by Pamela Morsi
Certainly the building was dark, but right near the front door, in the area where Scott had his desk, a light was burning. I pulled into one of the many empty parking places on the street. It was probably just a security light, I told myself. I’d just peek in and see if he was there and if he was, I’d see whether he looked really busy or not.
When I got to the window, I realized that peeking in wasn’t going to be the casual glance that I intended. He’d put up a paneled barrier between himself and the street that required someone to be at least seven feet tall to look in. There didn’t seem to be any movement on the other side of the panel, but somehow that wasn’t enough to discourage me.
I looked around for something to stand on. There was nothing readily available. Then I examined the brick on the front of the building. The gaps in the mortar were pretty deep, especially on the corner. As a kid, I’d climbed up the sides of buildings using those gaps. I slipped out of my slides and carefully set my right foot about four bricks up and got handholds a little higher. I pulled myself up, putting my left foot into the brick as well, and gazed over the top of the obstruction.
Scott Robbins was sitting motionless staring at his ancient Underwood typewriter. He was a nice-looking guy. Not in the way that most of the men I knew were attractive. He was slightly unkempt and definitely unfashionable. But I found him attractive despite that.
He glanced up and caught sight of me and actually jumped. His unexpected move startled me and I almost lost my footing, but managed to keep my place.
Scott was chuckling then and shaking his head.
“What are you doing?” he asked me, the sound muffled through the window.
“I’m the human fly,” I called back.
I puffed up my cheeks and pressed my face against the glass, distorting it. Eyes crossed. Nose squashed.
He was still shaking his head as he walked around the long counter toward the building’s entrance. His limp was more pronounced than usual and he was leaning heavily on his cane.
I hopped down from my perch, retrieved my shoes and met him at the front door.
“You are an absolutely crazy person,” he said.
“Yeah, and your point is…?”
“Come inside before my neighbors start calling the police,” he said.
I glanced up and down the deserted street. “You have neighbors?”
He shrugged. “There’s a flophouse in the next block. And I think there might be a guy sleeping in a box in the alley.”
I nodded. “Well, at least it’s good to know you’re not alone in this part of town.”
It was curious why he didn’t ask me what I was doing there. Which was fortunate, because I hadn’t thought of any plausible excuse. He led me around the counter to his little office area, now furnished with a 1970s vintage Early American sofa upholstered in orange flowers.
“Lovely,” I said facetiously.
“If you tell me that’s a valuable antique, I’m hanging up my gloves.”
“I’m sure it has sentimental value,” I told him.
“Not much,” he said. “I found a chair that I wanted, and part of the price of it was taking this thing with me.”
“At least it’s found a home,” I said, making myself comfortable on it.
“Yeah, and it kind of fits me, don’t you think?” he said. “We’re both worn, quirky and unfashionable.”
He was grinning at me, daring me to agree. He seated himself in his typing chair, hanging his cane upon the armrest.
“Well, I do have to admit that giving away a museum-quality antique is pretty quirky,” I told him. “You know the foundation would have been happy to let you loan it to them. That’s what people do. They loan their best to museums.”
“I didn’t want to loan it to them,” he said. “I wanted Hattenbacher House to have it.”
“It’s not the way it’s done, Scott,” I explained. “Rich people rarely give their art or antiques to museums. Either the museum buys it from them, or they loan it. Loaning is actually fabulous for the owner. They can take it back or sell it anytime. They don’t have to be responsible for damage or security and they get a nice tax deduction for charity.”
“Believe me,” he said, “I don’t need a tax deduction. I wanted to give it to them.”
“Why?”
“Why what?” he asked me. “I know what kind of sacrifice you made to keep that house from becoming condos. Why did you throw away all the money?”
“The money was nothing compared to the real value of that place,” I answered. “I couldn’t have lived with myself if I had profited from its destruction.”
“That’s the same kind of motivation that got me to give away that sofa,” Scott said. “That, and I was hoping to really impress you.”
The last was surely a joke, I thought. When I looked at him, however, I couldn’t really tell if he was being charming or simply sincere.
“Did it impress you?” he asked.
“Well…well, yes…of course,” I stammered.
“Mission accomplished.”
He was looking at me in a very strange way. It wasn’t exactly sexual, but the fact that sex even came to my mind was pretty amazing. Scott just kept staring, as if he couldn’t take his eyes off me. It was in some way flattering, but it was also a little disconcerting. Uncomfortable, off balance, I said the first thing that came into my head.
“So, what’s the deal with your leg?”
He seemed momentarily startled, but regained his composure quickly.
“It has its good days and bad,” he said. “This is one of the latter.”
“How did you get hurt?”
“I damaged the nerves,” he said vaguely. “And I’ve got some scar tissue from that.”
He didn’t actually answer my question, but I wasn’t crass enough to press further. I observed his desk. It was messy, books and reports were spread everywhere. A piece of paper was still in the Underwood, but I could see that he’d already typed out Sincerely yours.
