"I only read the blurb on the back flap. That’s all I---"
Corinne hung up. In her excitement she hadn’t thought of looking at the back flap of the dust jacket. She rushed back to her bed and read the few notes on Ray Ford.
She read that this Ray Ford was twice the winner of the Rice Fellowship for Poetry and three times the winner of the Annual Strauss and that he now divided his time "between his creative work and his duties as an instructor at Columbia University in New York." He was born in Boise, Idaho—an upsetting fact, as it should have been a decisive one, but Corinne had no idea where "her" Ray Ford had been born.
But the notes said that he was thirty years old. Which was exactly, electrically, right.
Corinne looked to see if there were a dedication. There was. The book was dedicated to the memory of a Mrs. Rizzio. This piece of information might have been a little puncturing, but Corinne’s imagination was already off the ground. It was very simple. Mrs. Rizzio was Raymond Ford’s mother remarried. Corinne didn’t even bother to consider, much less get around, the unlikelihood of an author (or anybody else), referring to his mother in the third person. She didn’t need logic. She needed more excitement. She jumped back into bed with her book.
Sitting erectly in bed, without lighting cigarettes, Corinne read The Cowardly Morning until the maid came in to wake her for breakfast. And even all the while she was getting dressed she felt Ray Ford’s poems standing upright all over her room. She even kept an eye on them in her dressing-table mirror, lest they escape into their natural vertical ascent. And when she left for her office, she closed her door securely.
From her office, later that morning, she twice telephoned Columbia, but didn’t get to speak to the author of The Cowardly Morning. He was either in class or "not in the building just now."
At noon she quit work and went home and slept until four o’clock. Then she called the Columbia number again. This time she spoke to Ray Ford.
Corrine began with a good strong apology. "I hope I’m not taking you away from something," she said rapidly, "but my name is Corinne von Nordhoffen and I used to know someone—"
"Who?" interrupted the voice on the other end.
She said her name again.
"Oh! How are you, Corinne?"
Corinne said she was fine and then supplied quite a gap in the conversation. She was much less taken aback by the fact that this was actually "her" Ray Ford than she was by the fact that her Ray Ford remembered her at all. After all, he was not salvaging her name out of an old cocktail party, but out of a childhood partitioned off by nineteen years.
She became very nervous. "I never expected you to remember me," she said. She began to think and talk in jumps. "I read your book of poems last night. I’d like to tell you how— beautiful—I thought they were. I know that isn’t the right word. I mean, the right word."
"It’s very nice," said Ford evenly. "Thank you, Corinne."
"I live in New York," Corinne said.
"I was just wondering about that. You don’t live in Bayonne anymore?"
"Shoreview, Long Island," she quickly corrected.
"Shoreview—of course! Don’t you live there anymore?"
"No. My father died and I sold the house," Corinne said, finding her own voice dissonant. "How’s your mother?"
"She died a long time ago, Corinne."
"I’m not keeping you from a class or something, am I?" Corinne demanded abruptly.
"No, no."
Corinne stood up, as though someone wanted her seat. "Well, I just wanted to tell you how much I loved them—your poems"
"It’s very nice of you, Corinne. Really."
She sat down again. She laughed. "It certainly is remarkable that you’re the same Ray Ford. I mean who wrote those poems. It isn’t an extraordinary name."
"No. No, it isn’t."
"Where—where did you go after you left Shoreview?" Without wanting a cigarette she reached for a cigarette box.
"I don’t remember, Corinne. It’s such a long time ago."
"It certainly is," she agreed and stood up. "I’m probably taking your time. I just wanted to tell you how—"
"Will you have lunch with me one day next week, Corinne?" Ford asked her.
Corinne fumbled with a cigarette lighter. "I’d love to," she said.
Ford said, "There’s a little Chinese restaurant very near here. Do you like Chinese food?"
"I love it." The lighter slipped out of her hand and fell on the telephone table.
They arranged for lunch the following Tuesday at one o’clock. Then Corinne had a chance to run to her photograph, flick it on, and turn the volume knob all the way to the right.
