Theophilus North

by Thornton Wilder

  “Good morning, Mrs. Keefe. Have you an apartment to let?”

  She paused a moment. “I have and I haven’t. How long would you want it?”

  “All summer, ma’am, if it suited me.”

  “Are you alone? . . . What is your work?”

  “I’m a tennis instructor at the Casino. My name is Theodore North.”

  “Do you attend any church regularly?”

  “I’ve only been a short time in Newport. During the War I was stationed at Fort Adams. I used to walk into town to attend the evening service at Emmanuel Church.”

  “Come in and sit down. Excuse my dress; it’s early and I’m housecleaning.”

  She led me into a sitting room that should have been preserved in a museum for generations yet unborn.

  “What exactly were you looking for, Mr. North?”

  “One large room or two small ones; a bath and some simple kitchen facility; some housecleaning and a change of linen once a week. And I’d like it to be on the second floor with an exterior stairway.”

  She had been looking me up and down. “How much would you be willing to pay, Mr. North?”

  “I was thinking of twenty-five dollars a month, ma’am.”

  She sighed and examined the floor in silence. I remained silent too. With each of us every penny counted; but she had a weightier anxiety on her mind. “It is occupied at present, but I have told the men there that they must be prepared to give it up on two weeks’ notice. They agreed to that.”

  “You don’t find them satisfactory, Mrs. Keefe?”

  “I don’t know what to think. They don’t sleep there. They had me take the beds away. They used it like it was a business office. They brought in a big table to work on. They say they’re architects, working on some problem, some prize-contest they want to win. Like a plan for a perfect town, something like that.”

  “Do they give you any trouble?”

  “I don’t see them or hear them for a week at a time, except sometimes when they come and go up their back stairs. I never see any of them face to face except when he pays the rent. They keep the doors locked all day and night. They do their own cleaning up. Never any letters; never any telephone calls. Mr. North, they’re like ghosts in the house. Never say good morning; never exchange the time of day. I don’t call that roomers.”

  She was looking at me with a first sign of confidence, even of appeal.

  “Did they give any kind of reference in town when they came? Any other address?”

  “The oldest one, I guess he’s the head of ’em, gave me the number of his postbox at the Post Office—Number 308. One Sunday noon I saw them all eating at the Thames Street Blue Star Restaurant.”

  “Have you taken other people up to inspect the apartment?”

  “Yes, two married couples. They didn’t like it—no beds, hardly any chairs. I guess it didn’t look like an apartment to them. Besides, there’s the smell.”

  “Smell!”

  “Yes, it’s getting all through the house. Some chemical they use.”

  “Mrs. Keefe, I think you have reason to be worried.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I don’t know yet. Can you take me up there now?”

  “Yes . . . Yes, I’d like to.”

  That amazing detective Chief Inspector Theophilus North had sprung to life again. I followed her up the stairs and when she had knocked loudly at the door I gestured to her, smiling, to stand at one side. I put my ear to the crack in the door. I heard a muffled oath, whispered commands, rapid motions, a falling object. Finally the door was unlocked and a tall man with a southern colonel’s mustache and goatee, very angry, faced us. He was wearing a white linen coat that I associate with surgeons.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, Mr. Forsythe, but there’s a gentleman here who’d like to look at the apartment.”

  “I asked you to arrange these interruptions at the noon hour, Mrs. Keefe.”

  “My visitors have to make these calls at their own time. They visit five and six apartments every morning. I’m sorry; that’s the way it is.”

  It was a large room filled with the sunlight that I would seldom be able to enjoy—seeming all the larger because of the sparseness of the furniture. A long trestle-like table ran the length of the room. On one end of it rested what I think would be called a “mock-up” of an ideal village in miniature, a delightful piece of work. The four men stood against the wall as though they were undergoing a military inspection.