I gestured toward it. “Luckily, I caught you just as you were finishing up.”
“Finally,” he admitted. “I’ve been at it all day.”
He turned in his chair, gathered up several pages and removed the paper from the typewriter, adding it to the bottom of the stack. Turning back to me, he held it out in my direction.
“Have a look,” he said.
I did, though I did not read it word for word. It was well written, intellectual, thought-provoking. It was twelve pages of graphs, statistics and explanation. I managed to get through the first couple of paragraphs. “What is this?” I asked him.
“It’s about the dangers of free trade,” he said. “Everyone knows it opens up markets and creates jobs in the third world. But without constraints, corporations can go country shopping for the lowest wage earners and the least restrictive environmental regulations.”
I nodded slowly. Everyone might know about free trade, but I didn’t. I’d spent the last couple of decades lunching and shopping. Well, not entirely. But beyond my little world, I really hadn’t ventured very far. To me the economy was stock prices, real estate values and prime lending rates. He’d written about third world labor practices and greenhouse gases.
My own ignorance was an embarrassment to me. I’d been the smartest girl in Sunnyside Junior High. I’d gotten a scholarship to a prestigious prep school. And had made the dean’s list at State. I had been a very bright young woman. I’d parlayed that promise into…into a very false start.
There was no address heading and the salutation was blank.
“Who is this letter for? It’s a little long for the newspaper,” I pointed out.
“The Courier would never print something like this,” he said. “As far as they are concerned, if it didn’t happen in Mervin County, it just didn’t happen.”
“Are you suggesting that our local newspaper suffers from provincialism?” I asked, feigning shock.
“Of course not,” he replied. “Int
ernational events are always covered in great detail if they involve some kind of ball or stick.”
“Who are you going to send this to?”
He shrugged and shook his head. “I honestly don’t know,” he admitted. “I’d like to send it to every world leader, U.S. senator and press organization. I can’t do that, so…so I’ll think of someone. I always do.”
I continued to look through the carefully worded, exhaustingly thorough missive.
“It’s pretty impressive,” I told him honestly. “You do this kind of thing all the time, don’t you?”
He nodded soberly.
“When did you start?”
“This one? About two days ago.”
“No, when did you start this letter-writing avocation.”
“Oh, I don’t know, years ago, I guess.”
His answer was deliberately casual. He was not being completely honest, I was certain of it.
“On what particular occasion years ago?” I asked with great specificity.
He laughed then.
“You’re not particularly good at dissembling,” I informed him.
Scott apparently knew that already. He raised his hands, conceding without argument.
“You want a beer?” he asked. “Soda? I could probably come up with a glass of wine.”
“No, thank you.”
“Water?”
“When did you start writing letters?” I asked again.
He sighed with resignation, giving up the effort to ignore the question.
“When I was in the hospital,” he said. “I got shot up in Vietnam. That’s what’s wrong with my leg. I took some shrapnel, then I developed a blood clot. I had five surgeries, including two skin grafts.”
“Oh no,” I said. “I thought maybe you’d been in some kind of accident, but I never thought that.”
“Actually, my recovery is considered a medical success,” he said. “I’m walking around, living a normal life. Really lucky.”
“Thank God.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “I was in the hospital for several months. I didn’t have any family to visit me. No girlfriend. All in all, it was pretty boring. I didn’t have much to do except read. And most of what they had to read was the newspaper.”
His tone was so very matter-of-fact, it was almost chilling in the fear and loneliness that it didn’t mention.
“What was most interesting to me, naturally, was the war,” he said. “I was a kid really, barely nineteen. I didn’t know very much about anything, but I’d just spent eight months in the middle of that war. I knew what was happening there.”
Vietnam had hardly made a blip on my personal radar screen. There was certainly plenty of talk about it at school, but it had never touched me personally. David had had some kind of deferment.
“I realized they were getting a lot of things wrong,” Scott continued. “At first I thought it was just the Stars and Stripes, but then I started reading other papers, national newspapers, and I was disappointed in them, too. It was as if they were missing things, important things, that were obvious to me.”
He laughed and shook his head. “You know where I come from, Janey,” he said. “I’d never even imagined that a newspaper might be wrong about something. I started watching the TV news. They weren’t doing any better. I didn’t blame them or believe there was any kind of conspiracy. I just thought they weren’t seeing things from my perspective.”
“And you wanted to help them,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “One morning I was railing about an article in the L.A. Times and one of the other guys on the ward told me to let the guy know what an idiot he was.”
“So you did.”
“I was far more polite than that,” he assured me. “But I did get myself a pen and some paper and quickly wrote the guy a letter. I didn’t really explain things very much. I expected him to call me. I stuck close to the phone for three whole days. I thought I’d be able to tell him directly why he was getting it wrong. I was so innocent of the way things worked. I didn’t know that papers don’t respond to letters, they print them.”