She listened ecstatically as the music—the Moldau—flowed into the room, very sensibly drawing everything in sight.
January 9, 1937 was a sharp, raw day. The Chinese restaurant was four blocks from Columbia—not, as Corinne had imagined, around the corner from it. Her cab driver had trouble finding it. It was off Broadway and squeezed between a delicatessen and a hardware store. The driver, sounding tricked and annoyed, kept saying that he didn’t know the neighborhood. Finally Corinne told him to pull over to the curb. She got out and, on foot, found the restaurant herself.
Inside the restaurant Corinne selected a boothed-in table opposite the door. She sat down, aware that she was probably the only person in the place who hadn’t either a textbook or a notebook within reach. She felt conspicuous, mink-coatish. Her face ached from the January weather. Her table, just vacated by a couple of beefy students, was wet with spilled tea.
Although she was ten minutes early she began at once to watch the door. She and Ford had not described themselves over the telephone, and all she had to go on was Robert Waner’s melba-toast remark about poets almost never looking like poets because they would be infringing on the rights of all chiropodists who are dead ringers for Byron—this and a badly lighted image in her mind of a small-featured, light-haired little boy. She nervously began unsnapping and snapping the silver catch on her wristwatch band. Finally she broke the thing. While she was trying to fix it, a man’s voice spoke over her head. "Corinne?"
"Yes."
She pushed her disabled wristwatch into her handbag and quickly extended her hand to a man in a gray overcoat.
Ford was suddenly seated and smiling directly at her. She had to look at him squarely now. There wasn’t even a glass for her to reach for.
Even if Ford had been a cyclops, Corinne probably would have flinched a kind of happy, integrating flinch. Actually, the other extremity was the case. Ford was a man. Only the glassed he wore saved him from gorgeousness. I won’t attempt to estimate the head-on effect of his looks on Corinne’s unused secret equipment. She was badly rattled, certainly, and immediately had to use her social wits. "I almost thought I’d better wear my middie blouse," she said.
Ford started to make some comment, but he didn’t get a chance. The Chinese waiter, clinging to some greasy mimeographed menus, was suddenly hanging over him. The waiter knew Ford and immediately mad some report to him about a book that had been left at the table the day before. Ford spoke to the waiter at some length, explaining that the book was not his, that it belonged to the other man and that the other man would be in later. Before the waiter could pass this bit of information along to the boss, Ford ordered lunch for Corinne and himself. Then Ford turned to Corinne, smiling kindly and with real warmth. "That certainly was quite right," he said to Corinne—as though resuming an interrupted discussion of last Saturday night at the Smiths’. "What ever happened to that man? Your father’s secretary. Or whatever he was."
"Mr. Miller? He stole a lot of money from Father and went to Mexico. I guess his case is outlawed by now."
Ford nodded. "And your dog?" he asked.
"He died when I was in college."
"He was a nice dog. Are you doing anything now, Corinne? Some kind of work, I mean?
You were a very rich little girl, weren’t you?"
&n
bsp; They began to talk—that is, Corinne began to talk. She told Ford about her job, about Europe, about college, about her father. She suddenly told him all she knew about her lovely, wild mother, who had, in 1912, in full evening dress, climbed over the promenade deck railing of the S.S. Majestic. She told him about the Detroit boy who had fallen off the running board of her car in Cannes. She told him about her sinus operation. She told him—just about everything. Ordinarily Corinne was not a talker but nothing could have stopped her that afternoon. She had whole years and even days full of information which suddenly seemed transferable. Apropos, Ford happened to have a high talent for listening.
"You’re not eating," Corinne observed suddenly. "You haven’t touched your food at all!"
"Yes, I have. I’m listening to you."
Corinne’s mind jumped happily to something else.
"A friend of mine, Bobby Waner—he’s my boss at the magazine—told me something yesterday. He said there are two lines in American poetry which regularly blow off the top of his head. That’s the way Bobby talks."
"What are the lines?"
