by Amy Bloom
The estate had told me it was Ricks’s house. “And is Miss Mays still living here?” I asked.
“She died ten years ago. No, I lie, it was twelve.”
I tried to date my last visit to the house. Was it eight years ago? Ten? Twelve? And who had opened the door? I remembered the dark, pupilless eyes. What story had I been writing? Why was I there?
“Could you tell me a bit about Miss Mays?” I asked. “Where did she come from?”
Miss Mays came from a very grand family in Ireland, Miss Harkwood said proudly, and grew up in a very grand house. She had no family now, her parents had died when she was a child.
I asked if there any photographs of her, and Miss Harkwood got up and led me into the library.
It was a high-ceilinged room, with tall bookcases and bottle-green curtains at the windows. Against the wall stood a mahogany partner’s desk, and along the back of it were framed photographs. Miss Harkwood stood beside me while I picked these up. Here was Alison as a toddler, smiling sunnily, standing by a little lake somewhere in Cornwall. Here was Alison sitting on a huge-wheeled bicycle, wearing a hat that tied under her chin.
“Miss Ricks was ever so much fun,” said Miss Harkwood with satisfaction. She was a heavy woman, and she stood with her feet spread apart, supporting her weight.
I was surprised to hear that Ricks had been the party organizer, the one who was so much fun. Miss Harkwood talked more and more about them, how they all laughed. How they hated dogs and loved cats. How they had gone to Spain for Christmas every year, it was very odd, but it was what they did, said Miss Harkwood, reminiscing happily.
“And then what happened as they got old?” I asked. “Did Miss Mays die here? Was she ill?”
“Oh, Miss Mays faded away, really.” Miss Harkwood’s eyes took on a sentimental look. “She got a bit furry in the head. You know,” she said, and I nodded. “Finally she didn’t know where she was, poor thing, and she just sat in a chair all day. After that she lay in bed, and then she died.”
“Poor Miss Mays,” I said facilely, writing it all down. Actually, it sounded like a pretty easy way to go. “And Miss Ricks? What happened to her?”
Miss Harkwood folded her arms over her big bosoms as though she’d been waiting for this. “Pneumonia. My fahver called it the old people’s friend, and so it proved to her. She was ninety-three, did you know that?” She nodded her head. “She slipped away too.”
I wanted to know if the two had shared a bedroom, but it was a nosy question and I didn’t want to scare her off. “Could you show me the upstairs?” I asked. “I’d love to see the rest of the house.”
By now Harkwood was full of pride and information, and she hadn’t had anyone to talk to for days. She took me all over the house: every bedroom (they each had their own, each with a big double bed, which didn’t tell me much), and the spare rooms, and the sewing room, and even the linen closet, which Harkwood informed me was very large for a London house. I took notes on everything. We ended up in the kitchen again, and I was beginning to hear the stories for the second time.
“Could I look again at the photographs?” I asked. “I’d like to take pictures of them with my camera.”
We went back in and this time I picked up each one and asked about it. One showed a pretty, laughing woman with dark eyes, wearing a full-skirted dress, with a hat and gloves.
“Is that Miss Mays?” I asked.
“Miss Ricks,” said Miss Harkwood.
“I thought she had blue eyes.” Surely the jacket photographs showed her with blue eyes?
Miss Harkwood shook her head. “Miss Ricks had very dark eyes, nearly black,” she said. “They were strange, they looked as though they were solid black. No student.”
“Pupil,” I said, trying to process this. Suddenly I remembered the story I’d been writing when I’d come to the house: it was on the Chelsea Flower Show, and that was 2008. Mays had died by then, so the woman who had answered the door must had been Alison Ricks herself. But I’d have recognized her, even thirty years older than the photographs I’d seen. I’d memorized her features, I knew them from poring over those books.
“Are Miss Ricks’s books here?” I asked, glancing around the room.
Miss Harkwood shook her head virtuously. “Miss Mays said it was poor form to keep your own books on the shelf. She wouldn’t have a single one on the premises.”