“They printed your letter.”
He rolled his eyes. “I’d just whipped it off. It was full of bad grammar and misspellings. I wrote it just like I would have said it. I think I even used the phrase sock it to me.”
“Oh no,” I moaned sympathetically.
“I didn’t give any reasons for what I thought,” he said. “I didn’t list any of the facts that backed up my opinion. I sounded bigheaded, bullshitting and brain-dead.”
I giggled. I couldn’t help myself.
“Immediately,” he said, “I wrote another letter, a better letter. That one never got printed, of course. It’s one of life’s truths that if you write something that’s truly insightful and accurate, it never gets published. But whenever you make errors, factual or clerical, they always get into print.”
His exasperation was leavened with humor.
“Anyway, that’s my story,” Scott explained. “The war was nothing like I thought it would be. It was also nothing like what I saw on TV and read in the newspapers. I thought people deserved to know the truth. I began writing letters that, I think, tell the truth. And I’ve been doing it ever since.”
“These letters must take a lot of your time,” I said. “How often do you write them?”
“It depends on what’s happening, what I’m thinking about and how difficult the subject happens to be,” he answered. “Usually I’ll write a couple of things a week, but there have been times when I’ve written about three different topics in one day.”
I was astounded. “That’s like a full-time job.”
“Why do you think I’m up writing at midnight? The research alone can sometimes take weeks.”
I was trying hard to understand but I didn’t.
“You don’t get paid for this, right?”
“Not everything that’s important to do is a paid position,” he said.
“I’m not arguing that,” I assured him. “But you could do this same sort of thing and get paid for it. Why don’t you?” I asked.
“There’s not a lot of demand for professional letter writers,” he said with a grin. “Though I admit I haven’t checked for it on GettaJob.com.”
I ignored his teasing. “You would be doing basically this same kind of work if you were a journalist.”
“I thought about that,” he admitted. “In fact, that was one of my original high-school ambitions. I dreamed of being a politician or a journalist.” He raised his eyebrows expressively. “We can only thank God that all our dreams don’t come true.”
“It’s not too late,” I said. “You could still do it.”
“I no longer want to do it,” he said. “Anytime you get paid for an opinion, the value of that opinion has to be called into question.”
“What do you mean?”
“All the news organizations are corporations,” he said. “Even if journalists are supposed to be independent, corporate structure is not. Newsrooms assign stories. Editorial boards take positions. And all writers have editors. The only way to be totally free to speak your own mind is to do it of your own volition, without compensation.”
I had never considered that, but what Scott said made sense.
“And then,” he added, “there’s that weird human thing.”
“What weird human thing?”
“If it was my job, then it would be a job. I’d be writing because I have to not because I want to. It would never be the same.”
There was some truth to that, I supposed.
“Besides,” he said, “I already have a job. I own my own business.” He spread his arms to indicate his surroundings. I found that the least believable of all his excuses.
“I think I’ve mentioned this before, Scott, but in case you’ve forgotten, read my lips, you don’t know anything about antiques,” I said.
He laughed. “I guess it’s more like the news business than I thought.”<
br />
“What do you mean?”
“Complete ignorance is no deterrent to maintaining a long-term enterprise,” he joked.
I enjoyed his humor, but was completely serious about his store. “I can’t imagine how anyone can operate a business for more than half his life and still not know anything about it,” I said.
“It’s a struggle,” he admitted, tongue-in-cheek. “But somehow I’ve managed.”
“I’d think some of the basic knowledge would have rubbed off from your father.”
He shook his head. “I didn’t want anything to do with my father’s avocation,” he said. “My mother didn’t want me involved, either. She made sure I had plenty of other activities to be doing when Dad needed me.”
“She had something against antiques.”
“She hated junk,” he said. “She still does. I think if she hadn’t been afraid of jail, she would have burned this building down rather than see me working in it. She’s remarried, lives in Waco with her new husband. Their house is as sparse and clean as an operating room.”
“All right,” I said. “She hated the business, but you must not have or you wouldn’t still be in it. Yet you’ve virtually tried to let the place run itself.”
He shrugged. “I admit that I’ve not been as interested or involved as I should have been,” he said. “I’m just not that intrigued by old furniture and dishes.”
“Antiques are like tangible chunks of history,” I told him. “When we touch them, it’s like we’re touching the past.”
He smiled. “You humble me, Janey,” he said.
“I’d rather inspire you,” I told him. “If you had half the passion for this store that you have for these letters, this could be a magical place.”
Scott’s eyes widened, “Magical,” he repeated. “I like that.”
“Well, it’s true,” I told him. “There is incredible stuff in here that is pretty much buried beneath the junk. If it was taken care of and presented attractively, it could go flying out these doors at top dollar.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” he said. “I wish you’d known my father. You two would have had a lot in common. He was interested in everything. There was nothing so lowly that he didn’t appreciate its potential.”