"Uh—Whitman’s I am the man, I suffered, I was there and one of yours, but I won’t say it in front of—I don’t know—the chow mein and stuff. But the one about the man on the island inside the other island."
Ford nodded. He was quite a nodder as a matter of fact. It was a defense mechanism, surely, but a nice one.
"How—how did you become a poet?" Corinne asked—and stopped to qualify her excited question. "I don’t mean that. How did you get an education? You were—you weren’t exactly on the right track when I last saw you."
Ford removed his glasses, and, squinting, cleaned them with his pocket handkerchief. "No, I wasn’t," he agreed.
"You went to college. What did you do, work your way through?" Corinne pressed innocently.
"No, no. I’d already made enough money to go, before that. When I was in high school, in Florida, I worked for a bookmaker."
"A bookie? Really? Horse races and all?"
"Dog races. They were at night, and I could go to school during the day."
"But isn’t there a law preventing minors from working for bookies?"
Ford smiled. "I wasn’t a minor, Corinne. I didn’t go to high school until I was nineteen. I’m thirty now and I’m only of college three years."
"Do you like teaching?"
He took his time answering.
"I can’t write poetry all day long. When I’m not writing it, I suppose I like to talk about it."
"Don’t you have any other interests? I mean—don’t you have any other interests?"
This time he took even more time answering.
"I don’t think so," he said carefully. "I used to. But I’ve lost them. Or used them up. Or just got rid of them. I don’t know anymore. Not exactly anyway."
Corinne thought she understood and nodded appreciatively, but her mind was still clicking like a lover’s. Her next question was entirely uncharacteristic of her—but it was that kind of afternoon.
"Have you ever been in love or anything?" she asked him, suddenly wanting to know about the women he had known, how many and what kinds.
One can guess, however, that she put the question to Ford less inexcusably than it records. Some of her lovely lopsided charm must have come through with it, because Ford responded to the question with a real laugh.
He shifted a little in his seat—the booth was narrow and hard—and replied, "No, I’ve never been in love." But he frowned over his own statement, as though his craftsman’s mind suspected itself of oversimplifying—or of having bad material to work with. He looked up at Corinne, as though he hoped she was already losing interest in her question. She wasn’t. His handsome face frowned again. Then, he undoubtedly took a guess at what Corinne really wanted to know—or what she ought to have wanted to know. At any rate, his mind began to select and juxtapose its own facts. At last, perhaps solely for Corinne’s benefit, he began to talk. Ford’s voice was not very good. It was overly husky and just missed being monotonous.
"Corinne, until I was eighteen I had never even had a date with a girl—except when I was a child and you invited me to your party. And that time you brought your dog to show me—you remember that?"
Corinne nodded. She was very excited. But Ford frowned again. He seemed dissatisfied with the way he was beginning. For a moment he seemed likely to chuck the whole idea.... Probably, Corinne’s immodestly responsive face helped lead him through his own strange story.
"Until I was almost twenty-three," he said abruptly, "the only books I had read—outside school—were the Rover Boys and Tom Swift series." The sound of italics was in this sentence, but he was speaking with a subsurface equanimity now, as though things were going in the right direction. "The only poems I knew," he told Corinne, "were the chanting little ballads I’d had to memorize in grade school. When I was in high school, somehow Milton and Shakespeare never quite got over the teacher’s desk." He smiled. "Anyway, they never got to my aisle."
The waiter came and picked up their half-full bowls and plates of chow mein and fried rice. Corinne asked him to leave the tea.
I was a grown man a long time before I knew that real poetry even exists." Ford said, when the waiter had left. "I’d nearly died looking for it. It’s—It’s a legitimate enough death, incidentally. It’ll get you into some kind of cemetery." He smiled at Corinne—not self- consciously—and added, "They may write on your tombstone that you fell off a girl’s running board in Cannes, for example. Or that you climbed over the railing of a transatlantic liner. I’m sure, though, the real cause of death is accurately recorded in more intelligent circles." He interrupted himself. "You feel cold, Corinne?" he asked solicitously.
