The Novel

by James A. Michener

  At the end of this tearful outburst, I said: ‘Karl, if we forget all that’s happened recently …’

  ‘Yvonne, I want to explain why I felt I had to leave you and Kinetic—’

  ‘Karl, I said we’d forget it. I need your help most urgently.’

  ‘What can I do?’

  ‘Help me protect Timothy’s reputation. His place in the world of books.’ This challenge had the same effect on him that it had had on Mrs. Garland: ‘What must I do?’

  In the next minutes he revealed that Timothy had left with him two substantial segments of Dialogue, but again they were isolated segments with no linkage to other sections. Like Jenny, he had every reason to believe that Timothy had intended them as part of the closing section of his novel. As soon as I started to recite my instructions he stopped me: ‘I understand your apprehension and share it. We must ensure authentication of this material. I’ll have it dated and Xeroxed immediately.’

  ‘And notarized,’ and he said: ‘Of course.’

  ‘Could you drive up to Dresden? Meet me at the inn at three? I’m driving down.’

  ‘I’ll see you then.’

  At last I telephoned the German president of Kinetic and told him: ‘In the depths of this tragedy there is one glimmer of light. Timothy Tull left behind at his tragic death a splendid manuscript—I’ve read eighty percent of it—I’ve been assured that ninety percent is completed. I seek your verbal promise, which I will not publicize until you and I work out the details in writing, that if I can get this new work published in good form and with the wide success I anticipate, you will, on behalf of Kinetic and our continued concern over the finest in American fiction, donate either a lump sum or a portion of our profits to the Department of Creative Writing at Mecklenberg College, where Tull learned his trade and where he taught others. A deal? Good. No, I can’t come in, because I’ve got to return to Dresden to help the boy’s grandmother arrange the funeral. I have your approval of the gift and Kinetic will reap untold rewards.’ That settled and with Chuck driving, I headed for Dresden, but I was asleep even before we entered the Lincoln Tunnel.

  End of statement of Ms. Yvonne Marmelle.

  Witnesses: Walter Stumpf

  Leonard Dreyfus

  Dresden, Penna.

  Typist: Fanny Trumbauer

  WEDNESDAY, 6 NOVEMBER: I will let Yvonne Marmelle’s report to the police explain why I was unable during the first days of the tragedy to write of it. Timothy’s death, that extinguishing of a life I had nurtured, the murder of a boy with such limitless promise and in such a horrible way, threw me into a state of shock that was intensified by the cold realization that with his death any hope of preserving the honorable name of Garland was also erased. I fell into such a trembling confusion that only Martha Benelli’s assistance at Windsong and Yvonne Marmelle’s calm voice in New York enabled me to get through that first day. By midafternoon, when Yvonne and her driver reached Dresden, I was functioning. When she called she asked me: ‘Would you be up to seeing Karl Streibert at three this afternoon? I’ve asked him to drive up to discuss the manuscript.’

  Since this was the day’s first problem involving living human beings I said: ‘High time you two started working together again,’ but before either he or Yvonne arrived, Jenny Sorkin knocked at the door, and I embraced her as the girl who might have married my grandson.

  As we sat in big chairs facing the wall of windows and staring down at the scene of the murder, I said, trying to fight back tears: ‘I do wish, Jenny, that this were the incident I once read about in an eighteenth-century romance. My grandson has been killed fighting with the Duke in Flanders and you’re the sweetheart he courted before leaving. You’ve come to tell me you’re pregnant and that you and I shall raise his bastard son. Dear God, I wish that were your story, Jenny,’ and I dissolved in tears. Before she could speak I added: ‘That’s what comes of taking you writers seriously.’

  In her blunt way, which I so appreciated, she said: ‘I’m afraid I don’t bear his seed, Mrs. Garland, but I do have the germ of the closing to his novel, and Ms. Marmelle gave instructions on how we can preserve it.’

  When Professor Streibert joined our solemn group we greeted him as if he were the prodigal son. Ms. Benelli said: ‘It doesn’t seem like the same library without you dropping by now and then,’ and after Jenny embraced him warmly she said: ‘Timothy and I missed you. You kept our noses pointed in the right direction,’ and he had to dry his eyes.

