Moon Palace Page 30

  “Our Hattie Newcombe?”

  “Yes, our Hattie Newcombe.”

  “But Sol, do you think that’s copy? I mean Hattie … Hattie, you know, Hattie is …”

  “Is what, Aunt Clara?”

  “A colored woman. Hattie is a colored woman.”

  “If Hattie doesn’t mind, I don’t see why it should bother you.”

  “But what will people say? A colored woman living in Cliff House. You know as well as I do that the only colored people in this town are servants.”

  “That doesn’t change the fact that Hattie is your best friend. As far as I can tell, she’s your only friend. And why should we care what people say? There’s nothing more important in this world than being good to our friends.”

  When Aunt Clara realized that her nephew was in earnest, she started to giggle. An entire system of thought had suddenly been demolished by his words, and it thrilled her to believe that such a thing was possible. “The only bad part is that I have to die before Hattie takes over,” she said. “I wish I could live to see it with my own eyes.”

  “If heaven is all they say it is, then I’m sure you will.”

  “For the life of me, I’ll never understand why you’re doing this.”

  “You don’t have to understand. I have my reasons, and there’s no need for you to concern yourself with them. I just want to talk over a few things with you first, and then we can consider the matter settled.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Old things. Things about the past.”

  “The Galileo Theatre?”

  “No, not today. I was thinking about other things.”

  “Oh.” Aunt Clara paused, momentarily confused. “It’s just that you always liked to hear me talk about Rudolfo. The way he’d put me in the coffin and saw me in half. It was a good stunt, the best one in the act. Do you remember?”

  “Of course I remember. But that’s not what I want to talk about now.”

  “As you wish. There are plenty of old days, after all, especially when you get to be my age.”

  “I was thinking about my father.”

  “Ah, your father. Yes, that was a long time ago, too. Indeed it was. Not as long ago as some things, but long enough.”

  “I know that you and Binkey didn’t move into the house until after he disappeared, but I was wondering if you remember anything about the search party that went looking for him.”

  “Your grandfather made all the arrangements, along with Mr. what’s-his-name.”

  “Mr. Byrne?”

  “That’s copy, Mr. Byrne, the man with the son. They looked for about six months, but they never found anything. Binkey was out there for a while, too, you know. He came back with all sorts of funny stories. He was the one who thought they were killed by Indians.”

  “He was just guessing, though, wasn’t he?”

  “Binkey was a great one for telling tall tales. There was never an ounce of truth in anything he said.”

  “And my mother, did she go out West, too?”

  “Your mother? Oh no, Elizabeth was here the whole time. She was hardly … how shall I put it … hardly in any condition to travel.”

  “Because she was pregnant?”

  “Well, that must have been part of it.”

  “What was the other part?”

  “Her mental condition. It wasn’t very sound then.”

  “Was she already crazy?”

  “Elizabeth was always what you’d call moody. All sulks one minute, then laughing and singing the next. Even years ago, way back when I first met her. High-strung was the word we used for it in those days.”

  “When did it get worse?”

  “After your father didn’t come back.”

  “Did it build up slowly, or did she snap all at once?’

  “All at once, Sol. It was a terrible thing to see.”

  “You saw it?”

  “With my own eyes. The whole thing. I’ll never forget it.”

  “When did it happen?”

  “The night you … I mean, one night … I don’t remember when. One night during the winter.”

  “What night was that, Aunt Clara?”

  “A snowy night. It was cold outside, and there was a big storm. I remember that because the doctor had trouble getting here.”

  “It was a night in January, wasn’t it?”

  “It might have been. It often snows in January. But I don’t remember which month it was.”

  “It was January eleventh, wasn’t it? The night I was born.”

  “Oh, Sol, you shouldn’t keep asking me about it. It happened so long ago, it doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “It matters to me, Aunt Clara. And you’re the only one who can tell me about it. Do you understand? You’re the only one left, Aunt Clara.”

  “You don’t have to shout. I can hear you perfectly well, Solomon. There’s no need for bullying and rough words.”

  “I’m not bullying you. I’m just trying to ask the question.”

  “You know the answer already. It slipped out of my mouth a moment ago, and now I’m sorry it did.”

  “You shouldn’t be sorry. The important thing is to tell the truth. There’s nothing more important than that.”

  “It’s just that it was so … so … I don’t want you to think I’m making it up. I was in the room with her that night, you see. Molly Sharp and I were both there, waiting for the doctor to come, and Elizabeth was screaming and thrashing so much, I thought the house would fall down.”

  “What was she screaming?”

  “Awful things. Things that make me sick to think about.”

  “Tell me, Aunt Clara.”

  “ ‘He’s trying to kill me,’ she kept shouting. ‘He’s trying to kill me. We can’t let him out.’ ”

  “Meaning me?”