  To my great surprise the youngest of the men was Elbert Hughes. He was as astonished as I was, and extremely frightened. In my role as detective I knew that it was my task to appear as unsuspicious as possible. I strolled over to Elbert and shook his hand. “Good morning, Hughes. Too bad to be indoors on a fine morning like this. We’ll get you out on the tennis courts yet.” I gave him a blow on the shoulder. “You look kind of thin and peaked to me, Hughes. Tennis, man, that’s what you need!—What! Making children’s toys? Awfully pretty village that. Excuse me, gentlemen, while I see if there’d be room in these cupboards for my collection of tennis cups.” There was a row of china cupboards, faced with glass and lined with silk. I grasped at their handles, but they were locked. “Locked?—Well, don’t take the trouble to unlock them now.” I strolled into the bathroom and kitchen. “Just right for me,” I said to Mrs. Keefe. “Funny smell, though. I also have a collection of rocks—an old hobby of mine, semiprecious stones. I’d like a good deal of cupboard space for them, too.” Returning into the main room I looked about me genially. It appeared as unlike an architect’s atelier as possible. There were no waste paper baskets! It was as neat and uncluttered as a business office in a department store window—except for one thing: across the open windows were strung sheets of paper, delicately fastened together; they were damp and had been hung out to dry. They had been dyed the color of blond tobacco.

  I smiled to Mr. Forsythe and said, “Laundry day, eh?”

  “Mrs. Keefe,” he said, “I think the gentleman has had time enough to inspect the apartment. We must get back to our work.”

  I assumed that the making of counterfeit money and the engravers’ and etchers’ art would require a bulky press and pots of blue and green ink, but nothing of the kind was to be seen. The sheets of paper in the window were certainly being “aged.” But I was getting “hot.”

  “There are some more cupboards for my collections up in that corner,” I cried eagerly. They were not furnished with locks. I could hardly reach their handles, but I made two jumps for them. They swung open. To break my fall I clutched at the stacks of paper they contained, bringing down cascades of leaves that covered the floor—yes, “Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks in Vallombrosa.” All four men rushed forward to pick them up, but not before I saw that they were copies in a delicate old-fashioned calligraphy of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” signed by Julia Ward Howe, once resident in Newport. As I lay flat on the floor over them I could see that each was inscribed to a different recipient —“For my dear friend . . . ,” “For the Honorable Judge So-and-so . . .” I showed no sign of finding anything remarkable. “Gee, gentlemen, I’m sorry about this,” I said, picking myself up. “I hope I haven’t sprained my ankle!—I’m ready to go now, Mrs. Keefe. Thank you very much for your patience, gentlemen.”

  As I started limping out of the door, Mr. Forsythe said, “Mrs. Keefe, I hope you’ll allow us to retain the rooms until the end of August—without interruptions. I was about to propose an arrangement of this matter.”

  “We’ll talk that over at another time, Mr. Forsythe. Now I’ll leave you to your work.”

  At the bottom of the stairs I asked, “Can we talk somewhere else—in the kitchen, maybe?”

  She nodded and started down the corridor. I turned back and opened the front door, saying loudly: “I’m sorry, Mrs. Keefe, I can’t consider it. It would take weeks to get rid of that unpleasant odor. Thank you for your trouble. Good morning, Mrs. Keefe!” I then slammed the fron
t door loudly and followed her on tiptoe to the kitchen.

  She watched me open-eyed. “You think they’re undesirable roomers, Mr. North?”

  “They’re forgers.”

  “Forgers, God bless my soul! Forgers!”

  “They don’t make counterfeit money. They make antiques.”

  “Forgers! I’ve never had them before. Oh, Mr. North, the father of the Chief of Police was a good friend of my husband’s. Shouldn’t I go to him?”

  “I wouldn’t make a big thing of it. They’re not harming anybody. Even if they sold a hundred fake letters of George Washington only fools would buy them.”

  “I don’t want them in the house. Forgers! What should I do, Mr. North?”

  “When is their month up?”

  “Like I said, they’ve agreed to go any time on two weeks’ notice.”

  “You shouldn’t let them suspect that you know what they’re doing. They’re ugly customers. Let everything go on for a few days just as usual. I’ll think of something.”

