drove to the village and settled in at the coffee shop to keep abreast of things, and now and then there was real news, another teenager dead of an overdose, a teachers’ strike imminent, tomorrow’s rainstorm. His companions over coffee were the mayor and the police chief, both women in their seventies. The present was so discouraging that they talked mostly of the peaceable past, the Christmas parade and the school pageant. That very afternoon a carnival was setting up in the soccer field behind the school. They often recollected a fresh anecdote concerning Wilson’s Fifty, the time the secretary of the navy fell off a horse. The afternoon old Wilson broke the ankle of the solicitor general with an errant croquet ball. How ya doin’ up there, Ned? Things quiet at the Fifty? Ned said he was doing fine, though the other day Myrtle the cleaning lady came upon trespassers, nonthreatening trespassers who claimed they had lost their way. They gave Myrtle an uneasy feeling, a man and his son, city types wearing overcoats and fedora hats. They looked like bail bondsmen. Shifty characters, didn’t know where in hell they were. But Myrtle was not one to be trifled with, so the trespassers went away.
Gets lonely, doesn’t it? the mayor said.
I have my work, Ned said.
That’s what you said when you came here, how many years ago now? “I have my work.” We were pretty sure you couldn’t stick it out. The Eastern Shore’s not to everyone’s taste. But you proved us wrong.
Takes time, Ned said.
We thought you’d miss the big city. Bright lights.
I did at first but not anymore.
You’re an adaptable fellow, the mayor said.
They were standing on the sidewalk watching workmen assemble the Ferris wheel. Fanning out from the Ferris wheel were canvas lean-tos, spaces for food and drink and the various games on offer. Hit the bull’s eye, win a kewpie doll. The workmen were taking their time, making frequent visits to the beer tent. The police chief shook her head.
She said, Accidents waiting to happen.
They’re just boys, Ned said.
That’s the trouble, the chief said.
We had carnivals in the little town I grew up in, Ned said. There was a girlie tent, so that usually meant a fistfight before things wrapped up. Hard cases from the next town over, Mill City. Everyone waiting for the fistfight, which usually ended in a draw. Always a few injuries. Our town tried to impose an admission fee for the hard cases from Mill City. Never worked. Or it didn’t work to our advantage. The fistfight was part of the fun, I guess. The paper I worked for always had a page-one story on the fistfight. Above the fold, two photographs.
This one ends with fireworks, as you’ll remember, the mayor said. In the old days they had an elephant. But the elephant died. Poor old thing, just keeled over. That was twenty years ago. You going, Ned?
I’m too old for carnivals, Ned said. All that standing around.
I’ll buy you a beer, the chief said.
Was there trouble last year? I can’t remember.
The chief shook her head. Rained like crazy. Damned deluge.
Ned said, Rain dampens high spirits.
Not always, the mayor said.
They stood quietly watching the Ferris wheel rise slowly, chair by chair. The chairs looked flimsy, as if a stiff wind could carry them away. Ned opened his mouth to say something, then didn’t. The carnival was not his affair, and lately he had come to avoid crowds. Crowds gave him mild vertigo. He felt a lack of agility among strangers. Carnivals were fun, though, always something anticipated, like a fistfight or a child in distress. The idea of a leisurely beer had appeal. He thought he would go home to the manor house and have a beer. There was a six-pack in the fridge, Amstel. He would have a beer and a ham sandwich while he figured out where Uncle Ralph fit into the scheme of things. Uncle Ralph slipped into his mind unbidden and now his presence was palpable, his fact-free zone and his difficulties with his brother the judge. All his life Ned remembered the German soldiers, their comity and their gift-bearing, candy bars and chocolate bears, and soon enough they were gone, vanished into a French twilight. Uncle Ralph had created his own private war in which there were no casualties, always excluding himself. You had to admire Uncle Ralph’s arrangements, a way to get through the day. Ned stepped back, away from the crowd. At dusk he would watch the fireworks from his Adirondack chair. He said goodbye to the mayor and the police chief, Paulette and Eloise, and strolled to his car. Ned looked back at the Ferris wheel. Work had ceased. There was a glitch and no one seemed to know what to do about it.
Ned Ayres drove slowly out of town, past the empty piers and the fish market. Someone waved and he waved back. Ned motored to the highway, turned left, and began the slow crawl to the manor house. The sun had begun its descent as the earth turned. Traffic thickened, everyone heading for the carnival. The Ferris wheel was visible in his rearview mirror. He passed the mayor’s house and, a mile or so on, the Bosenquets’. He noticed thunderheads in the west; so there would be rain for the carnival. Then Ned turned into his brick driveway. A flight of blackbirds scrambled overhead. In only a few moments the manor house appeared through the trees. The sun disappeared behind a thunderhead. Ned wondered who would occupy it when he was gone. In his will he had deeded the house and its fifty acres to the town for a museum or whatever the town wanted. That was years ago. His lawyer tried to talk him out of it. The house was uninsurable owing to decay. A white elephant, the lawyer said. Who would want your house? The town won’t take it. The town’s broke. It’s out of the way, Wilson’s house. It’s too big and it needs repair. You haven’t kept it up properly, Ned. It’s gone to seed. Now the land, that’s something else. Someone with vision could make a fine property, ten or twelve houses for the Washington people who want a summer place. A gated community. That, I could sell. I could sell the hell out of it and you could leave the money to the library or the Boy Scouts. The high school needs a grown-up playing field with bleachers and two locker rooms. A big scoreboard. They’d call it Ned Ayres Field. Something to remember you by, Ned.
