by Amor Towles
Closing the cabinet, I put my hands on my hips like Sally would have. She’d know where to look, I thought. Trying to see the situation through her eyes, I reviewed the kitchen from corner to corner. And what did I find sitting right there on the stovetop but a skillet as black as Batman’s cape. Picking it up, I weighed it in my hand, admiring its design and durability. With a gentle taper and curved edges, the handle fit so securely in your palm you could probably deliver two hundred pounds of force without losing your grip. And the bottom of the pan had a sweet spot so wide and flat you could clean someone’s clock with your eyes closed.
Yep, the cast-iron skillet was perfect in just about every respect, despite the fact that there was nothing modern or convenient about it. As a matter of fact, this very pan could have been a hundred years old. It could have been used by Ackerly’s great-grandmother on the wagon train and handed down until it had fried porkchops for four generations of Ackerly men. With a tip of the hat to the westward pioneers, I picked up the pan and carried it into the living room.
It was a lovely little room with a television in the spot where the fireplace should have been. The drapes, a chair, and the couch were upholstered in a matching floral print. In all likelihood, Mrs. Ackerly wore a dress cut from the same fabric, so that if she sat on the couch quietly enough, her husband wouldn’t know she was there.
Ackerly was still right where I had found him—stretched out on his BarcaLounger, sound asleep.
You could tell from the smile on his face that he loved that lounger. During his tenure at Salina, whenever Ackerly was dispensing strokes of the switch, he must have been dreaming about the day when he could own a lounger like this one in which to fall asleep at two in the afternoon. In fact, after all those years of anticipation, he was probably still dreaming about sleeping in a BarcaLounger, even though that’s exactly what he was doing.
—To sleep, perchance to dream, I quoted quietly while raising the skillet over his head.
But something on the side table caught my eye. It was a recent photograph of Ackerly standing between two young boys, each with the Ackerly beak and brow. The boys were wearing Little League uniforms and Ackerly was wearing a matching cap, suggesting that he had come to a game to cheer his grandsons on. Naturally, he had a big, fat smile on his face, but the boys were smiling too, like they were glad to know that Grandpa had been in the stands. I felt a surge of tender feelings for the old man in a manner that made my hands sweat. But if the Bible tells us that the sons shall not have to bear the iniquity of the fathers, then it stands to reason that the fathers should not get to bear the innocence of the sons.
So I hit him.
When I made contact, his body gave a jolt, like a shot of electricity had gone through it. Then he slumped a little lower in the chair and his khaki pants grew dark at the groin as his bladder relaxed.
I gave an appreciative nod at the skillet, thinking here was an object that had been carefully designed for one purpose, yet was perfectly suited to another. An added benefit of using the skillet—versus the meat tenderizer, or the toaster, or the can of franks and beans—was that when it made contact, it emitted a harmonious clong. It was like the toll of a church bell calling the devoted to prayer. In fact, the sound was so satisfying, I was tempted to hit him again.
But I had taken the time to do my arithmetic with care, and I was pretty confident that Ackerly’s debt to me would be satisfied with one solid whack on the crown. To hit him a second time would just put me in his debt. So I returned the skillet to the stovetop and slipped out the kitchen door, thinking: One down, two to go.
Emmett
Realizing that he had been frittering away not only the fortune his father had left him, but the more valuable treasure of time, the young Arabian sold what few possessions he had left, joined the ranks of a merchant vessel, and set sail into the great unknown . . .
Here we go again, thought Emmett.
That afternoon—while Emmett had been laying out the bread and ham and cheese that he’d secured from the Pullman car—Billy had asked Ulysses if he wanted to hear another story about someone who had traveled the seas. When Ulysses said that he would, Billy took out his big red book, sat at the black man’s side, and began reading of Jason and the Argonauts.
In that story, the young Jason, who is the rightful king of Thessaly, is told by his usurping uncle that the throne is his to reclaim if he can sail to the kingdom of Colchis and return with the Golden Fleece.
In the company of fifty adventurers—including Theseus and Hercules in the years before their fame—Jason sets course for Colchis with the winds at his back. In the untold days that follow, he and his band travel from trial to trial, variously facing a colossus made of bronze, the winged harpies, and the spartoi—a battalion of warriors who spring from the soil fully armed when the teeth of a dragon have been sown. With the help of the sorceress Medea, Jason and his Argonauts eventually overcome their adversaries, secure the Fleece, and make their way safely back to Thessaly.
So enthralled was Billy with the telling of the tale and Ulysses with the hearing of it, when Emmett handed them the sandwiches that he’d made on their behalf, they hardly seemed to notice they were eating them.
As he sat on the other side of the boxcar eating his own sandwich, Emmett found himself mulling over Billy’s book.
For the life of him, Emmett could not understand why this so-called professor had chosen to mix Galileo Galilei, Leonardo da Vinci, and Thomas Alva Edison—three of the greatest minds of the scientific age—with the likes of Hercules, Theseus, and Jason. Galileo, da Vinci, and Edison were not heroes of legend. These were men of flesh and blood who had the rare ability to witness natural phenomena without superstition or prejudice. They were men of industry who with patience and precision studied the inner workings of the world and, having done so, turned what knowledge they’d gained in solitude toward practical discoveries in the service of mankind.
