Sparks corkscrewed up the black throat of the chimney.
‘What does that mean?’ I asked, pointing to the inscription on the keystone. ‘Any idea?’
Waterhouse read it carefully, as if for the first time. IT IS THE TALE, NOT HE WHO
TELLS IT.
‘I suppose I have an idea,’ he said. ‘You may, too, if you should come back. Yes, I
should say you may have an idea or two. In time. Enjoy yourself, David.’
He walked away. And, although it may seem odd, having been left to sink or swim in
such an unfamiliar situation, I did enjoy myself. For one thing, I have always loved
books, and there was a trove of interesting ones to examine here. I walked slowly along
the shelves, examining the spines as best I could in the faint light, pulling one out now
and then, and pausing once to look out a narrow window at the 2nd Avenue intersection
up the street. I stood there and watched through the frost-rimmed glass as the traffic light
at the intersection cycled from red to green to amber and back to red again, and quite
suddenly I felt the queerest — and yet very welcome -sense of peace come to me. It did
not flood in; instead it seemed to almost steal in. Oh yes, I can hear you saying, that makes great sense; watching a stop-and-go light gives everyone a sense of peace.
All right; it made no sense. I grant you that. But the feeling was there, just the same. It made me think for the first time i r years of the winter nights in the Wisconsin farmhouse
where I grew up: lying in bed in a draughty upstairs room and marking die contrast
between the whistle of the January wind outside, drifting snow as dry as sand along miles
of snow-fence, and the warmth my body created under the two quilts.
There were some law books, but they were pretty damn strange: Twenty Cases of
Dismemberment and Their Outcomes under British Law is one title I remember. Pet
Cases was another. I opened that one and sure enough, it was a scholarly legal tome
dealing with the law’s treatment (American law, this time) of cases which bore in some
important respect upon pets – everything from housecats that had inherited great sums of
money to an ocelot that had broken its chain and seriously injured a postman.
There was a set of Dickens, a set of Defoe, a nearly endless set of Trollope; and there
was also a set of novels – eleven of them – by a man named Edward Gray Seville. They
were bound in handsome green leather, and the name of the firm gold-stamped on the
spine was Stedham & Son. I had never heard of Seville nor of his publishers. The
copyright date of the first Seville – These Were Our Brothers – was 1911. The date of the last, Breakers, was 1935.
Two shelves down from the set of Seville novels was a large folio volume which
contained careful step by step plans for Erector Set enthusiasts. Next to it was another
folio volume which featured famous scenes from famous movies. Each of these pictures
filled one whole page, and opposite each, filling the facing pages, were free-verse poems
either about the scenes with which they were paired or inspired by them. Not a very
remarkable concept, but the poets who were represented were remarkable – Robert Frost,
Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Louis Zukofsky, and Erica
Jong, to mention just a few. Halfway through the book I found a poem by Archibald
MacLeish set next to that famous photograph of Marilyn Monroe standing on the subway
grating and trying to hold her skirt down. The poem was titled The Toll’ and it began:
The shape of the skirt is
-we would say—
the shape of a bell
The legs are the clapper –
And some such more. Not a terrible poem, but certainly not MacLeish’s best or
anywhere near the top drawer. I felt I could hold such an opinion because I had read a
good deal of Archibald MacLeish over the years. I could not, however, recall this poem
about Marilyn Monroe (which it is; the poem announces it even when divorced from the
picture – at the end MacLeish writes: My legs clap my name:/Marilyn, ma belle). I have
looked for it since then and haven’t been able to find it;.. which means nothing, of course.
Poems are not like novels or legal opinions; they are more like blown leaves and any
omnibus volume titled The Complete So-and-So must certainly be a lie. Poems have a
way of getting lost under sofas – it is one of their charms, and one of the reasons they
endure. But —
At some point Stevens came by with a second martini (by then I had settled into a chair
of my own with a volume of Ezra Pound). It was as perfect as the first. As I sipped it I
saw two of those present, George Gregson and Harry Stein (Harry was six years dead on
the night Emlyn McCarron told us the story of the Breathing Method), leave the room by
a peculiar door less than three feet high. It was an Alice Down the Rabbit-Hole door if
ever there was one. They left it open, and shortly after their odd exit from the library I
heard the muted click of billiard balls.
Stevens passed by and asked if I would like another martini. I declined with real regret
He nodded. ‘Very goodt sir.’ His face never changed, and yet I had an obscure feeling that
I had somehow pleased him.
Laughter startled me from my book sometime later. Someone had thrown a packet of
chemical powder into the fire and turned the flames momentarily parti-coloured. I thought
of my boyhood again … but not in any wistful, sloppily romantic-nostalgic way. I feel a
great need to emphasize that, God knows why. I thought of times when I had done just
such a thing as a kid, but the memory was a strong one, pleasant, untinged with regret.
I saw that most of the others had drawn chairs up around the hearth in a semi-circle.
Stevens had produced a heaping, smoking platter of marvellous hot sausages. Harry Stein
returned through the down-the-rabbit-hole door, introducing himself hurriedly but
pleasantly to me. Gregson remained in the billiard room, practising shots, by the sound.
After a moment’s hesitation I joined the others. A story was told – not a pleasant one. It
was Norman Stett who told it, and while it is not my purpose to recount it here, perhaps
you’ll understand what I mean about its quality if I tell you that it was about a man who
drowned in a telephone booth.
When Stett – who is also dead now – finished, someone said, ‘You should have saved it
for Christmas, Norman.’ There was laughter, which I of course did not understand. At
least, not then.
Waterhouse himself spoke up then, and such a Waterhouse I never would have
dreamed of in a thousand years of dreaming. A graduate of Yale, a Phi Beta Kappa,
silver-haired, three-piece-suited head of a law firm so large it was more enterprise than company – this Waterhouse told a story that had to do with a teacher who had gotten stuck in a privy. The privy stood behind the one-room schoolhouse in which she had taught,
and the day she got her caboose jammed into one of the privy’s two holes also happened
to be the day the privy was scheduled to be taken away as Anniston County’s contribution
to the Life As It Was in New England exhibition being held at the Prudential Center in
Boston. The teacher hadn’t made a sound during all the time it took to load the privy onto
the back of a flatbed truck and to spike it down; she was struck dumb with embarrassment
and horror, Waterhouse said. And then the privy door blew off into the passing lane of
Route 128 in Somerville during rush hour –
But draw a curtain over that, and over any other stories which might have followed it;
they are not my stories tonight. At some point Stevens produced a bottle of brandy that
was more than just good; it was damned near exquisite. It was passed around and
Johanssen raised a toast – the toast, one might almost say: The tale, not he who tells it.
We drank to that.
Not long after, men began slipping away. It wasn’t late; not yet midnight, anyway; but
I’ve noticed that when your fifties give way to your sixties, late begins coming earlier and
earlier. I saw Waterhouse slipping his arms into the overcoat Stevens was holding open
for him, and decided that must be my cue. I thought it strange that Waterhouse would slip
away without so much as a word to me (which certainly seemed to be what he was doing;