The Letter Left to Me

by Thomas Berger

  Hal performed as asked through the now maximum mid-town traffic, even at one point breaking gridlock by driving up over the curb and across a piece of sidewalk, all of it with the impunity peculiar to a limousine. Yet when they drew up before the crutch shop and Kellog finally permitted himself to glance at the time, it was 6:06. The little man had been emphatic about his office hours. Kellog did not expect to gain access to the shop a good six minutes after the scheduled closing, but by now he had become too desperate to remain in the car.

  He leaped out and went to rap on the frame of the door and then to bang upon the glass so violently as to agitate the extended roller-shade behind it.

  He was amazed to see that almost immediately the shade was peeled back at one side and the little man looked out. When the latter recognized Kellog he scowled but opened the door.

  “Aren’t you fortunate that I had so little faith in you,” said he. “I knew you’d be back.” With disagreeable gestures he let Kellog in.

  Kellog waited until they were back in the office to voice his indignation. “Goddammit, this was your idea, not mine. Do you know what you’ve made me? Apparently insofar as I have a profession I’m a slumlord among other things, all of them unsavory, and privately a demented lecher who drives about the streets with his pimp-chauffeur, importuning young women for sex. I must say I make my own flesh crawl. Why have you done this to me?”

  “Now, hold on,” the little man said, with an indignation of his own. “All I provided was your ability to change the past. I had nothing to do with what you changed it to. Why would I? That would negate the purpose of the experiment, which is concerned with free choice. Many human beings feel that what they are has been imposed upon them from without. Well, here’s the chance to test the validity of that theory. You can go back and change whatever you don’t like. I assumed that you had done so by making yourself rich with inherited wealth, so that you don’t have to do any work at all, and by having a succession of women who can be considered only as pieces of flesh devoid of mind. If these are vulgar tastes, they are yours and freely chosen.”

  Kellog was chagrined to hear this argument. The little man had sought him out. But for that, Hunsicker would be halfway home by now, peacefully snoozing on the train. Reading was his work; after many years of it he seldom nowadays found off-duty recreation with a book. After a light dinner the menu of which did obeisance to the latest theories of diet, he watched whichever sports were in season on television, or even, after all those years of marriage, conversed with his wife.

  “Well, I think it’s unfair,” he said now. “I wasn’t really being serious, and you know it. It was just the kind of thing one thinks in an idle way from time to time: gosh, if I could just have unlimited money! The other, the satyriasis, must have come from my unconscious. I can’t recall ever consciously desiring every woman I saw. I wasn’t like that even as an adolescent. I now realize I probably could have gotten a lot more sex than I did in those days if I had not just accepted it when the girl said a preliminary no. But I was never assertive in that way. I guess I basically agreed with the girl that it was dirty and wrong. That was a long time ago, of course, before the great change of cultural climate regarding these matters.”

  “Obviously you want to make up for it, after all these years,” said the little man. “And why not?”

  “No, I don’t,” said Kellog. “It’s ridiculous and degrading. But the sex thing is the least of it: I don’t want to profit from human misery. A sick old man, who lived on canned dog food, died in one of my apartments last winter during a cold spell: the temperature of his bedroom was twenty-two Fahrenheit at the time. I was accused of inviting dope addicts to use the hallways as shooting galleries and to molest any tenant who passed by. It wasn’t really me who did that, but the people who manage my affairs. Which makes me responsible, legally and morally. I didn’t care what went on.”

  The little man shrugged. “It’s pointless to whine to me about such matters. You got yourself into the situation. You could have chosen another past.”

  “Yes,” said Kellog, “but you might have warned me of the possible pitfalls…. Look, just return me to the existence I had at the time I met you. I suspect I am stuck with Hunsicker’s past.”

  “You want to give up the money? With their combined incomes, the Hunsickers haven’t felt they could afford to have both the house painted and the roof reshingled this year.”