  “Yes, the baby. Don’t ask me how she knew it was a boy, but that’s the way it was. The time was getting close, and the doctor still wasn’t there. Molly and I tried to get her to lie down on the bed, to coax her into the proper position, but she wouldn’t cooperate. ‘Open your legs,’ we told her, ‘it will ease the pain.’ But Elizabeth wouldn’t do it. God knows where she found the strength. She kept breaking loose from us and going for the door, shrieking those terrible words over and over again. ‘He’s trying to kill me. We can’t let him out.’ We finally wrestled her onto the bed—or I should say that Molly did, with a little help from me—that Molly Sharp was an ox—but once we got her there, she wouldn’t open her legs. ‘I’m not going to let him out,’ she screamed. ‘I’ll smother him in there first. Monster-boy, monster-boy. I won’t let him out until I kill him.’ We tried to pry open her legs, but Elizabeth kept squirming away, thrashing and flailing until Molly started slapping her across the face—whack, whack, whack, as hard as she could—which angered Elizabeth so much that all she could do after that was scream, just like a baby herself, all red in the face, shrieking and screaming as though to wake the dead.”

  “Good Lord.”

  “It was the worst thing I ever saw in my life. That’s why I didn’t want to tell you.”

  “Still, I managed to get out, didn’t I?”

  “You were the biggest, strongest baby anyone had ever seen. More then eleven pounds, the doctor said. A gigantus. I do believe that if you hadn’t been so large, Sol, you never would have made it. You should always remember that. It was your size that brought you into the world.”

  “And my mother?”

  “The doctor finally came—Doctor Bowles it was, the one who died in that car wreck six or seven years ago—and he gave Elizabeth a shot that put her to sleep. She didn’t wake up until the next day, and by then she had forgotten everything. I don’t just mean the previous night, but everything—her whole life, all the things that had happened to her for the past twenty years. When Molly and I carried you in to let her see her new son, she thought you were her baby brother. It was all so strange, Sol. She had become a little girl again, and she didn�
��t know who she was.”

  Barber was about to ask her another question, but just then the grandfather clock in the hall began to chime. Aunt Clara cocked her head alertly to one side and listened to the bells, counting out the hours on her fingers. By the time the bells stopped ringing, she had made it up to twelve, and this brought an eager, almost imploring look to her face. “It seems to be noon,” she announced. “It wouldn’t be polite to keep Hattie waiting.”

  “Lunchtime already?”

  “I’m afraid so,” she said, standing up from her chair. “Time to fortify ourselves with a little food.”

  “You go ahead, Aunt Clara. I’ll be along in a minute.”

  As he watched Aunt Clara walk out of the room, Barber realized that the conversation was suddenly over. Worse than that, he understood that it would never begin again. He had played out his hand at one sitting, and there were no more houses to bribe her with, no more tricks to lure her into talking.

  He swept up the cards from the table, shuffled the deck, and then dealt out a hand of solitaire. Solly Tear, he said to himself, punning on his name. He decided to play until he won—and wound up sitting there for more than an hour. Lunch was over by then, but that didn’t seem very important. For once in his life he wasn’t hungry.

  We were sitting in the hotel coffee shop having breakfast when Barber recounted this scene to me. It was Sunday morning, and time had nearly run out on us. We drank a last cup of coffee together, and then, as we rode the elevator upstairs to fetch Barber’s luggage, he gave me the end of the story. His Aunt Clara had died in 1943, he said. Hattie Newcombe was duly given title to the Cliff House, and for the rest of the decade she lived there in crumbling splendor, reigning over a host of children and grandchildren who inhabited the rooms of the mansion. After she died in 1951, her son-in-law Fred Robinson sold the property to the Cavalcante Development Company, and the old house was promptly torn down. Within eighteen months the estate had been divided into twenty half-acre lots, and on every lot there was a brand-new split-level house, each one identical to the nineteen others.

  “If you had known that would happen,” I asked, “would you still have given it away?”

  “Absolutely,” he said, putting a match to his dead cigar and puffing smoke into the air. “I’ve never had any second thoughts about it. We don’t often get the chance to do such extravagant things, and I’m glad I didn’t waste the opportunity. When it comes copy down to it, giving that house to Hattie Newcombe was probably the smartest thing I’ve ever done.”

  We were standing outside in front of the hotel by then, waiting for the doorman to flag down a taxi. When the time came for us to say good-bye, Barber was inexplicably on the verge of tears. I assumed it was a delayed response to the situation, that the weekend had finally been too much for him—but of course I had no idea what he was going through, could not even begin to imagine the first thing about it. He was saying good-bye to his son, whereas I was merely seeing off a new friend, a man I had met just two days before. The taxi stood there in front of him, its meter ticking out a frantic little rhythm as the doorman loaded his bag into the trunk. Barber made a gesture as if to embrace me in farewell, but then, thinking better of it at the last moment, he awkwardly grabbed hold of my two shoulders and squeezed them tightly.

  “You’re the first person I’ve ever told those stories to,” he said. “Thank you for being such a good listener. I feel … how shall I put it … I feel there’s a bond between us now.”

  “It’s been a memorable weekend,” I said.

  “Yes, that it’s been. A memorable weekend. A weekend to end all weekends.”