I turned back to the table again, thinking of the woman who had opened the door to me. Those black eyes, the thin white hair. The nick from the earlobe. I picked up another photograph, this one a close-up from the sixties. The same smiling, black-eyed woman, with a flirty smile. This was a three-quarters view, and it showed her right ear. There was no nick in it. Surely this was the same woman: maybe she’d gotten the nick later on?
“This is Miss Mays,” I said, to see if she’d agree.
Miss Harkwood shook her head again, smiling. “No, Miss Ricks. Here’s Miss Mays.”
She held up another picture from the sixties, a woman with her hand over her forehead against the sun, smiling into it, at the camera. It was the picture I knew from the dust jacket of Stone Caveat, and I felt that electric jolt.
“I see,” I said. “Is there another close-up of Miss Ricks?”
Miss Harkwood picked up another. This was taken from the other side, and the nick in the lobe was visible: I’d seen her in real life, but the camera had reversed the image. The nick was on her left ear.
“Thank you,” I said, closing up my notebook. “You have been very kind.”
* * *
Back in New York, jetlagged and exhausted, I called Jake. “I got it,” I said. “You won’t believe what happened. I’ll come in and tell you.”
We sat on either side of his desk and I held the cup of cold coffee again as I explained what had happened.
“I’m pretty certain she was gay,” I began. “Which is why people were so closemouthed about her, and why those files were sealed.”
He waved his hand.
“Wait,” I said. “That’s just the beginning. She moved to London so she could live with her girlfriend. But once she was there they switched identities. She stopped publishing, and she never gave interviews or allowed photographs, even when she won prizes. She had no copies of her books in her house, and over the years the new identity became real.”
Jake stared at me, leaning back in his chair, his long arms sticking out at angles. “Switched? But what about Mays? She was English. People would have known her. How could she change her identity?”
“I found out more about her. She wasn’t English but Irish. She must have arrived in London with Ricks and the two of them did it together.”
“But why?”
“Ricks did it because she had dried up as a writer. You can see it in the letters to her editor at the end of the decade. She couldn’t write, and it was painful to be asked about her work, and what she was doing, when she knew she couldn’t do it anymore. Remember poor Hemingway, trying to walk into the airplane propeller because he couldn’t write? I think she wanted to put that part of her life behind her, not be that person anymore.”
Jake nodded slowly. “I like it,” he said. “And then what about the new book?”
“Mays wrote it. I don’t know when. It’s probably in those secret X-files in the staff room. Then after Ricks died she got up her nerve and published it.”
Jake whistled. “Zowie. And then of course she kept the house that had been Ricks’s.”
“It had gone on for thirty years,” I said. “Kind of genius. All their London friends knew them as each other.”
Jake nodded. “I like it,” he said again. “But how fast can you get it down? Because I have some news for you.” I waited. “It’s not good. Wareham’s book is on her publisher’s spring list. Next year.”
“What?” How could she be done? I’d been writing as I was researching, but I was only halfway through. How could she be finished? Well, I knew how. She’d been writing all day while the W
easel was reading the letters, then calling her to tell her what she’d found. It would be trash, pure trash, and full of clichés. And also, what was the secret she had mentioned on the phone? Was there something else I didn’t know about? What had she discovered that was so amazing?
“It’s going to be the lead nonfiction book,” Jake said.
“I can’t believe it.”
“Believe it,” Jake said. “Yours has to come out in the next six months or we’re lost.”
* * *
The next day I was back at the Beinecke. The Wolverine wasn’t there, but the Weasel was, wearing a cream silk blouse and a gold bracelet, sitting at their table. In the middle of the afternoon the Wolverine appeared. She very ostentatiously did not see me, and she walked over to the Weasel and whispered something. The Weasel stood and the two of them started for the door.