  “I don’t need that much,” said Hunsicker. “But I’m going to retire in a few years, and I don’t have a lot put away. Sending Elliot to good schools, even with help from scholarships, pretty well kept me hand-to-mouth for a long time, and Martha hasn’t always worked.” He put his hand to his jaw. “Can’t I just be well-to-do? Not so wealthy or powerful that I bully people, but just have enough to be secure?”

  The little man grimaced. He was so nondescript-looking that one would have had great difficulty in describing him to—well, the police, if it came to that. But what kind of con man provided money to his victim? “Walter, I don’t think you’ve yet got the right idea. Everything in existence is consequential. You should have learned that from briefly serving in the role which you so quickly discarded. What you must do is get a past of the kind to put you in the sort of situation you’d like today, but then you must accept what goes along with it.”

  “I don’t think it’s worth the risks. As I told you, I have had, and am still having, a good life, a happy life. Sure, you can maliciously point out some slight irregularities in its texture.” He colored slightly. “I don’t regret having risen above my wife’s foibles—which is what they really were—so long ago that until you unkindly reminded me I had forgotten them. I’m sure she would have done as much for me. And Elliot, so he’s homosexual, so what? At first I admit I was only ritualistically tolerant—barely that, but I’m proud to say I have never been a bigot. I lived to accept the situation genuinely. All right, so I won’t be a grandfather. After him, Martha couldn’t have more children. But to have such a regret would be awfully selfish.”

  The little man threw up his hands. “Okay, you’ve made your decision.” He spun around and plucked from a cubbyhole what probably was that piece of notepaper on which he had made his earlier entries. He made a new notation on it.

  “I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” said Hunsicker, leaving the rickety chair. “But then, I guess I still don’t really believe it’s possible to change the past. Or if it is, then it would be done at a university laboratory, beginning with frog embryos or whatnot, and take forever to get to human life.”

  MARTHA WAS waiting for him at the station as always except on the rare occasions when she made other arrangements by telephone. They lived only a mile from the railroad, and he could easily have walked it if not every day then twice or thrice a week in good weather, and no doubt should have done so for cardiovascular reasons, but Martha liked to provide the service. While she waited she read, and what she read was more often than not a book published by his firm, for he brought home many of the latest titles in advance of their appearance in the shops, which gave him a certain prestige amongst his neighbors if the book was one which got a lot of attention in the news media prior to its official publication date—say that former statesman’s memoir from which he and the lawyers had worked so hard to eradicate pretexts for libel actions.

  Today, as he approached the car, he could identify at quité a distance the volume she held against the steering wheel, for as she read a righthand page the front cover was at an angle to display the bold type thereupon. The book was the autobiography of a motion-picture actor who, though a has-been in the current professional context, was not only remembered by an over-fifty public but recognized by younger persons through film festivals, TV showings, and video cassettes, as being one sort of classic, the embodiment of a style no longer to be found even on celluloid: the felt hat, four-button double-breasted jacket, perhaps even white trousers, certainly an extremely widespread collar filled with the thick but
neat triangle of “Windsor” knot, named for the ex-king of England who had married an American divorcée who was supposedly, uniquely, the cure for his impotence. Whatever the truth of this, the autobiographer at hand, Barry Howard, alluded to it as established fact in his prefatory remarks on the sex lives of the renowned, and then proceeded to characterize his own role as that of male Mrs. Simpson in satisfying the erotic needs of the wife of a president of the United States. Like the Windsors, both this woman and her husband were now deceased, needless to say, and thus without recourse to a suit for libel. Of the famous people of whom he had carnal knowledge and were yet alive to confirm or deny the tale, virtually all were professional performers and could be counted on not to make trouble: either, themselves faded or fading, they could use the publicity, or they were too successful to stoop to self-defense in such a context.

  “Not to mention,” said Mark Feld, the actor’s acquisition editor at Rodgers, Wirth & Maddox, a movie addict thrilled to be in this situation, “that he’s telling the truth.”

