A Slepyng Hound to Wake

by Vincent McCaffrey

  But Henry was not finished.

  “But it’s the sense of place that’s lost with that. A bookshop is a place of books. Browsing in books is a matter of smell, and texture, and time. It’s having all those strange new worlds within reach. It’s the conversation… .” He stumbled on the memory of the cheapskate woman in Alcott & Poe. He was not happy with his inability to find the right words.

  He looked toward Della, who was chatting about Hungarian food with Duggan. Nora smiled patiently at him after he stopped.

  “We don’t get to smell the sweet perfume of horse manure on the streets any longer, either,” she added.

  Nora seemed very much in the thrall of the new day of the internet. After lunch she went out on the lake again alone. They could see that she had her cell phone with her and spent much of the time talking.

  Duggan asked for help with the two-handled bucksaw and they cut a hip-high pile of logs for the fireplace within an hour. Afterward they sat on the porch and wallowed in a warm breeze that pushed into the shade of the pines from off the lake.

  Duggan had sprawled in a heavy board Adirondack-style chair. They had started to speak about Penny Candy.

  “Mr. Perry was unusual … But, you know that.”

  “I didn’t know—not until I read the book,” Henry answered.

  The big man got up then and sat on the hand rail with his back against a post, his voice lowering in a way Henry remembered from the memorial service for Morgan Johnson.

  “His talent was unusual, of course, but I meant something else. … It’s odd to say this now, after his death, but he was a survivor. You actually see a lot of them in history, because the survivors are the ones who make it and are written about. But they are actually not so common as they appear. The hardships of history are Darwinian to the extreme. I have come to believe that the importance of chance is far smaller than most Modernists assert. If chance were to predominate, mankind would still be scratching two-dimensional figures on the walls of caves. In the short term, chance may play a larger roll, but in the long term it is the inexorable force of the human spirit which succeeds… . Think of it religiously if you wish, but I see it as the spread of life. Here’s this fellow, Eddy Perry, who might have given up a thousand times, but had that bit of sinew in his heart that made him try again, and again. If anyone deserved to win, it was Eddy Perry. With all his faults. He had earned it.”

  Henry had thought the same thing. “Chance turned against him in the end, though. His last bit of luck was bad.”

  Duggan shook his head. “Luck? I’m not sure … Perhaps. There is such a thing as luck, I suppose. But all I’m saying is this: that luck has less to do with things than most people think.”

  “You found us in the woods,” Della said.

  “That was Matty.” Matty’s ears went up.

  “Della found me.” Henry said.

  “She knows you. She guessed your direction with a pretty good sense of who you are, and then she found your trail. That was plain as can be.”

  Henry took a leap. “You found Nora.”

  “Nora … No, Nora found me. I’m just an old reprobate who couldn’t take his eyes off her. She gets that every day. She came up and talked to me one day after I gave a speech at Boston University. She volunteered to help with a project I had started there. Later on, when she was working with the fellow I hired to get Tremont Press going, she understood what I wanted and made things happen there better than he did. We had some common interests. It’s what civilizations are build on, common interests.”

  Della looked at Henry.

  “Common interest. See?”

  “Hot pastrami.” Henry answered.

  Nora’s canoe drifted in low silhouette against the sheen of the sun on the surface of the lake.

  “Does she like Eddy’s book?” Henry asked.

  Duggan looked behind himself to the small figure.

  “Yes … You’ll be hearing from her about that. She wants to know who owns the rights.”

  Henry shrugged. He had not given that much thought.

  “I’m not sure. Legally. You know from the book that he has no relatives left. I thought—in the introduction he says that the book was written for Janet Fowler, as a gift, he says. Isn’t that as good as a will? He gave it to her.”

  Duggan wiped his face with his hand.

  “I’ll talk to Boyle. He has a guy—you met him, I believe—Ted Schultz. He can figure it out. I think that would be a fine idea.”

  Henry settled back with the idea in his head. It sounded right to him. The other canoes bobbed against the pier, knocking gently. To one side, the quiet of the shuttered cabins seemed to want the sound of kids running wild.

  “This must have been a great camp.”

  “It was the best.”

  “How long has it been closed?”

  Duggan surveyed the structures with his eyes.

  “Twenty-something years. In the late seventies. The recession then killed it.”

  “No chance of opening it up again?”

  Duggan looked at him with a squint.

  “Yeah … we had a writer’s conference up here last year. … My kids spend their summers here.”

  “How many children do you have?”

  “Three.”

  “Three’s a good number.” Della said, pressing at Henry’s arm.

  Duggan said, “It turned out to be a lot more than I bargained for.”

  Della’s asked, “Where are they now?”