"No."
"Do you want to hear all this? It’s long"
"Yes," she said.
Ford nodded. He blew into his hands and then set them on the table.
"There was a woman," he told Corinne. "who used to come to the track every evening, in Florida. Woman in her late sixties. She had bright henna hair and wore a lot of make-up. Her face was pretty jaded and all that, but you could tell that she had once been very wonderful- looking." He blew into his hands again. "Her name was Mrs. Rizzio. She was a widow. She always wore silver foxes, no matter how hot it was. I saved her a lot of money at the track one evening—several thousand dollars. She was a heavy, crazy better. She was very grateful to me and wanted to do something about it. First she wanted to send me to her dentist. (My mouth was full of gaps in those days. I’d had some dental work done, but not much. When I was fourteen some two-dollar dentist in Racine had pulled nearly all my teeth.) But I just thanked her and told her I went to high school during the day and that I didn’t have the time to go to the dentist. She seemed very disappointed. She sort of wanted me to become a movie actor. I think. I thought that was the end of it. But it wasn’t. She had another way of showing her gratitude." Ford said. "Are you sure you’re not cold, Corinne?"
Corinne shook her head.
He nodded, and took what seemed to be an extraordinarily deep breath. Exhaling, he said, "She began to push little white slips of paper into my hand every evening when she saw me at the track. She always wrote me in green ink, and in a small but very legible handwriting. She printed. The first slip of paper she gave me had "William Butler Yeats" written at the top of it, and under Yeats’ name the title, The Lake Isle of Innisfree. Under the title, the complete poem was written out for me. I didn’t think it was a gag. I just thought she was nuts. But I read the poem," he told Corinne, looking at her. "I read it under the arc lights. And then, just for the hell of it, I memorized it. I started reciting it to myself under my breath while I waited for the first race to start. And suddenly the beauty of it caught on. I got very excited. I had to leave the track after the first race. I went straight to the drugstore where I knew they had dictionaries. I wanted to find out what "wattles" were and what a "glide" was and what a "linnet" was. I couldn’t wait to k
now.
For the third time Ford blew into his long hands.
"Mrs. Rizzio gave me a poem every evening," he said. "I memorized, and learned, all of them. Everything she gave me was fine. I’ve never really reconciled her taste in poetry with her idea about my going into the movies. Maybe she just approved of money. Anyway, she gave me the best of Coleridge, Yeats, Keats, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley. Some Whitman. A little Eliot.
"I never once thanked her for the poems. Or even told her what they were meaning to me. I was afraid of breaking the spell—the whole thing seemed magic to me. I knew I’d have to take some kind of action before the season was over. I didn’t want the poems to stop reaching me because the season was over. I didn’t have sense enough to do any investigating at a public library on my own. I could very well have used our high school library, for that matter, but somehow I didn’t connect our high school library with poetry.
"I waited till the last evening of the season. Then I asked her where she was getting the poems. She was very kind. She invited me to her house to see her library. I went along with her that same night. My heart nearly pounded me out of the cab.
"The day after she showed me her library I was supposed to tell my boss whether I’d join him in Miami after my graduation from high school. Graduation was only a week away. I made up my mind not to go to Miami. Mrs. Rizzio had told me I could use her library whenever I wanted. She lived in Tallahassee, and I figured I could hitchhike there in less than an hour, any time of the day. So I quit my job.
"As soon as I got my high school diploma, I started spending eighteen, nineteen hours a day in Mrs. Rizzio’s library. Never less. I did that for two months, until my eyes finally gave out under the strain. I didn’t wear glasses in those days, and my eyes were very bad. The left eye, particularly; I don’t see much of anything out of it.
"But I kept coming to her library anyway. I was afraid she’d stop letting me use it if she knew I could no longer read the print in her books. So I didn’t say anything to her at all about my eyes. For about three weeks I sat in her library from early morning until late at night, with a book in front of me, pretending to be reading, in case anyone came into the room.
22 Out-of-print J. D. Salinger Stories Page 20