  “Even,” Hunsicker had asked with a scowl, for he had voted with mild enthusiasm for the president in reference, “in the case of Mrs.—?”

  “Who could doubt it?” Mark said loftily. Editors, as opposed to copy-editors like Hunsicker-Kellog, often fell under an author’s enchantment and, like Madison Avenuers who believed their own ads, would give credence to all manner of twaddle. For example, Dan Gillespie, a professed atheist, accepted much of what Lilli-Ann Mulholland, whose manuscripts were barely literate, proclaimed as astrological truth. And Susan Hillman, though to all appearances a stern rationalist, was a pushover for any book with a thesis opposed to any tradition whatever, and after reading the appropriate works believed, e.g., that General Custer was a full-blooded Negro, that Hitler was alive and living quietly in New South Wales, Australia, and that Sherlock Holmes had been not only a real person but also had royal blood.

  Martha was engrossed at the moment and did not see her husband until he opened the door. “Oh, hi,” she said then, hardly taking her eyes off the page. She slid to the passenger’s side. She would have done the same without a book. Martha was unreconstructed in assigning roles according to sex. When they were together in a car, unless he was feeling very ill, Hunsicker drove, though he was not nearly so proficient behind the wheel as she, never having mastered the craft of parking next to a curb, for example.

  “You’re enjoying that?”

  She lowered the book and moued. “I don’t know.” She leaned over and gave him a kiss.

  “I told you, didn’t I,” Hunsicker asked, then waited till he had backed the car from the parking space and put it into forward motion, “that Howard insisted on writing it himself, refused to use even a collaborator. Naturally it was unpub-lishable in the form in which we received it. We had virtually to demolish it entirely and write what is really a new book. Dorothy did most of it. Everybody was afraid that in view of his original position, Howard would be enraged and never agree, but when the manuscript went to him for approval, he sent it back promptly and with much praise for our work in ‘polishing it up.’ I’m sure he didn’t even look at it. In his egomaniacal way he assumed all we did was correct a misspelling here and there.”

  “He’s not a likable person,” Martha said in her calm but, to Hunsicker, definitive and sometimes even devastating way. As usual, she had found the mot juste. Hunsicker himself would less eloquently have used the term “prick,” which was also imprecise, Howard being well known for his apparently quite genuine efforts in raising financial aid for crippled children. All the same, on the evidence of this book, he was certainly not likable.

  “The only thing is,” Martha added, waiting until her husband got clear of the traffic at the station, for he was a nervous driver when at close quarters with other cars, “the dirt’s fascinating.”

  Hunsicker was in the strangest of states. Ordinarily he was eager to share the events of his day with Martha. Now he had had what was obviously as remarkable an experience as a human being could have, whatever the little man’s authenticity. That is to say, however his sleight of hand and/or hypnotic techniques were performed. Reason would have to rule him a charlatan in the absence of any evidence that such a shabby little person, operating out of a dusty bedpan shop, was an agent of divinity. Yet Hunsicker was unable to find a means by which even to introduce the subject to his wife, whom he had known for thirty years. Therefore, instead of taking the conversational initiative that would by tradition seem to be the responsibility of him who has only just returned from the big city, he remained silent for several blocks.

  Finally Martha said, “I gather your day was not the greatest.” She had been maternal to him, even as a young woman.

  “No,” he said quickly. “I’m just exhausted. I didn’t catch my usual forty winks on the train. At my age I really need that little nap after the working day. But how about you? Did you sell the Workman place?” The reference was to an unimpressive colonial house for which the owner wanted an astronomical figure. Martha had assured him he would never get it and that she could not afford to do much to sell something that no one would consider on the proposed terms, but he said he was quite satisfied to wait passively amidst her other listings.