  “Oh, Mr. North, help me get them out. They pay thirty dollars a month. I’ll give it to you for twenty-five. I’ll put the beds back and some nice furniture.” Suddenly she burst out, “My sister said I should have gone back to Providence when my husband died. She said I wouldn’t be happy here. There’s an element in this town, she said, that’s riff-raff and that attracts riff-raff, and I’ve seen it over and over again.”

  I knew her answer, but I asked, “You mean the other side of Thames Street?”

  “No! No!” She tossed her head toward the north. “I mean up there: Bellevue Avenue. No fear of God. Filthy money, that’s what I mean!”

  I comforted her as best I could and drove off on my bicycle to a hard day’s schedule, whistling. I’d found my apartment and I’d heard the voice of the Ninth City.

  At about nine that evening as I sat brushing up my New Testament Greek for one of my students there was a knock at my door. I opened it to Elbert Hughes. He wore the look of the unhappiest man in the world.

  “What can I do for you, Elbert? Nightmares again? . . . Well, what is it? Sit down.”

  He sat down and burst into tears. I waited.

  “For God’s sake, stop crying and tell me what’s the matter.”

  Sobbing he said, “You know. You saw it all.”

  “What do I know?”

  “They said if I told anyone, they’d crush my hand.” He extended his right hand.

  “Elbert! Elbert! How did a decent American boy like you get mixed up with a gang like that? . . . What would your mother think, if she knew what you were doing?”

  It was a shot in the dark, but it went home. Heavy precipitation. I got up and opened the door: “Stop crying or leave this room!”

  “I’ll . . . I’ll tell you.”

  “Take this towel and clean up. Drink a glass of water at the washstand and begin at the beginning.”

  When he’d pulled himself together, he began, “I told you how Mr. Forsythe offered me the job to work for him. Then I found out it wasn’t lettering they wanted, but . . . that other thing. They’d bought a lot of first and second editions of Hiawatha and Evangeline and made me inscribe them to the writer’s friends. At first I thought it was a kind of stunt. Then I copied the poems and did the same thing. And short letters by a lot of people. He keeps thinking up new things, like Edgar Allan Poe. Lots of people collect the signatures of the Presidents of the United States.”

  “Where do they sell these?”

  “They don’t talk much about it in front of me. By mail, mostly. They have a stamp that says ‘John Forsythe, Dealer in Historical Documents and Autographs.’ They get a lot of letters every day from Texas and places like that.”

  For two months he had been working at this, eight hours a day, five and a half days a week. The men wanted him under their eyes every day and night. They lived in a commercial hotel on Washington Square. He was not a man of strong will, but Elbert had won a small battle; he had insisted on living at the Y.M.C.A. They surrounded him as in a cocoon. He couldn’t go out for a meal or to a lecture without one or other of them in amiable attendance. When he announced that he was going to Boston for a weekend to see his mother and his fiancée, Mr. Forsythe said, “We’re all taking a vacation in September.” He pulled from his pocket the lengthy contract that Elbert had signed in which he agreed to a “continuous residence in Newport, Rhode Island.” Mr. Forsythe added, kindly, that if Elbert broke that contract he could be sued in court for all the salary that had been paid him. “A team is a team, Elbert; a job is a job.” I had long noticed that one or other of the team spent a large part of the evening in the lobby of the “Y” reading or playing checkers and watching the stairs.

  No wonder that he dreamed of being buried alive, of walls closing in.

  “What does the curly-haired one do?”

  “He makes the watermarks, and ages the paper. He makes stains on the paper and sometimes he makes burns on it.”

  “And the other one?”

  “He frames the writing and puts glass over them. Then he takes the boxes to the Post Office.”

  “I see. . . . What’s this about smashing your hand?”

  “Well, he said it just as a joke, of course. One day I said that I was really interested in lettering—and that’s what they hired me for—and that I wanted to go down to Washington, D.C., for two weeks to study the lettering on the public buildings there, like the Supreme Court and the Lincoln Memorial. He said he wanted me right here. He said, ‘You wouldn’t want anything to happen to your right hand, would you?’ and he pushed my fingers way back, like this. . . . He said it with a smile, but I didn’t like it.”