You never married, did you?
No, Ned said.
No living relatives?
None, Ned said.
Well, then, the lawyer said, and that was all he said.
I’ll think on it, Ned said, but he didn’t think on it. The lawyer died, and the idea died with him. Ned lost interest, what interest he had. He was now wholly occupied with his memoir and the recollections that went with it. The fragments, he called them.
Ned Ayres had begun with high enthusiasm for his new life, making what repairs he could and setting up a work schedule—one hour in the morning and two hours in the afternoon, bisected by lunch and a nap. He thought he could finish in two years, maybe three. There was no rush, and any deadline was his own deadline. He foresaw a long, loose glide path that ended in his library, an office so unlike his other offices. He thought of Poe’s fragment and the Alma-Tadema. From the far corner of the library he watched the antique clock mark the minutes, a ding every quarter hour. For a time this annoyed him, but after a while he forgot about it. Everything depended on his memory and the reliability of his diaries and other papers. Of course Ned Ayres had difficulty in the beginning, his thoughts turning naturally to Herman and his apprenticeship in the correct presentation of news. In those days he lived in the moment without thoughts of tomorrow, entirely consumed by his line edits and two-sentence ledes, the first anchoring the second. He insisted that Gus Harding use two-sentence ledes, the mill that set things up for the grist. The lede was like a smart hat, the second thing the reader noticed. All this was the minutiae of news reporting but essential also. He thought of the minutiae as the stretcher-bearers of the campaign, skilled in triage. The triage came first. He remembered Gus Harding looking at him without comprehension. Ned was sympathetic. Sometimes you could take these strictures too far, make more of them than they were worth. But when one loved the business, insisted on its importance, well, a little exaggeration did no harm. Years ago Ned tried to spell out the idea to his father, who responded, Oh, for Chrissakes. But no one ever accused the judge of having the soul of a poet. Instead, he believed in his briefs. When Ned told him he had met William O. Douglas, Eric Ayres rolled his eyes: Douglas did not have a mind, he had a personality. The old man was baffled when Ned told him that a number of newsrooms around the country called the two-sentence lede the Ayres Lede. The Muncie paper did. The Indi-anapolis paper also, and others round and about.
Ned had not returned to Herman in years. What excitement there was he had mostly forgotten, and reasonably so. That was what you did with a used-up newspaper, forgot it along with yesterday’s weather and the ball scores and the obits. Ned thought to place himself in that time, eighteen years old and so little had stuck; there were many lessons learned, but he had forgotten what they were except for the two-sentence lede. He did not begin a diary until years later when he had bought the green leather notebook with the Mark Cross logo, all but effaced over the years. Ned studied photographs to help him recall what downtown Herman looked like, the great swath of Benjamin Franklin Boulevard and the newspaper office next to the pharmacy, Grant Haberdashery down the street. He studied photographs to see what he looked like as a young man not out of his teens, six feet two inches tall, a tousled head of dark hair, unusually large eyes, capable hands, an untroubled smile, a squint following the smile. As a young man he had forged ahead willy-nilly. Falling upstairs, as they said. He was not born to the trade, but at the Herman Press-Gazette he had learned to read type upside down, made corrections faster than any of the regulars. But his memory, infallible for years, failed to find his boyhood self. He learned to live with that. In the high-vaulted library he pressed on, searching for the bits and pieces of a life back then, a snapshot of Elaine, another of Uncle Ralph, his mother in a fox stole, his father on the first tee of the golf club. Of course these were surface observations, as if his life were a procession of newspaper stories, “shorts,” they were called. There was a Rosebud in there somewhere if he could find it. He did not have an up-to-date diary because there would have been so few facts to put in it. Often he turned to the computer, but the computer revealed little beyond years-old expense accounts and to-do lists, addresses and telephone numbers and income tax records and random notes deploring the high cost of newsprint. He was surprised one day to find a snapshot of Milo Passarel and Lana in the parking lot of the Alhambra.
Naturally there were no examples of his own work, the cutting and fitting, the word changes. Editing was as invisible as the work of a careful tailor. No one outside the newsroom could say, Nice edit, because readers never saw the edit. They saw the results of the edit. The edit was the live heart beating against the skin, essential yet concealed, crafted to endure. It was the mirror of the sea.