I spent the afternoon going over the latest files I could get, letters from the seventies. I saw plenty of evidence of what I was looking for. When Jens asked about her next book, or even her next story, she resisted more and more. Don’t ask, she said finally.
It killed me that I didn’t have another six months to work all this together properly.
When I got up for a break, out in the hall I saw the Wolverine again. She was headed toward the staff room, though this time alone. In her clothes and style she tried to imitate the Weasel, but because she was squat and dark she couldn’t. She was one of those women who throws a big scarf around her neck to appear rakish, but since she has no neck she looks as though she’s drowning in textile. Today she was wearing one of those scarves, and it came up to her ears and nearly down to her waist.
She was walking away from me, down the hall, and on an impulse I followed her. I moved silently, keeping my heels from hitting the floor. I wanted to see what was behind that door. She pulled it open fast and slipped inside, but I could see through a narrow slit: several long tables, chairs standing messily about. High metal shelves against the wall held a hodgepodge of file boxes. Then the door shut and I was left out in the hall, standing on my tiptoes, wondering what she was looking at.
I had the feeling that those X-files held the fact that she was gay—which would have been a big deal decades ago, when she gave her papers to Yale, but a small deal now. So what had the Wolverine learned that was so amazing? Was it Ricks’s confession, during the eighties, that she couldn’t write anymore? Was it the secret of the switched identities? Or was it the secret that Pauline Mays had written the idiotic book which had been on the best-seller list for forty-eight weeks now, and which might—who knew?—mean a claim of fraud, if the publisher had presented the work of a clumsy amateur under the golden name of Alison Ricks?
The thought of Wolverine learning this made me angry. And worse, it seemed unfair that she had chewed in her horrible rodent-like way through the barrier Ricks had chosen to erect. She’d done it just by buttering up some rich donor, whereas I had done real research and found it out on my own.
There was no way I could finish my book in time to compete with the Wolverine. She had finished it in a year and a half, so it would be a quickie, superficial and trashy. Even worse, she was a terrible writer.
I’d looked up some of her stuff. I could imagine the sentences: Alison (she’d call her Alison, as though they were friends) and her lesbian girlfriend, the elegant socialite Pauline May, led a scandalous life of partying and debaucheries.
Did she even know what debaucheries meant? It made me angry just thinking of her using it.
Their big London town house was a party pad, full of wild times and bohemian revels. Drugs, sex, and liquor were rife.
Did she even know what rife meant? Could she write a single sentence without a cliché? She would write, She must have thought . . . a sentence that should never appear in a biography. She would call Ricks an acclaimed author and her work luminous and provocative and compelling, and say that her writing was haunting and her style was deft.
I doubted that she had even read Ricks’s work, or had any idea why it was great. Whereas I had not only read every book, I also owned them all, and I had bought them years ago, as they came out.
The more I thought about the Wolverine’s terrible writing the angrier I became, standing in the hall as I thought about her cliché-ridden style, and her big fucking advance, and her trashy, splashy, successful book that was going to be the lead nonfiction book on the spring list. Across from me Chelsea was standing at her desk. She looked up, her eyebrows raised interrogatively. I was motionless, doing nothing.
“Do you need something?” Chelsea called over. “Or are you just thinking?”
“Thinking,” I said. “Trying to decide what angle to follow next.”
Just then the door to the staff room opened and the Wolverine came out. She peered up and down the hall, then walked quickly toward us. She didn’t look at either Chelsea or me, but stared straight toward the exit. She was wearing thick stacked heels and a skirt, with one of her big drowning shawls over her neck and shoulders. There was something odd about her posture: her shoulders were even more hunched than usual. They were drawn up high under her shawl, making her even more neckless.
As she walked past me, steaming along on her short thick legs, her rodent-like profile jutting out ahead of her, I thought again of her terrible writing and something came into my mind, out of nowhere. I stepped forward and stuck out my foot.