  “With their respective mothers. I have three fabulous children, two by my first wife and one by my second. They spend a lot of time with me up here. They have the run of the place for now … but kids are as selfish as writers are. They need their own time. They possess it. My first wife did not understand that. She wanted to share the time I needed to write. It didn’t work. My second wife is my agent now. I sometimes think it was Heber’s little joke. He was the one who recommended her to me before he died. But at least she understood my need for time, and everything was cool until she got pregnant. … That’s when I got a vasectomy. I’m way too selfish a man to have all those children. But as undeserving as I am, they’ve given me a lot more in return than I have ever been able to give to them. Nora and I agreed at the start not to get married. I guess I don’t want to take a third swing and strike out. But she’s like you,” he turned to Della. “She wants to have kids someday.”

  Duggan rose then with his own thoughts and took one of the canoes and paddled to the center of the lake where Nora floated. She was still lying on her back, sunglasses pointed at the sky and her elbow sharpened, to hold her cell phone at her ear.

  It occurred to Henry later, as he listened to a loon in the evening light across the shadowed lake and the mountain had once again caught the red of the sun, that he had never once, since he had left home at seventeen, taken a vacation. He said this aloud to Della as she closed her eyes to the sun. Henry had experienced days without work. He had gone to New York many times, but always because he had books to buy or sell, and not just to eat pastrami sandwiches. He had spent a day at the beach, but not a whole week, as he had when he was a kid.

  His father had sold the little beach house long ago, when the property values went crazy on the Cape. No—probably just because his mother was no longer there. But even so, it seemed a distant memory… . He had driven by the little place one time. Someone had torn it down and put up a big grey-shingled box. He pushed the memory away. In any case, he could not remember once going away on vacation to relax or escape. He admitted this now to Della. He had liked being in the woods, being away with her. She grunted, or the dog did, as she moved her chair closer to his on the porch. He was not sure she understood.

  Matty sprawled beneath them on the deck.

  “Remember the loon last night? I had never heard a loon before,” he said. “I thought it was a human cry. It sounded like someone moaning.”

  “That was me.” She put her cheek against his arm.

  �
�No …”

  He was cornered. On one side, the whole world was laid out before him, and on the other, she held his hand to her breast.

  “Did you hear what George said about Eddy Perry’s book?”

  “Yes. That was pretty good.” Her eyes were closed.

  Henry said, “It’s worth the trip.”

  Della squeezed his hand. “Did you talk about the other thing?”

  “No … Not yet. Maybe. I’m not sure I want to.”

  She did not ask why. He hoped it was because she was thinking the way he was about it. She sat up to pull the blanket they had used the night before from off the rail where it had been left to dry, and spread it over their legs to cut the chill.

  “Nora says that loons mate for life.”

  “I wonder if that has anything to do with why they’re called loons.”

  She hit him beneath the blanket.

  They used the blanket again on the way back in the truck to cut the wind as they sat facing backwards in the open bed, the inflatable boat folded beneath them for a seat. Albert had refused to sit back there alone and opted to drive. Junior had thought it better to sit in the cab than with Henry. Della said she had not ridden in the open since she had dated a guy with a Harley in college.

  Della huddled close beneath the blanket and held his hand against her knee.

  She said, “And how about George Duggan?”

  He was not thinking about George Duggan at that moment.

  “Right. How about him?”

  “You like Duggan.” She said it, more than asked.

  “I do,” Henry answered.

  “He gives them what they want—”

  “True … But he tries to pull Barbara’s little trick. He slips in a little something extra. He puts in fresh carrots. He uses a little different sauce. He writes thrillers and slips in a bit of history for seasoning. I guess for my taste, it’s still too processed. Even if it makes him feel better about what he’s done. I preferred the Frankowski book, after all.”

  “Don’t you think it’s better that people read a Duggan novel than watch TV?”

  He jerked at his hand but she held on.

  “Relativism! That’s exactly what makes it all wrong.”

  She was not going to make it simple. “You have something against relatives?”

  “Moral relativism!”

  “He’s just trying to entertain people.”

  “He’s part of the system.”

  “But you said you liked him.”

  “I do.”

  The large cooler near their feet leaked water from the melting ice, and the smell of fish wafted in the boil of air around them. Albert had done well. Junior had done better. Henry was looking forward to an invitation to eat some of Alice’s famous fried fish.

  “Is that going to make it hard to help Sharon?”

  He did not answer that. He was not sure what he could do now to help Sharon.

  Della persisted. “How about Barbara?”

  And he thought differently about that, now.

  “I’m not sure she can save the store. With all the changes. The number of people who can read goes up, and the number of people who want to read goes down. The ones that do, all read the same stuff. Any chain store can supply that crap cheaper than she can. Barbara’s whole thing was to keep all those authors alive who wrote so well but got passed by in the bestseller parade. But that takes too much space for a real estate market that measures inches.”

  Della looked directly at him. “Could she move it to the country?”

  What was working in her mind?

  “But that defeats the purpose, doesn’t it—if she takes it out where most people can’t get to it, just because the overhead is cheaper. The only ones who would come are people who already know what they’re looking for. The idea of the bookstore in the city is that more potential readers can find you. You don’t run away from the challenge, just because it’s difficult. … Well. Anyway. She needs to find a space she can afford. I think she is going to have to move.”

