BE AT EASE. I’m not about to pretend this story is true. First, that claim is a literary convention which went out with Theodore Roosevelt of happy memory. Second, you wouldn’t believe it. Third, any tale signed with my name must stand or fall as entertainment; I am a writer, not a cultist. Fourth, it is my own composition. Where doubts or gaps occur in that mass of notes, clippings, photographs, and recollections of words spoken which was bequeathed me, I have supplied conjectures. Names, places, and incidents have been changed as seemed needful. Throughout, my narrative uses the techniques of fiction.
Finally, I don’t believe a line of it myself. Oh, we could get together, you and I, and ransack official files, old newspapers, yearbooks, journals, and so on forever. But the effort and expense would be large; the results, even if positive, would prove little; we have more urgent jobs at hand; our discoveries could conceivably endanger us.
These pages are merely for the purpose of saying a little about Dr. Robert Anderson. I do owe the book to him. Many of the sentences are his, and my aim throughout has been to capture something of his style and spirit, in memoriam.
You see, I already owed him much more. In what follows, you may recognize certain things from earlier stories of mine. He gave me those ideas, those backgrounds and people, in hour after hour while we sat with sherry and Mozart before a driftwood fire, which is the best kind. I greatly modified them, in part for literary purposes, in part to make the tales my own work. But the core remained his. He would accept no share of payment. “If you sell it,” he laughed, “take Karen out to an extravagant dinner in San Francisco, and empty a pony of akvavit for me.”
Of course, we talked about everything else too. My memories are rich with our conversations. He had a pawky sense of humor. The chances are overwhelming that, in leaving me a boxful of material in the form he did, he was turning his private fantasies into a final, gentle joke.
On the other hand, parts of it are uncharacteristically bleak.
Or are they? A few times, when I chanced to be present with one or two of his smaller grandchildren, I’d notice his pleasure in their company interrupted by moments of what looked like pain. And when last I saw him, our talk turned on the probable shape of the future, and suddenly he exclaimed, “Oh, God, the young, the poor young! Poul, my generation and yours have had it outrageously easy. All we ever had to do was be white Americans in reasonable health, and we got our place in the sun. But now history’s returning to its normal climate here also, and the norm is an ice age.” He tossed off his glass and poured a refill more quickly than was his wont. “The tough and lucky will survive,” he said. “The rest . . . will have had what happiness was granted them. A medical man ought to be used to that kind of truth, right?” And he changed the subject.
In his latter years Robert Anderson was tall and spare, a bit stoop-shouldered but in excellent shape, which he attributed to hiking and bicycling. His face was likewise lean, eyes blue behind heavy glasses, clothes and white hair equally rumpled. His speech was slow, punctuated by gestures of a pipe if he was enjoying his twice-a-day smoke. His manner was relaxed and amiable. Nevertheless, he was as independent as his cat. “At my stage of life,” he observed, “what was earlier called oddness or orneriness counts as lovable eccentricity. I take full advantage of the fact.” He grinned. “Come your turn, remember what I’ve said.”
On the surface, his life had been calm. He was born in Philadelphia in 1895, a distant relative of my father. Though our family is of Scandinavian origin, a branch has been in the States since the Civil War. But he and I never heard of each other till one of his sons, who happened to be interested in genealogy, happened to settle down near me and got in touch. When the old man came visiting, my wife and I were invited over and at once hit it off with him.