by Amor Towles
Mr. McGinley patted his desk three times, quietly.
—Hewett?
—That’s right.
Patting the desk one last time, Mr. McGinley pressed the button on his intercom.
—Alice? Bring me the file on . . . Harrison Hewett.
A few moments later Alice entered and handed a folder to Mr. McGinley that could not have held more than a single sheet of paper. After taking a quick look inside, Mr. McGinley laid it on his desk.
—Harrison Hewett is an excellent choice, Mr. Watson. I can see why your father has never forgotten him. And he’s a man who thrives on artistic challenges, so I am certain he would leap at the chance to perform in your revue. But by way of clarification, I should note that we represent Mr. Hewett on a cooperative basis. . . .
By Mr. Morton’s estimation, the chances were better than fifty percent that Mr. McGinley would say exactly this.
—If an agent states that he represents a performer on a cooperative basis, explained Mr. Morton, this means that he does not represent the performer at all. But not to worry. The agents in the Statler Building are in universal agreement that to get a bird in the hand, they would happily pay ten percent to the bush. As a result, they all maintain active lists of the performers who work with their competitors, so that, for the appropriate commission, they can send an interested party up or down the stairs.
In Emmett’s case, it was a trip up to a Mr. Cohen on the eleventh floor. As Mr. McGinley had called in advance, Emmett was greeted at the door and whisked straight into another interior waiting room. Ten minutes later, he was shown into Mr. Cohen’s office, where he was greeted warmly and offered another drink. Again, the idea of introducing a Shakespearean actor into a rodeo was celebrated for its ingenuity. But this time, when the button on the intercom was pressed and a folder brought in, it was almost two inches thick—stuffed with yellowed news clippings and playbills and a stack of outdated headshots, one of which was given to Emmett.
Once Mr. Cohen had assured Emmett that Mr. Hewett (who was a close personal friend of Will Rogers) would be thrilled by this opportunity, he asked how Emmett might be reached.
Following Mr. Morton’s instructions, Emmett explained that since he was leaving the city on the following morning, he needed to hammer out any details right then and there. This sent the office into a flurry of activity as terms were agreed to and contracts written up.
—If they actually prepare contracts, Emmett had asked Mr. Morton, should I agree to sign them?
—Sign anything they put in front of you, my boy! Make sure the agent signs them too. Then insist upon receiving two executed copies for your files. For once an agent has your signature, he would give you the keys to his own mother’s house.
* * *
• • •
The address that Mr. Cohen gave Emmett for Harrison Hewett led him to a dingy hotel on a dingy street in downtown Manhattan. From the well-mannered man who answered the door of room 42, Emmett learned to his disappointment that Mr. Hewett was no longer a resident, but he also learned that Mr. Hewett’s son had been there the previous morning and had apparently checked into the hotel for the night.
—Perhaps he’s still here, said the gentleman.
In the lobby, the clerk with the pencil-thin moustache said sure, sure, he knew who Emmett was talking about. Harry Hewett’s kid. He showed up asking about his old man’s whereabouts, then booked two rooms for the night. But he wasn’t there no more. He and his daydreaming pal had left around noon.
—With my fucking radio, added the clerk.
—Did he happen to say where he was going?
—He might have.
—Might have? asked Emmett.
The clerk leaned back in his chair.
—When I helped your friend find his father, he gave me ten bucks . . .
* * *
• • •
According to the clerk, Emmett would be able to find Duchess’s father by speaking to a friend of his who drank at a West Side saloon every night after eight. With time to spare, Emmett walked up Broadway until he found a coffee shop that was busy, clean, and well lit. Sitting at the counter, he ordered the special and a piece of pie. He finished his meal with three cups of coffee, and a cigarette that he bummed from his waitress—an Irish woman named Maureen, who, despite being ten times busier than Mrs. Burk, had ten times her grace.