  Della looked at him long enough to make him uncomfortable. The swirl of the wind wrapped her hair in a veil across her face, her eyes glistening between the blond strands. She had been letting it grow.

  “Do you feel like you ran away, by doing your business the way you do?”

  He was surprised that she should think of that. Of course he had considered that a few thousand times.

  “No. You still don’t believe me when I say I don’t like the human race. People can be okay, but the race is lost. Working in a store like that, a person has to put up with the worst of it. For me, there is just too little of the best. Barbara can keep going all day because she sold one Angela Thirkell or one Nevil Shute. I get hammered into the ground after I’ve sold the third copy of Danielle Steele or Anne Rice. I don’t have the guts Barbara has, or I’m just too much of a snob.”

  “You’re a snob,” Della agreed, and looked away.

  “Sure. You give people a choice. You put two meals out in front of them. One is fresh and prepared with a little creativity, and the other is processed junk food. Nine times out of ten they will pick up the processed junk food. Why? Because they’re familiar with it already. They saw the ad on TV. Why bother selling books to people if that’s the way they think? Let Barnes & Noble do it!”

  “That’s not the way your dad thinks.”

  Henry looked into the brown of her eyes. Chestnut brown, he thought. She blinked innocently at him.

  “You’ve only met him once.”

  “That was enough. He’s right up front. No pretense. You know what he thinks. He doesn’t look down on other people.”

  “He’s a worse snob than I am … I don’t look down. I’m a realist. It’s the way people are that I don’t like. They are so seldom better than they have to be. Besides, it’s a rhetorical question. Just because the world is full of maroons, doesn’t mean you have to act like one yourself. We can go to Michael’s Deli instead of McDonald’s. I can sell the books I like to people who like the books I sell. I can be happy. The world is still a glorious place in spite of the human race.”

  She did not answer right away, looking back over the traffic that followed them.

  “Your dad seems lonely.”

  “ ’Cause he is.”

  “Why don’t you live at that house with him?”

  “ ’Cause then he’d be lonely, and I’d be miserable. It’s not me he needs.”

  “He seemed pretty happy to see you.”

  “You missed the part about the haircut.”

  “He’s right, you need a haircut. And I like his stories. He was very sweet.”

  “That’s because he likes you. I could see it. The stories are all lies.”

  Della frowned at him. “You’re just saying that.”

  Henry adjusted his position so that he could look her in the eye.

  “He has been telling the story about how he met my mother as long as I can remember. Mom said he was telling it before he even met her.”

  “She didn’t steal his clothes when he was skinny dipping?”

  “No. He read it in a book we used to have. H. E. Bates, I think. He liked it. It’s the kind of story he likes. They actually met at church.”

  “You weren’t born on the seat of a truck?”

  “No. I might have been conceived there. I was born at Boston Lying-In.”

  “Did he know President Kennedy?”

  “Dad used to go to St. Aidan’s because he didn’t like the priest at St. Mary’s. The Kennedys did too, once upon a time. Only God knows if they were ever in the same building at the same time.”

  She seemed to consider this for a moment.

  “I still think he’s sweet.”

  “He’s a curmudgeon—a disappointed man—a cynic. I may think the human race is hopeless, but I still go about my business in the hope that I’m wrong. Dad has no doubts. He’s playing the cards that were dealt him, and not asking for more. … That’s the thing. Af
ter my mother died, he stopped taking chances.”

  “He didn’t seem depressed to me.”

  “Never. Getting depressed is my father’s idea of a capital crime. It’s giving in. It’s letting the bastards know they have you. Never. He laughs. He laughs at God. You’ll hear him say it. ‘God can have me and do what he wants with me any time he wishes. While I’m waiting, I’ll have a beer, please.’ ”

  “And if your mother had lived … how would things be different?”

  “He used to just laugh. … His stories, they were mostly the stories his father had told him. … Everything was a story. But his own stories were the best.”

  “Tell me one.”

  Henry knew the one he liked the most.

  “He rewired a big Victorian house on Commonwealth Avenue the year after I was born, one of those really big ones out toward Newton. It took quite a few weeks. The old ball and wire had to be replaced. But then, after it was done, the fellow, a man named Crimmins, went bankrupt before he could pay the bill. My dad—” Henry shook his head. “My dad understands things like that. He’d been through it before. He shook the man’s hand and wished him luck and then, as he was leaving, he looked again at a picture in the hall that he had admired several times as he came and went doing the job. It was a small watercolor of a little shack on a dune in Eastham on the Cape. Crimmins took the picture off the wall and handed it to him. ‘It’s not much, but you can take this before my other creditors do,’ he said. My dad thanked him, said he’d hang it by his writing desk, and was about to turn and go when Crimmins said, ‘But you won’t be able to use it until August this year, because it’s rented through July.’ And that was how we got our little beach house.”

  She gaped, the wind wrapping the hair into her mouth.

  “Is it true?”

  “Sure. It’s where I spent every summer of my childhood.”

  “But how do you know the story is true? That it’s not like the others your father told?”

  Henry thought about that a moment.