“Yes … mainly.”
He had intended to say as little as possible, mostly because he did not think he had it in him to say much more, but now he had become curious.
She wiped the sweat from her cheeks, and then tilted her head to the side.
“I don’t have any money …”
She might have hoped for something more than a pack of paper, he thought. He had no idea how desperate she might be. Henry had sold the Tom Clancy book and used the money to pay his last month’s rent. He wished he had set some of it aside.
He said, “I’m sorry. I guess I can give you a little. I don’t really have a whole lot myself. …”
Henry dug in his pocket and pulled out the four twenties he had stuffed there for getting gas or books he might stumble across on his way.
“No!” She let out a single bark of laughter. “I’m not asking for money. I just don’t have any. I thought you were looking for some kind of reward.”
He was embarrassed for his own stupidity.
“No. I’m sorry. I was just trying to do a favor for someone. Someone past forgetting, as they say. No. … I’m a bookseller. Like Eddy. More like Eddy, I think, than I would like to admit.”
She smiled wryly. “You’re all a bunch of odd ducks. And I know about ducks.”
Henry stuffed the money back in his pocket. “Right. Well. Eddy set some standards in that regard. And I never really knew him well. But I was the one who bought the book from him—the one who gave him the money that he was probably killed for.”
She put the back of one hand on her hip just like her daughter had, and smiled again, this time more broadly.
“Guilt. You’re on a guilt trip.”
“I guess, quite literally.”
He smiled back. It was true. He was not sure what all he was guilty of, but certainly something worth this small trip to New Hampshire. Her tone went to mock exasperation.
“Jesus! Eddy was going to end up dead sooner than later. His drugs would have killed him.”
Henry realized she had not yet understood.
“He had really quit. He was trying to get things in order.”
Her smile faded. “You don’t know. You didn’t know him like I did. I tried. I tried and tried. He would quit for a short time, but he always fell back.”
Henry looked her in the eye to make his point. “He didn’t this time. … He quit and he wrote his book.”
She stood by the stool, with the spoon raised, and looked down at the package, suspiciously. Finally she picked it up again, removing the rest of the brown paper wrapper, the spoon wagging from the loose grip of one hand. Henry had gotten the copy spiral-bound, and she opened the manuscript to a page at the center and read it.
A drop of sweat darkened the page before she closed it. “It reads well … I’ll read it as soon as—” Her tone changed. “Why did you bring this up here to me? Why did you think I would want to see it? Had he told you about me?”
Henry was a stranger, shown up at her door out of nowhere. How could she understand that?
“No. It actually took some doing to figure out where you were. But I brought it to you because it’s yours. It’s his story and he wrote it for you. He left it for you …”
Her spoon hit the floor, as if it had slipped away. The metal rang like a small bell in the air. Her face seemed suddenly impassive. Henry picked the spoon up and offered it to her, but she did not react. She was still holding the closed manuscript in both hands. He knew there was more than sweat on her cheeks now.
“It was the first thing he ever promised me, you know. Even before he quit the drugs the first time …”
The silence, with her words halted as she looked blindly through tears at a spice rack on the wall, made him speak.
“How did you meet him?”
She sniffed. “I was a social worker for the city of Cambridge … Eddy was just one of about thirty or so addicts I was supposed to check on regularly. It was a light load. I couldn’t find most of them, most of the time. So I used to talk with Eddy longer than I should. … He was a smart guy. A nice guy. And he knew about things. He was a treasure of information about almost anything, really. And I just talk too much … and Eddy ended up listening to me. He listened to me. You know how it is—I mean, why does someone go into social work? Because they need help themselves. Right? Eddy had me talking so much I couldn’t shut up. He never really talked about himself. Ever.” She looked at the manuscript again. “He had no self esteem. He thought just about anyone was better than he was. But he was different. … And I fell in love with him.”
Henry could see her eyes then. The tears released in a solid trail through the sweat and fell to the floor from her chin.
“I’m sorry.” Henry said.
“You’re sorry? I—He was a sweet guy. I wouldn’t have left him, except …” Her head tilted sideways again, as if bearing the weight of words she could not say.
Henry guessed. “Is that Eddy’s daughter?”
She nodded her head and wiped her cheeks with the palm of her hand before saying the word.
“Yes.”
“He didn’t know, did he?”
“No. I even never told him I was pregnant. I just left when he came floating home one night. I couldn’t take it again.”
Henry looked up the hall through the screen door toward the small figure still huddled on the walk.
“When I saw her … you know, she has something of Eddy in her looks.”
Janet Fowler squinted as if suddenly hurt.
“I never even sent him a letter. I just left, with him laying there on the bed. … I was angry. I was not about to have a child around him. … And I wanted the child.”
Henry looked down at the floor to avoid the pain in her eyes.
“He says, somewhere in the book, that he wanted a kid. Isn’t that incredible? With all he went through—with all he survived, he still wanted a kid.”
Her voiced weakened and broke. “He told me that too … once.”
Henry said, “You’ll like the book, I think.”