The information from the hotel clerk sent Emmett back to Times Square, which in the hour before dusk was already incandescent with brightly lit signs announcing cigarettes, cars, appliances, hotels, and theaters. The sheer scale and garishness of it all made Emmett disinclined to buy a single thing that was being advertised.
Emmett returned to the newsstand on the corner of Forty-Second Street, where he found the same newsman from earlier in the day. This time the newsman pointed to the northern end of the square, where a giant sign for Canadian Club whiskey was shining ten stories above the street.
—See that sign? Just beyond it, take a left onto Forty-Fifth and keep walking till you’ve run out of Manhattan.
Over the course of the day, Emmett had grown accustomed to being ignored. He’d been ignored by the commuters on the subway train, by the pedestrians on the sidewalks and the performers in the waiting rooms, chalking it up to the inimicality of city life. So he was a little surprised to discover that once he was beyond Eighth Avenue, he wasn’t ignored anymore.
On the corner of Ninth Avenue, he was eyed by a beat cop in the middle of his rounds. On Tenth Avenue he was approached by one young man offering to sell him drugs and another offering to sell him his company. As he approached Eleventh, he was beckoned by an old black beggar, whom he avoided by quickening his pace, only to run right into an old white beggar a few steps later.
Having found the anonymity of the morning somewhat off-putting, Emmett would have welcomed it now. He felt he understood why the people of New York walked with that purposeful urgency. It was a dissuasive signal to the vagrants and drifters and the rest of the fallen.
Just before the river, he found the Anchor—the bar the clerk had told him about. Given its name and location, Emmett had imagined it would be a spot that catered to sailors or members of the merchant marine. If it ever had, the association had lapsed long ago. For inside there wasn’t a man you might call seaworthy. To Emmett’s eye, they all looked one step above the old beggars he’d dodged in the street.
Having learned from Mr. Morton how reluctant the agents were to share whereabouts, Emmett was worried that the bartender might be equally tight-lipped; or perhaps like the clerk at the Sunshine Hotel, he would expect to be handsomely reimbursed. But when Emmett explained that he was looking for a man named FitzWilliams, the bartender said that he’d come to the right place. So Emmett had taken a seat at the bar and ordered the beer.
* * *
When the door of the Anchor opened shortly after eight and a man in his sixties entered, the bartender gave Emmett the nod. From his stool, Emmett watched as the old man made his way slowly to the bar, picked up a glass and half-empty bottle of whiskey, and retreated to a table in the corner.
As FitzWilliams poured himself a drink, Emmett recalled the stories that Duchess had told of his rise and fall. It wasn’t easy to imagine that this thin, shuffling, forlorn-looking man had once been paid handsomely to play the part of Santa Claus. Leaving some money on the bar, Emmett approached the old performer’s table.
—Excuse me. Are you Mr. FitzWilliams?
When Emmett said the word mister, FitzWilliams looked up with a touch of surprise.
—Yes, he admitted after a moment. I am Mr. FitzWilliams.
Taking the empty chair, Emmett explained that he was a friend of Duchess’s.
—I gather he may have come here last night to speak with you.
The old performer nodded, as if now he understood, as if he should have known.
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—Yes, he said in a tone that verged on an admission. He was here. He was trying to find his father because of a little unfinished business between them. But Harry had left town, and Duchess didn’t know where he’d gone, so he came to see Fitzy.
FitzWilliams offered Emmett a half-hearted smile.
—I’m an old friend of the family’s, you see.
Returning the smile, Emmett asked FitzWilliams if he had told Duchess where Mr. Hewett had gone.
—I did, the old performer said, nodding his head at first, then shaking it. I told him where Harry went. To the Olympic Hotel in Syracuse. And that’s where Duchess will go, I suppose. After he sees his friend.
—Which friend is that?
—Oh, Duchess didn’t say. But it was . . . It was in Harlem.
—Harlem?
—Yes. Isn’t that funny?
