amazing blue-eyed black man, Dexter Gordon, blow his horn until almost two in the
morning. We woke up the next morning with fluttery stomachs and achey heads, both of
us still unable to completely believe what had happened. One of them was that my salary
had just climbed by eight thousand dollars a year long after our expectations of such a
staggering income jump had fallen by the wayside.
The firm sent me to Copenhagen for six weeks that fall, and I returned to discover that
John Hanrahan, one of the regular attendees at 249, had died of cancer. A collection was
taken up for his wife, who had been left in unpleasant circumstances. I was pressed into
service to total the amount – which was given entirely in cash – and convert it to a
cashier’s check. It came to almost ten thousand dollars. I turned the check over to Stevens
and I suppose he mailed it.
It just so happened that Arlene Hanrahan was a member of Ellen’s Theatre Society, and
Ellen told me some time later that Arlene had received an anonymous check for ten
thousand four hundred dollars. Written on the check stub was the brief and
unilluminating message ‘Friends of your late husband John’.
‘Isn’t that the most amazing thing you ever heard in your life?’ Ellen asked me.
‘No,’ I said, ‘but it’s right up there in the top ten. Are there any more strawberries,
Ellen?’
The years went by. I discovered a warren of rooms upstairs at 249 – a writing room, a
bedroom where guests sometimes stayed overnight (although after that slithery bump I
had heard – or imagined I had heard – I believe I personally would rather have registered
at a good hotel), a small but well-equipped gymnasium, and a sauna bath. There was also
a long, narrow room which ran the length of the building and contained two bowling
alleys.
In those same years I re-read the novels of Edward Gray Seville, and discovered an
absolutely stunning poet – the equal of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens, perhaps – named
Norbert Rosen. According to the back flap on one of the three volumes of his work in the
stacks, he had been born in 1924 and killed at Anzio. All three volumes of his work had
been published by Stedham & Son, New York and Boston.
I remember going back to the New York Public Library on a bright spring afternoon
during one of those years (of which year I am no longer sure) and requesting twenty
years’ worth of Literary Market Place. The LMP is an annual publication the size of a
large city’s Yellow Pages, and the reference room librarian was quite put out with me, I’m
afraid. But I persisted, and went through each volume carefully. And although LMP is
supposed to list every publisher, great and small, in the United States (in addition to
agents, editors, and book club staffs), I found no listing for Stedham & Son. A year later –
or perhaps it was two years later – I fell into conversation with an antiquarian book dealer
and asked him about the imprint. He said he had never heard of it.
I thought of asking Stevens – saw that warning light in his eyes — and dropped the
question unasked.
And, over those years, there were stories. Tales, to use Stevens’s word. Funny tales,
tales of love found and love lost, tales of unease. Yes, and even a few war stories,
although none of the sort Ellen had likely been thinking of when she made the suggestion.
I remember Gerard Tozeman’s story the most clearly – the tale of an American base of
operations which took a direct hit from German artillery four months before the end of World War I, killing everyone present except for Tozeman himself.
Lathrop Carruthers, the American general who everyone had by then decided must be
utterly insane (he had been responsible for better than eighteen thousand casualties by
then – lives and limbs spent as casually as you or I might spend a quarter in a jukebox),
was standing at a map of the front lines when the shell struck. He had been explaining yet
another mad flanking operation at that moment – an operation which would have
succeeded only on the level of all the others Carruthers had hatched: it would be
wonderfully successful at making new widows.
And when the dust cleared, Gerard Tozeman, dazed and deaf, bleeding from his nose,
his ears, and the corners of both eyes, his testicles already swelling from the force of the
concussion, had come upon Carruthers’s body while looking for a way out of the abbatoir
that had been the staff HQ only minutes before. He looked at the general’s body … and
then began to scream and laugh. The sounds went unheard by his own shellshocked ears,
but they served to notify the medicos that someone was still alive in that strew of
matchwood.
Carruthers had not been mutilated by the blast… at least, Tozeman said, it hadn’t been
what the soldiers of that long-ago war had come to think of as mutilation – men whose
arms had been blown off, men with no feet, no eyes; men whose lungs had been
shrivelled by gas. No, he said, it was nothing like that The man’s mother would have
known him at once. But the map…
… the map before which Carruthers had been standing with his butcher’s pointer when
the shell struck …
It had somehow been driven into his face. Tozeman had found himself staring into a
hideous, tattooed deathmask. Here was the stony shore of Brittany on the bony ridge of
Lathrop Carruthers’s brow. Here was the Rhine flowing like a blue scar down his left
cheek. Here were some or the finest wine-growing provinces in the world bumped and
ridged over his chin. Here was the Saar drawn around his throat like a hangman’s noose …
and printed across one bulging eyeball was the word VERSAILLES.
That was our Christmas story in the year 197-.
I remember many others, but they do not belong here. Properly speaking, Tozeman’s
doesn’t, either … but it was the first ‘Christmas tale’ I heard at 249, and I could not resist
telling it And then, on the Thursday after Thanksgiving of this year, when Stevens
clapped his hands together for attention and asked who would favour us with a Christmas
tale, Emlyn McCarron growled: ‘I suppose I’ve got something that bears telling. Tell it
now or tell it never; God’ll shut me up for good soon enough.’
In the years I had been coming to 249,1 had never heard McCarron tell a story. And
perhaps that’s why I called the taxi so early, and why, when Stevens passed out eggnog to
the six of us who had ventured out on that bellowing, frigid night, I felt so keenly excited.
Nor was I the only one; I saw that same excitement on a good many other faces.
McCarron, old and dry and leathery, sat in the huge chair by the fire with the packet of
powder in his gnarled hands. He tossed it in, and we watched the flames shift colours
madly before returning to yellow again, Stevens passed among us with brandy, and we
passed him his Christmas honorariums. Once, during that yearly ceremony, I heard the
clink of change passing from the hand of the giver to the hand of the receiver; on another
occasion, I had seen a one thousand dollar bill for a moment in the firelight. On both
occasions the murmur of Stevens’s voice had been exactly the same: low, considerate, and
entirely correct. Ten years, more or less, had passed since I had first come to 249 with
George Waterhouse, and while much had changed in the world outside, nothing had
changed in here, and Stevens seemed not to have aged a month, or even a single day.
He moved back into the shadows, and for a moment there was a silence so perfect that
we could hear the faint whistle of boiling sap escaping from the burning logs on the
hearth. Emlyn McCarron was looking into the fire and we all followed his gaze. The
flames seemed particularly wild that night. I felt almost hypnotized by the sight of the fire
– as, I suppose, the cavemen who binned us were once hypnotized by it as the wind walked and talked outside their cold northern caves.
At last, still looking into the fire, bent slightly forward so that his forearms rested on
his thighs and his clasped hands hung in a knot between his knees, McCarron began to
speak.
2: The Breathing Method
I am nearly eighty now, which means that I was born with the century. All my life I
have been associated with a building which stands almost directly across from Madison
Square Garden; this building, which looks like a great grey prison -something out of A