She took a short breath. “I want to read it …”
Henry adjusted himself to his prepared speech.
“But there is something else I wanted to talk with you about … I’ve already spoken to someone about publishing it. It wasn’t my place to do it, but I did it before I realized there would be a problem. I just wanted to do Eddy a favor, and make sure the manuscript would not be lost. And they want to publish it. They think the book is a fine piece of work and ought to be published. … But they need your permission.”
Her eyes searched his. Her face fell slack, the tinsel line of tears unwiped.
“My permission? … You mean, he actually did give this to me? I didn’t know what you meant.”
“Yes. Legally. It’s a literary property. It has some value. And because Eddy is dead, and he specifically gave it to you, it’s yours.”
Henry told her to read the dedication. He watched her eyes as she did. The tears held momentarily until she was finished. Finally she looked again at Henry’s face.
“Do you think it’s the right thing to do?”
It seemed an odd question to him at first.
“Yes. I think it is a fine book and it deserves to be published.”
She meant something more. “Will you help me with it? Will you see to it that it’s done properly? That it’s done well? I don’t know about things like that.”
Henry had not seen it as a responsibility in that way, only as a matter of fact.
“Sure. I think it’ll be fine.”
“Then do it. Please, do it.”
“But you haven’t read it yet.”
“That’s okay. I’ll read it … soon. When I can. I have to get myself prepared a little. … But that’s no reason to keep it from being published. I don’t want to be the judge. I can’t be his judge. … No. I did that once. More than once. I walked out on him. I left him.”
“You had a child to think o
f.”
“But he needed someone to take care of him … I’ve thought this before. A thousand times I have thought this before. He could be here. He could be with me now. He would have followed me if I had asked him to. Maybe he would have quit if I had taken him away. And now it’s so clear … how I misjudged him. I was just another unlucky turn in his life. I didn’t love him enough. I didn’t think he could quit on his own. I didn’t believe in him. I misjudged him.”
Henry had to stand. He wanted her to read the book. He wanted her to understand now, before she blamed herself for something she did not do wrong.
“Losing you is what did it, though. Losing you is what made him quit. I guess you’ll never know what would have happened if you had stayed. But because you left, he quit the drugs, and he wrote his book, after all. You’ll see that. Read his book, and you’ll see that. And you’ll see that he knew it, and that he loved you.”
Chapter Twenty-one
Henry was reminded of Albert’s observation about the geology of trash as he examined Nora Lynch’s desk. The loose pages of letters were overwhelmed by thick veins of manuscript. Yellow stickies grew flower-like from the strata. Padded manila mailers and FedEx boxes leaned against one another at the far side in great tectonic upheavals. He noted that there was no typewriter to be seen, only the over-bright face of the computer screen.
This time she had shown none of the anger she displayed when he first came to the office unannounced—perhaps a slight cold front of annoyance. She buzzed him in quickly after he said his name into the brass device at the door, and was waiting for him at the top of the stairs. She had not offered to shake his hand, but led him to her desk to talk. He apologized for his impatience after calling earlier and getting an answering machine. She had not yet checked her messages. When he tried to make some small talk about his visit to the camp, she cut him off and asked him why he had come by.
He said, “To keep things simple. To get things straight.”
She was unsympathetic. “Nothing is ever simple. The only straight line comes before the punch line.”
She was not going to make it easy for him.
He told her about his visit to Janet Fowler. This too she interrupted by taking incidental calls on the phone. He had met Nora three times now and had formed the impression that her personality was nearly opposite to her red-hot exterior. When she stood suddenly and left to go to another room, probably to make another phone call, he hoped she was trying to reach Duggan and not Boyle.
Around the corner from her desk, out of direct sight, two student interns worked at opening and sorting incoming mail. The rip of envelopes made Henry think of air escaping a tire. He could tell that they were talking about a recent movie, but their voices were nearly absorbed by partitions and the wall-to-wall carpet.
A cursor blinked at the end of an unfinished sentence on Nora’s computer screen. Her letter concerned a writer Henry did not know, and was none of his business, but he read it anyway.
“I have never had the pleasure of working on a scallop boat during the winter, or any other time for that matter, and it is difficult for me to imagine the bitter sting of sea spray when the nets rise from the grey boil of the water, or the numb manipulation of fingers in gloves filmed by frozen slime. I remember such description from another book of a few years ago, and it still comes back to me when I walk beside the ocean in harsh weather. I wish you had offered your own experience of such things to seduce my imagination into believing the plight of David. His story seems to be an interesting one, but I was unable to finish this. I hope you will be able to go back to this manuscript and give it the time it deserves.”
Henry had seen rejection letters before. Editors seldom ventured beyond the boilerplate. It was obvious to him why Nora could not keep up with the incoming waves of manuscript. Rejection letters of the kind she wrote must absorb a great deal of time.