—No, it makes perfect sense. Thank you, Mr. FitzWilliams. You’ve been very helpful.
When Emmett pushed back his chair, FitzWilliams looked up in surprise.
—You’re not going, are you? Surely, as two old friends of the Hewetts, we should have a drink in their honor?
Having learned what he had come to learn, and certain that Billy would be wondering where he was by now, Emmett had no desire to remain at the Anchor.
But having initially looked like he didn’t want to be disturbed, the old performer suddenly looked like he didn’t want to be alone. So Emmett got another glass from the bartender and returned to the table.
After FitzWilliams had poured their whiskeys, he raised his glass.
—To Harry and Duchess.
—To Harry and Duchess, echoed Emmett.
When they both had taken a drink and set down their glasses, FitzWilliams smiled a little sadly, as if moved by a bittersweet memory.
—Do you know why they call him that? Duchess, I mean.
—I think he told me it was because he was born in Dutchess County.
—No, said FitzWilliams, with a shake of the head and his half-hearted smile. That wasn’t it. He was born here in Manhattan. I remember the night.
Before continuing, FitzWilliams took another drink, almost as if he needed to.
—His mother, Delphine, was a beautiful young Parisienne and a singer of love songs in the manner of Piaf. In the years before Duchess was born, she performed at all the great supper clubs. At El Morocco and the Stork Club and the Rainbow Room. I’m sure she would have become quite famous, at least in New York, if it weren’t for becoming so sick. It was tuberculosis, I think. But I really can’t remember. Isn’t that terrible? A beautiful woman like that, a friend, dies in the prime of her life, and I can’t even remember from what.
Shaking his head in self-condemnation, FitzWilliams raised his glass, but set it back down without taking a drink, as if he sensed that to have done so would have been an insult to her memory.
The story of Mrs. Hewett’s death caught Emmett a little off guard. For in the few times that Duchess had mentioned his mother, he had always spoken as if she had abandoned them.
—At any rate, FitzWilliams continued, Delphine doted on her little boy. When there was money, she would quietly hide some from Harry so that she could buy him new clothes. Cute little outfits like those, what do you call them . . . lederhosen! She would dress him up in his finery, letting his hair grow down to his shoulders. But when she became bedridden and she would send him downstairs into the taverns to bring Harry home, Harry would . . .
FitzWilliams shook his head.
—Well, you know Harry. After a few drinks, it’s hard to tell where Shakespeare ends and Harry begins. So when the boy would come through the door, Harry would stand up from his stool, make an elaborate flourish, and say, Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you, the Duchess of Alba. And the next time it would be the Duchess of Kent, or the Duchess of Tripoli. Pretty soon some of the others began calling the boy Duchess. Then we all called him Duchess. Every last one of us. To the point where no one could even remember his given name.
FitzWilliams raised his glass again, this time taking a good, long drink. When he set the glass down, Emmett was startled to see that the old performer had begun to cry—letting the tears roll down his cheeks without bothering to wipe them away.
FitzWilliams gestured to the bottle.
—He gave me that, you know. Duchess, I mean. Despite everything. Despite all of it, last night he came here and bought me a brand-new bottle of my favorite whiskey. Just like that.
FitzWilliams took a deep breath.
—He was sent away to a work camp in Kansas, you know. At the age of sixteen.
—Yes, said Emmett. That’s where we met.
—Ah. I see. But in all your time together, did he ever tell you . . . did he ever tell you how he came to be there?
—No, said Emmett. He never did.
Then after taking the liberty of pouring a little more of the old man’s whiskey into both of their glasses, Emmett waited.
Ulysses
Though the boy had already read the story once from beginning to end, Ulysses asked him to read it again.