The Wolverine tripped, staggered, lurched, and fell headlong. She landed on her knees, putting her left hand out to break her fall. With her right hand she was clutching at her chest. Out from beneath the shawl fell a file folder. When it hit the stone floor it spilled its contents: a sheaf of handwritten letters.
There was a silence. No one moved.
Chelsea said, “Miss Wareham.”
Then we heard the sound of the alarm, loud and metallic against the alabaster walls.
It was the first time I’d heard a loud noise in the library, and the first time I’d seen speed and confusion there, people running, hard shoes on stone floors, raised voices, the static of walkie-talkies, the complicated metallic synchrony of doors locking.
I liked the library when it was silent and light-filled, suffused with that alabaster glow. I liked it when it was like a church, where people moved slowly and reverentially, and spoke in hushed, respectful voices. I liked the library when it echoed the secrecy of the closed, forbidding buildings studding the narrow streets, with their sealed windows and locked doors. I liked the idea of closed archives, inaccessible information, facts that were not available to the public. I liked mysteries that were only to be shared with those dedicated initiates who had earned the right to be inducted into the world of secret knowledge. I liked the Beinecke when it held those secrets within its silent realm.
But I liked it like this even more.
The Boy
by Karen E. Olson
Fair Haven
While they wait, she gives the boy a glass of milk.His hand shakes, almost spilling it, and she indicates he should sit. So he does. His eyes flitter around the room, and she positions herself between him and the back door. She knows what he’s considering, and she’ll have none of it. He drinks the milk in three gulps without breathing in between, and she marvels at that. It’s as though his thirst is unquenchable. She wonders when he last had milk. His lanky build is almost anorexic, but it could just be that he is at that age where he is growing into himself. She remembers that, how awkward and uncomfortable it is as your body molds and stretches into what it will eventually become. He is a good-looking boy, maybe twelve, thirteen. His face is long, his cheekbones high, his nose wide, his skin swarthy. His ears stick out a little from beneath the close-cropped hair. His eyes are full of fear.
She puts a cannoli from Rocco’s on a plate and shoves it across the table. He gives her a wary look before scooping it up and putting half of it in his mouth at once, seemingly swallowing it whole. She hands him another glass of milk.
Taking a cannoli
herself, she nibbles it slowly. Her tea went cold awhile ago, but she drinks it anyway. This was her after-dinner treat, the one that reminds her of her mother and how they’d pick out their Sunday pastries together, her mother wistfully reminding her that they would never be as good as the ones back home in Italy.
He drums his fingers nervously on the top of his leg, almost as though he is playing it like a piano. She glances toward the living room, where the baby grand sits. No one has played it in years, not since Frank died. Christmases were full of soft candlelight and the scent of pine needles and music. She wants to ask the boy if he can play, but it might embarrass him if he doesn’t.
She is pretty sure it was him she saw last week downtown with a group of boys on bicycles that were from another decade, small with long seats and high handlebars. Her son used to call it a banana bike, because of the seat, and he pinned playing cards to the spokes of the back wheel and it made a flip-flip-flip sound as he pedaled. Those boys downtown, though, didn’t want to make any noise. They pedaled past a woman with a large handbag slung over her shoulder; she was talking animatedly into her cell phone, not paying attention. It was easy for one of the boys—was it this one?—to pull the bag off the woman’s shoulder as he rode past. She marveled at his swift, smooth movement, not even hesitating. It was almost as if she were watching a dance, like that show on TV with the celebrities and the judges, what was the name of it? She can’t remember things anymore, not like she used to. She used to dance herself, gliding along the floor in Frank’s arms, her skirt fluttering around her calves, her thin heels barely making a sound against the wood, the music swirling around them. It used to be like magic.
The boy shifts a little, his eyes taking in the kitchen. For a moment, she sees what he sees: dark wooden cabinets full of nicks, worn laminate countertops, a bright red cookie jar shaped like an apple with a broken green stem, delicate china teacups on the shelf over the table, the cross over the small calendar where she writes all her appointments. It’s probably better than what he’s used to.