What good could possibly come from mixing the lives of these men with stories of mythical heroes setting sail on fabled waters to battle fantastical beasts? By tossing them together, it seemed to Emmett, Abernathe was encouraging a boy to believe that the great scientific discoverers were not exactly real and the heroes of legend not exactly imagined. That shoulder to shoulder they traveled through the realms of the known and unknown making the most of their intelligence and courage, yes, but also of sorcery and enchantment and the occasional intervention of the gods.
Wasn’t it hard enough in the course of life to distinguish between fact and fancy, between what one witnessed and what one wanted? Wasn’t it the challenge of making this very distinction that had left their father, after twenty years of toil, bankrupt and bereft?
And now, as the day was drawing to a close, Billy and Ulysses had turned their attention to Sinbad, a hero who set sail seven different times on seven different adventures.
—I’m going to bed, Emmett announced.
—Okay, the two responded.
Then, so as not to disturb his brother, Billy lowered his voice, and Ulysses lowered his head, the two looking more like conspirators than strangers.
* * *
• • •
As Emmett lay down, trying not to listen to the murmured saga of the Arabian sailor, he understood perfectly well that when Ulysses had happened upon their boxcar it had been a stroke of extraordinary luck; but it had been humbling too.
After Billy had made introductions, in his excited way he had recounted everything that had happened from the moment of Pastor John’s appearance to his timely departure from the train. When Emmett expressed his gratitude to Ulysses, the stranger had dismissed the thanks as unnecessary. But the first chance he got—when Billy was retrieving his book from his backpack—Ulysses had taken Emmett aside and given him a thorough schooling. How could he be such a fool as to leave his brother alone like that? Just because a boxcar has four walls and a
ceiling doesn’t make it safe, not remotely so. And make no mistake: The pastor wasn’t simply going to give Billy the back of his hand. He had every intention of throwing him from the train.
When Ulysses had turned back to Billy and sat down at his side, ready to hear about Jason, Emmett had felt the sting of the reprimand burning on his cheeks. He felt the heat of indignation too, indignation that this man whom he had only just met should take the liberty of scolding him as a parent scolds a child. But at the same time, Emmett understood that his taking umbrage at being treated like a child was childish in itself. Just as he knew that it was childish to feel resentment that Billy and Ulysses hadn’t lingered over their sandwiches, or to feel jealous over their sudden confederacy.
Trying to calm the roiling waters of his own temperament, Emmett turned his attention away from the events of the day toward the challenges that lay ahead.
When they had all been seated together at the kitchen table in Morgen, Duchess had said that before going to the Adirondacks, he and Woolly were going to stop in Manhattan to see his father.
From Duchess’s stories it was clear that Mr. Hewett rarely had a steady address. But on Townhouse’s last day in Salina, Duchess had encouraged Townhouse to look him up in the city—by contacting one of his father’s booking agencies. Even if a has-been is on the run from creditors, wanted by the cops, and living under an assumed name, Duchess had said with a wink, he’ll always leave word of where he can be found with the agencies. And in New York City, all the biggest bookers of has-beens have offices in the same building at the bottom of Times Square.
The only problem was that Emmett couldn’t remember the name of the building.
He was fairly certain it began with an S. As he lay there, he tried to jog his memory by going through the alphabet and systematically sounding out all the possible combinations of the first three letters of the building’s name. Beginning with Sa, he would say to himself: Sab, sac, sad, saf, sag, and so on. Then it was the combinations flowing from Sc and Se and Sh.
Maybe it was the sound of Billy whispering, or his own murmuring of alphabetical triplets. Or maybe it was the warm, wooden smell of the boxcar after its long day in the sun. Whatever the cause, instead of recalling the name of a building at the bottom of Times Square, Emmett was suddenly nine years old in the attic of his house with the hatch pulled up, building a fort with his parents’ old trunks—the ones that once had traveled to Paris and Venice and Rome and that hadn’t traveled anywhere since—which in turn brought memories of his mother wondering where he could have gotten to and the sound of her voice calling out his name as she went from room to room to room.
SIX
Duchess
When I knocked on the door of room 42, I heard a groan and a labored movement on the bedsprings as if the sound of my rapping had woken him from a deep sleep. Given it was nearly noon, that was right on schedule. After a moment, I could hear him put his hungover feet on the floor. I could hear him look around the room as he tried to get his bearings, taking in the cracked plaster of the ceiling and the peeling wallpaper with a hint of bewilderment, as if he couldn’t quite grasp what he was doing in a room like this, couldn’t quite believe it, even after all these years.
Ah, yes, I could almost hear him say.
Ever so politely, I knocked again.
Another groan—this time a groan of effort—then the release of the bedsprings as he rose to his feet and began moving slowly toward the door.
—Coming, a muffled voice called.
As I waited, I found myself genuinely curious as to how he would look. Barely two years had gone by, but at his age with his lifestyle, two years could do a lot of damage.