Shortly after ten—with the sun having set, the moon yet to rise, and the others retreating to their tents—Billy had taken out his book and asked if Ulysses would like to hear the story of Ishmael, a young sailor who joined a one-legged captain on his hunt for a great white whale. Though Ulysses had never heard the story of Ishmael, he had no doubt it would be a good one. Each of the boy’s stories had been good. But when Billy had offered to read this new adventure, with a touch of embarrassment Ulysses had asked if he would read the story of his namesake instead.
The boy hadn’t hesitated. By the waning light of Stew’s fire, he had turned to the back of his book and illuminated the page with his flashlight beam—a circle of light within a circle of light within a sea of darkness.
As Billy began, Ulysses felt a moment of worry that having read the story once before, the boy might paraphrase or skip over passages, but Billy seemed to understand that if the story was worth reading again, it was worth reading word for word.
Yes, the boy read the story exactly as he had in the boxcar, but Ulysses didn’t hear it the same way. For this time, he knew what was to come. He knew now to look forward to some parts and dread others—to look forward to how Ulysses bested the Cyclops by hiding his men under the pelts of sheep, and to dread the moment when the covetous crew unleashed the winds of Aeolus, setting their captain’s ship off course at the very moment that his homeland had come into view.
When the story was over, and Billy had closed his book and switched off his light, and Ulysses had taken up Stew’s shovel to cover the embers, Billy asked if he would tell a story.
Ulysses looked down with a smile.
—I don’t have any storybooks, Billy.
—You don’t have to tell a story from a book, Billy replied. You could tell a story from yourself. Like one from the war overseas. Do you have any of those?
Ulysses turned the shovel in his hand.
Did he have any stories from the war? Of course, he did. More than he cared to remember. For his stories had not been softened by the mists of time or brightened by the tropes of a poet. They remained vivid and severe. So vivid and severe that whenever one happened to surface in his mind, Ulysses would bury it—just as he had been about to bury the embers of this fire. If Ulysses couldn’t stomach the sharing of the memories with himself, he certainly wasn’t going to share them with an eight-year-old boy.
But Billy’s request was a fair one. Generously, he had opened the pages of his book and told the stories of Sinbad and Jason and Achilles, and of Ulysses’s namesake twice. He had certainly earned a telling in return. So setting the shovel aside, Ulysses threw another log on the fire and resumed his seat on the railroad tie.
—I have a story for you, he said. A story about my own encou
nter with the king of the winds.
—When you were sailing across the wine-dark sea?
—No, said Ulysses. When I was walking across the dry and dusty land.
* * *
• • •
The story began on a rural road in Iowa in the summer of 1952.
A few days before, Ulysses had boarded a train in Utah, intending to travel over the Rockies and across the plains to Chicago. But halfway through Iowa, the boxcar in which he was traveling was shunted onto a siding in order to wait for a different locomotive, which was scheduled to arrive who knew when. Forty miles away was the junction in Des Moines, where he could easily catch another train headed east, or one headed north toward the Lakes, or south to New Orleans. With that in mind, Ulysses had disembarked and begun working his way across the countryside on foot.
He had walked about ten miles down an old dirt road when he began to sense that something was amiss.
The first sign was the birds. Or rather, the absence of them. When you’re traveling back and forth across the country, Ulysses explained, the one great constant is the companionship of birds. On your way from Miami to Seattle or Boston to San Diego, the landscape is always changing. But wherever you go, the birds are there. The pigeons or buzzards, condors or cardinals, blue jays or blackbirds. Living on the road, you wake to the sound of their singing at dawn, and you lay yourself down to their chatter at dusk.
And yet . . .
As Ulysses walked along this rural road, there wasn’t a bird to be seen, not circling over the fields or perched upon the telephone wires.
The second sign was the caravan of cars. While throughout the morning Ulysses had been passed by the occasional pickup or sedan moving along at forty miles an hour, suddenly he saw an assortment of fifteen cars, including a black limousine, speeding in his direction. The vehicles were driving so fast, he had to step off the shoulder in order to shield himself from the gravel that was kicked up by their tires.