  Within a few minutes Ms. Marmelle appeared, and her first task, after consoling me, was to establish amicable relations with Professor Streibert, whom she was meeting for the first time since our dinner at the 7&7. And even though I was distraught I could see that he was more nervous about the meeting than she. ‘Hello, Karl. I’m grateful you could come back to help us,’ she said and kissed him on the cheek.

  Then she became the Napoleon I had admired: ‘Can we, among us, piece together Timothy’s movements during his last days?’ and as we began to explain what had become known since her early morning call to her friend at the Times she started her tape recorder lest she miss important details.

  Jenny spoke first. ‘On Saturday night he had a date with me at the Hex, that’s the college hangout, where we met with two other couples. One couple walked Timothy to his rooms, the other took me to mine. No heavy date or anything. That was one in the morning.’

  On Sunday Timothy in company with four other men and two women, all from the college, hiked down the entire length of the off-road border of the Wannsee, a distance of twelve leisurely miles, while Jenny had Timothy’s car waiting at the end of the hike. In rather brisk November weather containing a hint of frost, they had a cookout on the campus, at the end of which, at about seven at night, Timothy said: ‘I’m sleeping at Windsong tonight. Grandmother lives alone and enjoys companionship now and then.’

  Authority for his movements now shifted to me, and painful though it was, I managed, with frequent pauses to dry my eyes, to share as much as I knew: ‘What Jenny says sounds reasonable, because he arrived here alone about seven-thirty. He said he’d already eaten but would join me in a bowl of rum raisin ice cream, which he knew I kept in the refrigerator on a regular basis. As we ate it, we talked of his manuscript, which I had found both professional and ingenious. I told him that although it was daring I believed he had pulled it off, except for one passage at about page ninety. He asked to see that section and cried: “No wonder! The typist left out a whole section,” and he borrowed my pen to make a mark so that he could insert the missing paragraphs.

  ‘We watched the end of the J. B. Fletcher show as she solved her weekly murder, and then we trundled off to bed. No one saw him alive after that, except the murderer.’

  Now Ms. Marmelle took over, beginning with an apology: ‘I may sound ruthless raising these matters at this time of mourning, but we four are responsible for the literary reputation of a gifted young man, and the steps we take in the next few days will determine how the public, now and later, will remember him.

  ‘First of all, Mrs. Garland, have you any document that gives you title to the manuscript? Is it yours?’

  Calmly I said: ‘With foresight our lawyer insisted upon two wills. Mine gave everything, after gifts, to Timothy; his gave everything to me.’

  ‘Good. We’re free to go ahead.’ Then she asked Ms. Benelli: ‘You had the manuscript Xeroxed, notarized and stowed in a locked box? Good. This can be a tremendously important book—if it’s presented right. Karl, I see a five-signature book—a hundred and sixty pages—if we can reconstruct the closing pages, so I want you to write a one-signature essay up front, thirty-two pages on how this work was conceived and perceived by Timothy, the conditions under which it was written, and most important, his habit of showing you and Jenny, his colleagues, segments as they came along. You must establish that he shared with you two, as his co-equals in the writing program, his hopes and plans for the completed book.’

  At this point she sna
pped her fingers: ‘Did he ever read portions of his text to members of his class? Great! Jenny, I want you to get notarized statements from half a dozen students testifying to what he told them about his work in progress. Karl, try to remember the one who writes best and I’ll invite him or her to do a two-page piece on Timothy reading, and let’s make sure our writer specifies what it was he read.’

  Continuing with Karl, she warned: ‘You’re to be a most meticulous chronicler, because if you are, you justify our combined efforts to complete his manuscript. Thus you write your own credentials.’

  ‘Sound strategy,’ Streibert said, and I agreed.

  She interrupted her instructions: ‘Please clarify one point. I’ve been using three different percentages, seventy-five, eighty, ninety. Can we agree on how much of the manuscript he completed—in the typed form I saw?’