He was curious about the correspondence piled in the rise of small mesas near the surface of the geological formation before him. He pulled at a manila folder closer to his chair. It was marked for Boston University. Henry tilted the cover back—resumes for potential student office help—then pushed it back into place. He listened for her return in the near silence and then reached from his chair for a letter on another pile and peeked at it. A writer begged for more time with revisions. Nora’s note in the margin gave him until July 4th, already over a month past.
“I’ve always liked the word ‘deadline.’ ” Nora suddenly stood over him. The carpet had muffled the sound of her approach. He put the letter back as she finished her thought. “It has a ring to it.”
She picked the letter up as she sat in her chair, looked at it briefly, and put it back in the stack where Henry had found it.
Henry tried to pick up on the theme. “I’m trying to finish up a few things myself.”
Nora waved her hand at the stack. “Eddy Perry made his deadline, and he didn’t need an editor to tell him when it was.” Her words surprised him a little. Black humored as they were, the words betrayed a sympathy he was not sure she would have had. “I write letters like this every day. Usually to the same writers, again and again. Something happens. Sometimes after we accept a work and ask for corrections, they suddenly decide they have to rewrite the entire thing, they don’t like the name of a character, or want to add a chapter to explain some bit of action. But I don’t think Eddy Perry would have done that to me. When he was done, he was finished.”
Henry wondered out loud, “If he had lived, do you think he would have written more?”
Her face was not impassive as much as unforgiving. “Perhaps. … Some people only have one good book in them. We’ll never know. But our problem is this: who owns the rights to Penny Candy?”
She tapped a copy of Eddy’s manuscript, half buried in a surface layer on the desk.
Henry answered, “Janet Fowler.”
“Good enough. I can agree to that—but do you realize that you have a claim?”
“Why?”
“You found it. It was thrown away. We have confirmed that Eddy has no relatives. The courts have held previously in some cases that objects found in the garbage can be claimed. The dedication might be interpreted as just that—a dedication.”
“But there is no other claim. I gave the original to Janet Fowler. It’s hers.”
Nora paused. “You’re sure?” The pink of her skin made her appear much younger than she was. She wore no makeup. Her eyes, which had darkened once when speaking to him, were clear water painted with sky.
He said, “Yes.” This was the same woman he had watched at a distance not so long ago and speculated about. He had not thought about that since, but Henry had made up his own mind.
The ruddiness at her cheeks appeared to grow. He thought she was blushing and realized it might be because he had given away his thoughts.
Nora looked away. “I spoke to Janet yesterday. She’ll be coming down this week to meet with us.”
“Did she read it?” Henry asked, wanting to know what she might have said.
“Yes. She told me about your visit. She apologized again for being rude to you. I’m not sure what she did, but she seemed nice enough to me. She said she started to read the book right after you left. She seemed to be a little weepy over it. Of course, I don’t know very much about her relationship with Eddy.”
“It was difficult.”
She looked back at Henry, eyes intent, but still with no readable expression. The blue might even be gaudy set against her skin and the flame of her hair. He thought she might be a difficult opponent in a game of poker, or chess for that matter, if only because he would find it difficult to keep his own concentration.
Nora pulled another sheet of paper from the midst of the pile. “Boyle wants you to sign this.”
He admired her sense of organization.
Henry read the three paragraph letter twice without clearly understanding it.
“What does it say?”
Her vo
ice was matter-of-fact. “It is an assignment of any right or claim you have. It recognizes the claim of Janet Fowler to all rights in the manuscript.”
Henry pulled a pen from a clutch in a coffee mug at the edge of the desk and signed the paper on the line above his printed name. “I told her I would take care of things. I don’t want to be letting her down.”
Her voice lowered. “You haven’t. We will do our best to see to it.”
“Thanks.”
Henry put out his hand and Nora took it. He had expected it to be cool, but it was not. Finally she smiled at him.
“George was right. He said you were okay … I was sure you had another motive with all of this. Boyle bet Duggan you wouldn’t sign the letter. I’m glad I was wrong.”
He admitted his thought. “Not entirely …”
One eyebrow dipped above an intent blue eye.
“What other motive have you kept from us?”
“I’m still trying to help Barbara.”
She squinted at him now with both eyes. “Barbara!” Nora swept the air with her hand. “She’s the mystery in all this. Why does she keep at it? I’ve been to her store, you know. She doesn’t know me. But I love old bookshops. Really!” Nora tilted her head at him bullishly. “I can see you’re not convinced. Lately I’ve been collecting the early Alfred A. Knopf titles. I found two there the last time. It’s wonderful. Very nineteenth century. Very Dickensian. Very romantic. She makes me jealous. She lives in a movie set. A museum. Totally unreal—” Nora mistook the sudden reaction on his face to the coincidence of both women making the same allusion, and changed her direction and tone. “Look. We’re in the twenty-first century. Barnes & Noble can have a brand new copy of any out-of-print title reprinted for less than a dollar a copy. They can sell it for less than five dollars and make a profit. How is your Barbara going to sell an original used copy of the same book for ten dollars to a public that wants to consume books like they do with a television show?”
A Slepyng Hound to Wake Page 20