Ned Ayres persevered as the years accumulated. The manor house continued its slow, strained desuetude. The fields went to seed. The Adirondack chair, bleached white, was rarely occupied. Ned was slow afoot and rarely ventured beyond his house. The memoir became an avocation, like stamp collecting or billiards. His one certainty was that he would never complete it, and in time people stopped asking. In his off-hours he thought of a final resting place for his papers, such as they were. He had the idea to offer the archive to the Library of Congress, and when that went nowhere he considered a fine Maryland bonfire, invite his neighbors, serve champagne. It did occur to him to wipe the computer clean and send the contents to wherever they belonged in the ether. Someone told him that the word now was cloud. But at the last minute he could not bring himself to push the buttons, fate’s temptation. Ned knew in his heart that was a kind of suicide, not so different from that wretch—what was his name? Grant. Born Kelly.
PRELUDE
THESE EVENTS HAPPENED a while back, when the war was not quite a war, more a prelude to a war. Their army was called a guerrilla force. Our army was called a Military Assistance Command. The war is the least of the story that follows. It cast its own shadow, and to live within it was to live within a sphere of strained silence and self-reliance.
Foreign service officer Harry Sanders was visiting river villages in one of the southern provinces. He traveled by boat with a helmsman and a bodyguard, a lethargic army sergeant who sat in the stern, a carbine in his lap, his eyes invisible behind army-issue sunglasses. Foliage along the edges of the river was thick and, where the channel narrowed, so close that the leaves touched the boat’s hull. The helmsman throttled back, explaining that he was disoriented by the river water, dead still and reflective as a mirror. Stare at it long enough and it was hard to tell up from down.
The Americans were there to inspect projects in five villages, a schoolhouse in one, wells in two others, a guardhouse in the fourth, a clinic in the fifth. The clinic was Harry’s particular interest, certainly the most troubling, completed only the week before. Construction delays were chronic. The idea was to verify that the work had been done and that the projects were fully operational and useful to the inhabitants. There were always complaints and Harry was there to listen to the complaints—the leaking roofs, the lack of proper medicines, the strange noise the well made. In each village the headman would take Harry to the project, whatever it was, and explain the difficulty, and Harry wrote the complaints in a notebook and promised action, though not right away. The sergeant always stood a little apart, holding his carbine while he scrutinized the surroundings. The first three villages were empty of people, always a bad sign. Asked about that, the headman would say the people were in the fields, harvesting. But they were nowhere in sight. The villages were the soul of silence. Nothing moved in the damp heat. Even the insects had disappeared. Asked about the security situation, the headman smiled vaguely and said there had been no change. The villages were exposed. Why, only the other day a platoon of the enemy had arrived at dusk and harangued them for an hour or more. There were threats. Finally they took what they wanted and departed. What did they want? They wanted food and volunteers and went away with the food and three teenage boys. The headman was small of stature, middle-aged, with a wispy beard that fell to his chest. His eyes were hooded and he never looked directly at Harry.
We should go now, the sergeant said.
What do you see?
>
Nothing. That’s the trouble.
Harry thanked the headman and gave him some money and he and the sergeant walked slowly down the path to the boat. When Harry looked back, the headman had vanished. He wondered how they did it, disappear into thin air like Ali Baba. He thought that somehow they dwelled in a parallel universe, one of their own making. The American presence covered them the way a shroud covered a grave. No hint of the shape of things beneath the shroud. The shroud was opaque. Anything could be under it, a corpse or a bomb or a pygmy elephant or a naked woman. And if the shroud were suddenly ripped away—well, perhaps one would find nothing at all. Harry supposed that someday a native of the region would write a poem describing the parallel universe, its weather and dimensions, its values, what it loved and what it loathed, its aspirations. Why were foreigners hated so? Not only Americans but everyone else. And the poem would be translated into an English filled with obscure allusions, dry as dust but something seething beneath the surface.
They motored on to Village Number Four, mostly unoccupied, though the word that came to mind was abandoned. The guardhouse looked unoccupied. The headman stood impassively to greet him, two small children hanging on his legs. Harry took the presence of the children as a hopeful sign. They were the only hopeful sign, and as he looked about him at the stilted houses and the gray concrete guardhouse he thought that a splash of color would improve the look of things. He often summoned optimistic images when in the sullen countryside and what he conjured now was a newspaper kiosk, the sort of cheerful amenity found on Paris boulevards. Perhaps a café with red awnings and a white-aproned waiter balancing a drinks tray on the tips of his fingers. Somewhere nearby music floated from an open window, French cabaret, horns and violins and Piaf’s raw throat. Girls in short skirts, a boulevardier walking his dog . . . The mirage was unsuccessful. Perhaps next time, something more durable, the Hoover Dam or a Mayan pyramid. Stonehenge. Harry shook hands with the headman, who avoided looking him in the eye. They stood a moment talking of the security situation, the weather, his family. The weather was normal, the security situation in flux, his wife was ill. Harry said, Your village appears deserted. Where is everyone? The headman moved his arms as if to indicate they were elsewhere, in the fields, round and about, parts unknown.