But when the door creaked open, it wasn’t my old man.
—Yes?
Somewhere in his seventies, room 42’s occupant had a genteel bearing and the accent to go with it. At one time, he could have been the master of an estate, or served the man who was.
—Is there something I can do for you, young man? he asked, as I glanced over his shoulder.
—I was looking for someone who used to live here. My father, actually.
—Oh, I see. . . .
His shaggy eyebrows drooped a little, as if he were actually sorry to have been the cause of a stranger’s disappointment. Then his eyebrows rose again.
—Perhaps he left a forwarding address downstairs?
—More likely an unpaid bill, but I’ll ask on my way out. Thanks.
He nodded in sympathy. But when I turned to go, he called me back.
—Young man. By any chance, was your father an actor?
—He was known to call himself one.
—Then wait a moment. I believe he may have left something behind.
As the old gent shuffled his way to the bureau, I scanned the room, curious as to his weakness. At the Sunshine Hotel, for every room there was a weakness, and for every weakness an artifact bearing witness. Like an empty bottle that has rolled under the bed, or a feathered deck of cards on the nightstand, or a bright pink kimono on a hook. Some evidence of that one desire so delectable, so insatiable that it overshadowed all others, eclipsing even the desires for a home, a family, or a sense of human dignity.
Given how slow the old man moved I had plenty of time to look, and the room was only ten by ten, but if evidence of his weakness was present, for the life of me I couldn’t spot it.
—Here we are, he said.
Shuffling back, he handed me what he’d rummaged from the bureau’s bottom drawer.
It was a black leather case about twelve inches square and three inches tall with a small, brass clasp—like a larger version of what might hold a double strand of pearls. The similarity wasn’t a coincidence, I suppose. Because at the knee-high height of my father’s fame, when he was a leading man in a small Shakespearean troupe performing to half-filled houses, he had six of these cases and they were his prized possessions.
Though the gold embossing on this one was chipped and faint, you could still make out the O of Othello. Throwing the clasp, I opened the lid. Inside were four objects resting snuggly in velvet-lined indentations: a goatee, a golden earring, a small jar of blackface, and a dagger.
Like the case, the dagger had been custom made. The golden hilt, which had been fashioned to fit perfectly in my old man’s grasp, was adorned with three large jewels in a row: one ruby, one sapphire, one emerald. The stainless steel blade had been forged, tempered, and burnished by a master craftsman in Pittsburgh, allowing my father in act three to cut a wedge from an apple and stick the dagger upright into the surface of a table, where it would remain ominously as he nursed his suspicions of Desdemona’s infidelity.
But while the steel of the blade was the real McCoy, the hilt was gilded brass and the jewels were paste. And if you pressed the sapphire with your thumb, it would release a catch, so that when my old man stabbed himself in the gut at the end of act five, the blade would retract into the hilt. As the ladies in the loge gasped, he would take his own sweet time staggering back and forth in front of the footlights before finally giving up his ghost. Which is to say, the dagger was as much a gimmick as he was.
When the set of six cases was still complete, each had its own label embossed in gold: Othello, Hamlet, Henry, Lear, Macbeth, and—I kid you not—Romeo. Each case had its own velvet-lined indentations holding its own dramatic accessories. For Macbeth these included a bottle of fake blood with which to smear his hands; for Lear a long gray beard; for Romeo a vial of poison, and a small jar of blush that could no more obscure the ravages of time on my old man’s face than the crown could obscure the deformities of Richard III.
Over the years, the collection of my father’s cases had slowly diminished. One had been stolen, another misplaced, another sold. Hamlet was lost in a game of five-card stud in Cincinnati, appropriately to a pair of kings. But it was not a coincidence that Othello was the l
ast of the six, for it was the one my old man prized most. This was not simply because he had received some of his best reviews for his performance as the Moor, but because on several occasions the jar of blackface had secured him a timely exit. Sporting the uniform of a bellhop and the face of Al Jolson, he would carry his own luggage off the elevator and through the lobby, right past the debt collectors, or angry husbands, or whoever happened to be waiting among the potted palms. To have left the Othello case behind, my old man must have been in quite a hurry. . . .
—Yes, I said while closing the lid, this is my father’s. If you don’t mind my asking, how long have you been in the room?
—Oh, not long.
—It would be a great help if you could remember more precisely.
—Let’s see. Wednesday, Tuesday, Monday . . . Since Monday, I believe. Yes. It was Monday.
In other words, my old man had pulled up stakes the day after we left Salina—having received, no doubt, a worrisome call from a worried warden.
—I do hope you find him.
—Of that I can assure you. Anyway, sorry for the bother.
—It wasn’t a bother at all, the old gent replied, gesturing toward his bed. I was only reading.
Ah, I thought, seeing the corner of the book poking out from the folds of his sheets. I should have known. The poor old chap, he suffers from the most dangerous addiction of all.
* * *
• • •
As I was headed back toward the stairs, I noticed a slice of light on the hallway floor, suggesting that the door to room 49 was ajar.