  “I see. . . . Do you want to break away from them, Elbert?”

  “Oh, Ted, I wish I’d never seen them. Help me! Help me!”

  I looked at him for a few minutes. Damn it, I was caught. I was caught in a trap. It looked as though I were the sole person responsible for the welfare of this helpless incapable half-genius. If we called in the police, these men, sooner or later, would retaliate on Elbert or on me, or on Mrs. Keefe, or on all three of us. I had a busy schedule; I could not drop what I was doing to extricate this unhappy maladept from his predicament. I must throw the baby on someone else’s lap—and I had an idea.

  “Now, Elbert, things are going to change for you. You go back to work just as usual—and continue working so for a few days. Don’t you give any sign that there’s going to be a change or you’ll ruin the whole plan.”

  “I won’t. I won’t.”

  “Now you go back to your room and go to sleep. Did Dr. Addison give you something to help you about that? Are you getting some sound sleep?”

  “Yes,” he said, unconvincingly. “He gave me some pills.”

  “Now you’ve got all wrought up. I can’t read to you tonight. Take one of Dr. Addison’s pills, and what have you got to think about to calm you down?”

  He looked up at me with a confidential smile. “I think about designing a good gravestone for Edgar Allan Poe.”

  “No! No!—Forget Poe! Think about what’s ahead for you—freedom, your marriage, Abigail. Get a good rest now. Good night.”

  “Good night, Ted.”

  There was a telephone at the end of the corridor. I called up Dr. Addison. “Doc, this is Ted North. Can I drop in and see you in about ten minutes?”

  “Sure! Sure! Always ready for a little prayer-meeting.”

  As I have said the “Y” had its own doctor, Winthrop Addison, M.D., a tall trunk of walnut, over seventy. His professional notice was still attached to the post of his verandah, but he told all strangers that he had retired; no patient he had ever served, however, was turned away. He cut his own hair, cooked his own meals, tended his own garden, and, as the ranks of his former patients were thinning, he had plenty of free time. He liked to linger in the front room of our building and talk with any resident who chose to approach him. I greatly enjoyed his company and was assembling a portrait of him for
my Journal. He had a fund of stories not always suitable for his younger listeners.

  I ran down to Thames Street and bought a flask of the best, then came back up our street and rang his doorbell.

  “Come in, professor. What is it now?”

  I offered my present to him. As he knew I didn’t drink hard liquor, he put the bottle to his lips murmuring, “Heaven, sheer Heaven!”

  “Now, Doc, I’ve got a problem. You’re under the oath of Hippocrates not to say a word about it for six months.”

  “Agreed, lad. Agreed! I can clean you up in two months. I should have warned you about going to ‘Hattie’s Hammock.’ ”

  “I don’t need a doctor. Listen: I need smart, experienced grade-A advice.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “What did you think of Elbert Hughes?”

  “He needs rest; he needs food; he needs backbone. Maybe he needs a mother. He’s got some load of misery. He won’t talk.”

  I told him about the forgery ring, about Elbert’s extraordinary gift; about his condition of slavery. Doc loved it and took a deep swig. “Elbert wants to get away from them without their suspecting that he’ll talk to the police or to anyone. They’re very ugly types, Doc. They’ve already threatened to maim him, to smash his right hand. Could you give him some disease that would put him to bed for six weeks? That would put them out of business and they’d leave town. He’s all they’ve got. He’s their pot of gold.”

  Doc laughed long and loud. “That reminds me of a case that I had twenty-five years ago—”

  “Save it! Save it!”

  “This man’s wife had hives—cruel! What I call ‘thistle-patch hives.’ He told me he wanted an excuse not to sleep in the same bed with her. She said she couldn’t sleep a wink without his being by her side.”

  “Doc, save it. Please save it. I want the whole story another time. Remember we’re writing a book together.” (It was to be called Coughing Up the Diamonds: The Memoirs of a Newport Doctor; the best of it is in my Journal.) “Get your mind back to Elbert Hughes. What’s that disease that makes your hand tremble? Or could you sort of make out that he’s blind for a while?”