  Streibert and Jenny each said eighty, and then Yvonne said: ‘Now the crucial part. You, Karl, have two segments he gave you to read, and you, Jenny, have three.’ Streibert looked at his former student. ‘But do either of you have pages on which he was still working—not typed out properly?’

  Both did, and from their briefcases each produced pages showing how Tull had worked and reworked passages. ‘Marvelous,’ Yvonne said. ‘Four of these must be reproduced photographically in your essay, Karl, to establish authenticity.’ Returning the pages, she asked: ‘Have we any clues that can be substantiated as to how he planned to finish the book? Any notes? Fragments?’

  When Streibert remained silent, Jenny said: ‘He talked to me about it. I have a fair idea of what was in his mind.’

  ‘Hearsay. Any notes from him?’

  ‘No, but if you’ll look at the Xeroxes of my pages you’ll find three places on which I wrote notes telling him how I think the pages he’d let me see would fit or not fit into his overall plan.’

  ‘Where? Where?’ and when Jenny produced the pages she referred to, we plotters saw that they were exactly as she had described them. There were her notes, tying the tentative pages into the complete plan, and his curious notation: ‘Okeh,’ a variant of O.K. ‘These are precious,’ Yvonne cried. ‘The manuscript can be completed, and thousands of people are going to read it, hundreds of thousands.’

  She then gave a series of crisp directives, allowing no deviations: ‘Karl, can you get to work immediately on your essay? Document everything. Let’s call it something like “Tull at Mecklenberg.” But first, Karl and Jenny, have dinner with me at the inn, and we’ll try to fit your five segments into some kind of sensible sequence. In the published book, we’ll give the reader three clear indications: the part finished and edited by Timothy, the five segments written by him but not polished or edited, and those short linkages proposed by us but with no original verification by him. Every word completely honest and aboveboard.’ Rising from her chair, she came to me: ‘It’s going to be a sensationally good book, one that’ll be studied for decades to come,’ and I said: ‘That’s what I want. More important, that’s what he would have wanted. When he handed me the unfinished manuscript he said: “This one’ll be much better than the first.” ’ Yvonne turned and said: ‘Did you get that on the tape, Karl?’ And as they left, I heard her say: ‘Now tell me about this fabulous new department at Temple.’

  THURSDAY, 7 NOVEMBER: For the past four days I’ve been having constant reports from a man for whom I have developed considerable respect. Captain Walter Stumpf of our Dresden police looks like a junior Herman Zollicoffer, for he’s a rotund Dutchman with a bullet head, thick neck, powerful shoulders and short pumping legs that seem tireless. Red-faced and inclined to sweat, even in November, he works energetically. He speaks in a modified Dutch accent; that is, he uses proper English learned at Franklin and Marshall but with a rural pronunciation that seems at times illiterate but is always amusing. From what I can see of him or learn about him, he’s a bulldog of a man; each time we part he says: ‘Mrs. Garland, we’ll find out who did it.’

  I first saw him around four o’clock in the morning on the day of the murder. Oscar, my chauffeur, had heard a dog barking at two and deduced that it must be Xerxes, though why he was out at that hour he did not know. He went back to sleep. At about four he awakened, left his quarters to investigate where Xerxes was and found the body. Bellowing, he ran toward the house, awakened me, and in my nightdress I ran down the lawn to see the horrible sight. It was so awful, blood everywhere, and the dead dog so protectively close to Timothy’s face, that I began shaking uncontrollably, but Oscar, quite properly I think, said: ‘Stay here. I’ll go call the police.’ He left me his flashlight but I turned it off, for I could not bear to look at the carnage, and there in the cold darkness I assessed the destruction of my world. I was numb, but not from the cold.

  I guarded the body till Captain Stumpf roared up in his police car, siren shrieking and lights flashing. When he flashed his light on the broken bodies of Tim and Xerxes he muttered: ‘A madman,’ and that started his three-day effort to line up the facts.

  Using his radio to summon assistants, he posted them so that no one could molest the body or trample such clues as the lawn grass might hold. Then, standing back to view the crumpled body, he swore to his men: ‘We’ll find out who did this.’