  She smiled. “Not bloody likely, but I do think I’ve found a good prospect for the Horning.” Martha was an excellent saleswoman, with a deceptively soft approach that often proved effective with initially resistant clients. Not only could she sell a huge house to someone who wanted a cottage, but such a buyer seldom displayed a subsequent regret. She was a large woman, not fat in the sense of ill-proportioned, but big. She was as tall as her husband, which meant taller in high heels, and looked as though she would weigh more, but that was an illusion, though in fact he was slender for his age. He had always found her a reassuring presence, yet now could not as yet find a way to tell her about the unsettling encounter with the strange little man.

  “Great,” he said now. “But we’d better not spend the commission before you collect it.” He made the same comment with respect to every imminent sale. She agreed as always. Surely one of the reasons why they had been satisfactorily married so long was that they never quarreled about money. Both were conservatives in that area, having little taste for gloss and frippery, but shared an interest in providing Elliot with the best education and, when that had been accomplished, improving the house in which they were domiciled and the grounds around it. Last year the entire side yard had been resodded.

  As always he let Martha out of the car at the top of the driveway and then continued on to the garage, before which he braked and, having found the gadget in the glove compartment, pressed the button that caused the garage door to rise. Inside, as he left the car, he reflected as usual on the need to take one whole Saturday and throw out the accumulation of useless material that filled most of the space which, had they owned one, would have been occupied by a second vehicle. Some of this—a snow tire, the frame of an old window screen, a rolled-up throw rug—constituted a fire hazard.

  Before entering the house by the back door, he glanced towards the dogwoods at the bottom of the garden. He could never call a season spring until their blooming: they still had several weeks to go. It had been a dry winter. The heavy city rain would have been welcome, but as sometimes happened, none had fallen here, by the look of things.

  The back door was still locked when he tried to turn the knob. Martha hadn’t got there yet. He found the proper key amongst the several in the little leatherbound booklet he carried in the right trousers pocket, and let himself in. It had been the universal practice throughout the neighborhood, twenty years before, never to lock a door: of course that had changed.

  Passing through the kitchen, where, judging from the aroma, something was simmering in the Crock Pot, he heard his wife’s murmur from the top of the hallway. She had been detained there by a telephone call. Because he would have had to squeeze past her if he continued on that route, he took the circuitous one that
went via the dining and living rooms, and emerged in the vestibule between the front door and the little desk at the beginning of the hall, where Martha stood, holding the phone at the level of her waist, neither speaking into it nor listening.

  Her unusual expression alarmed him. “Not an obscene call?” he asked, remembering that Dorothy Kalergis, at work, had recently complained of receiving such, and had been militantly advised by her colleague Carrie Janes to keep a police whistle at phoneside to use on the next occasion: “Shatter his goddamn eardrums!”

  “It’s Elliot,” Martha said at last, in a voice that went with her lusterless eyes.

  “He’s back?” Elliot had been abroad for a month and a half, taking a spring vacation to Paris—which went to show how well he was doing at the law firm, at which he had been employed less than three years. As it happened, Hunsicker himself had never been closer to Paris than the city of Québec. He had married young and soon thereafter had a child to bring up and educate. Since Elliot had been out on his own, domestic things—resodding lawns, conversions from oil to gas heat, etc.—had taken all the extra money. “If you’re done,” he said now to Martha, “let me talk to him.” But the best time to hear Elliot’s account of the trip—he was a marvelous raconteur—would be over a long dinner of the substantial kind: beef or leg of lamb. Elliot had in the last year taken up the practice of smoking an expensive cigar after such a meal. His father admired the elegance of all phases of the process in which his son, who had been fastidious even as a small child, pierced the chocolate-brown tube with a little vest-pocket tool of gold, then painstakingly applied to the cigar’s end the intense blue flame of an engine-turned^ golden lighter, extending the snow-white cuffs of his shirt, discreetly exposing the small cuff links, also gold, exquisite in their simplicity. Everything about Elliot was classic. Hunsicker was wont sometimes to wonder where his son had acquired such style, which was unique on either side of the family.