  Before the sun rose at six-thirty he had begun assembling known data on my grandson, his associates and his movements in recent days. Members of his staff had alerted the Philadelphia and New York newspapers, while he hurried off before breakfast to the college to interrogate Timothy’s associates, among them Jenny Sorkin. Universal shock greeted the grisly news he bore, and President Rossiter rushed out wearing a mix of nightclothes and the formal wear lying beside his bed following a college dinner party the night before. Everyone testified to Timothy’s fine character, his intellectual brilliance and his lack of enemies. From Mecklenberg Stumpf picked up not one clue.

  Doubling back, he spent two hours in the village of Neumunster questioning anyone who might have specialized knowledge of Tim’s associates or movements, and wherever he probed, Stumpf heard the same report: ‘Fine young man. Never attended our little school after the sixth grade, but not stuck up, either.’ Had he dated any of the local girls? ‘He wouldn’t have been allowed to do that. After his parents were killed in that crash on the Cut Off, his grandmother took over, and she ruled with an iron hand. Sent him to the expensive private school in Pottstown.’

  ‘I thought he went from here to Reading?’

  ‘You’re right. He did. And I believe he ran with the fast crowd there. At any rate, his grandmother yanked him out and sent him to the private school. Discipline was better.’

  Visits to both Reading and Pottstown produced only standard information: ‘It’s wrong to say that Timothy ran into trouble here in Reading. Bad study habits but never bad personal behavior. He associated with only our best boys. Girls? None that we know of.’

  At The Hill word of his murder had come in over the morning radio, so that officials had already begun assembling a verifiable profile, and it was exemplary: ‘Superb student. Passed his College Boards with highest marks his junior year. Played moderately good tennis. Excelled in writing and won the Edmund Wilson Prize, named in honor of the great literary critic who got his start at this school. Trouble? Timothy never came close. Bad companions? We have none at The Hill. A few in the local community but he never associated with them. Girls? Not as far as we know.’

  Since Windsong lay only ten miles from the heart of Allentown, Stumpf also hurried there after leaving Pottstown, but the dead man’s name was not even known by the police in the city, and there had never been a single incident involving an Allentown hoodlum and Windsong: ‘The feeling among our hoods was that the place was too well guarded, and patrolled by you fellows in Dresden. Our police agreed, so Windsong just didn’t surface in Allentown calculations.’

  Frustrated in that quarter, he sped along the crowded highway to Bethlehem, so close at hand that he, like most of us, was never aware of when he had left Allen
town and entered the industrial center. In the offices of the steel company he asked probing questions about whether Larrimore Garland could have generated any conspicuous hatreds or actual enemies during his tenure as a major representative of management at the great mill: ‘Anytime you have a strike, tempers are apt to flare, but Larrimore was such an understanding man that he kept the differences restricted to money matters only. Never allowed arguments to degenerate into personal hatreds.’

  ‘With labor, yes. But how about jealousies in management over things like promotion?’

  ‘None of that. I honestly believe we all grieved when that good man died.’

  ‘Managers of competing mills?’

  ‘We don’t play that way.’

  ‘But someone had a vicious hatred of his grandson. That I saw at four this morning.’

  ‘Captain Stumpf, in this industry the sins of the grandfather, if there are any, which I doubt, are not visited upon the grandson.’

  ‘Someone visited Timothy Tull real heavy. I’d appreciate any leads that might come to mind later in the day.’

  So at five-thirty Monday afternoon, just as our meeting at Windsong of the people interested in Tim’s manuscript was breaking up, Stumpf stopped by to report, and when he saw my three guests, he remembered that Yvonne had consulted him about the purchase of her house: ‘Did you have a good deal with Troxel?’

  ‘We were both satisfied.’

  ‘Now since you’re all here, and interested in your own way, let me give you a brief report. The coroner believes he must have died about two in the morning. Police photographs show he could have died from any of six or seven different blows, so some could have been delivered after he was already dead. I’m sorry, ma’am.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ I said.