  Barber then maneuvered his enormous bulk into the cab, threw me a thumbs-up sign from the back seat, and disappeared into the traffic. At that moment, I did not think I would ever see him again. We had taken care of our business, explored whatever ground there was for us to explore, and that seemed to be the end of it. Even when the manuscript of Kepler’s Blood arrived in the mail the following week, I did not feel it was a continuation of what we had started so much as a conclusion, a last little flourish to our encounter. Barber had promised to send it, and I assumed that he was merely being polite. The next day, I wrote back a letter of thanks, reiterating how much I had enjoyed our meeting, and then I lost contact with him, apparently for good.

  My Chinatown paradise continued. Kitty danced and studied, and I went on writing and taking walks. There was Columbus Day, there was Thanksgiving, there was Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Then, one morning in the middle of January, the telephone rang and it was Barber on the other end of the line. I asked him where he was calling from, and when he said New York, I could hear the excitement and happiness in his voice.

  “If you have some free time,” I said, “it would be nice to get together again.”

  “Yes, I’m very much hoping we will. But you don’t have to disrupt your schedule for me. I’m planning to be here for a while.”

  “Your college must give a long break between semesters.”

  “Actually, I’ve gone on leave again. I’ll be off until next September, and in the meantime I thought I’d have a go at living in New York. I’ve sublet an apartment on Tenth Street, on the block between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.”

  “That’s a pretty neighborhood. I’ve walked through it many times.”

  “Cozy and charming, as the real-estate ads say. I just got in last night, and I’m very pleased with it. You and Kitty will have to come and visit me.”

  “We’d love to. Just name a day, and we’ll be there.”

  “Capital. I’ll ring back later in the week, as soon as I’m settled in. There’s a project I want to discuss with you, so be prepared to have your brains picked.”

  “I’m not sure you’ll find much inside them, but you’re welcome to whatever there is.”

  Three or four days later, Kitty and I went to Barber’s apartment for dinner, and after that we began to see him often. It was Barber who initiated the friendship, and if he had some ulterior motive in courting us, neither one of us could perceive it. He invited us out to restaurants, to movies and concerts, to accompany him on Sunday drives to the country, and because the man was so filled with good humor and affection, we could not resist him. Wearing those outlandish hats of his wherever he went, cracking jokes left and copy, undaunted by the commotion he caused in public places, Barber took us under his wing as though he meant to adopt us. Since Kitty and I were both orphans, everyone seemed to benefit from the arrangement.

  The first night we saw him, Barber told us that Effing’s estate had been settled. He had come into a good deal of money, he said, and for once in his life he was not dependent on his job. If things worked out as he hoped they would, he wouldn’t have to go back to teaching for another two or three years. “It’s my chance to live it up,” he said, “and I’m going to make the most of it.”

  “With all the money that Effing had,” I said, “I’d have thought you could retire for good.”

  “No such luck. There were inheritance taxes, estate taxes, lawyers’ fees, expenses I’d never heard of before. That took care of a big chunk. And then there was a lot less to start with than we thought there’d be.”

  “You mean there weren’t millions?”

  “Hardly. More like thousands. When all was said and done, Mrs. Hume and I each came out of it with something like forty-six thousand dollars.”

  “I should have known better,” I said. “He talked as though he was the richest man in New York.”

  “Yes, I do think he was prone to exaggeration. But far be it from me to hold it against him. I’ve inherited forty-six thousand dollars from someone I never even met. That’s more money than I’ve ever had in my life. It’s a tremendous windfall, a boon beyond imagining.”

  Barber told us that he had been working on a book about Thomas Harriot for the past three years. Ordinarily, he would have expected it to take him two more years to finish it, but now that he no longer had any other obligatio
ns, he thought he might be able to complete it by the middle of the summer, just six or seven months away. That brought him to the project he had mentioned to me over the phone. He had only been toying with the idea for a couple of weeks, he said, and he wanted my opinion before he devoted any serious thought to it. It would be something for later, something to tackle once the Harriot book was finished, but if he wound up going ahead with it, then a considerable amount of planning would be required. “I suppose it boils down to one question,” he said, “and I don’t expect you’ll be able to give me an unqualified answer. But under the circumstances, your opinion is the only one I can trust.”

  We had finished eating dinner at that point, and I remember that the three of us were still sitting around the table, drinking cognac and smoking Cuban cigars that Barber had smuggled back from a recent trip to Canada. We were all slightly drunk, and in the spirit of the moment, even Kitty had accepted one of the huge Churchills that Barber had offered around. It amused me to watch her puffing calmly away at it as she sat there in her chipao, but just as funny was the sight of Barber himself, who had dressed up for the occasion by putting on a burgundy smoking jacket and a fez.

  “If I’m the only one,” I said, “then it must have something to do with your father.”

  “Yes, that’s it, that’s it exactly.” To punctuate his response, Barber tilted back his head and blew a perfect smoke ring into the air. Kitty and I both looked up at it in admiration, following the O as it quivered past us and slowly lost its form. After a brief pause, Barber lowered his voice a full octave and said: “I’ve been thinking about the cave.”

  “Ah, the cave,” I repeated. “The enigmatic cave in the desert.”

  “I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s like one of those old songs that keeps on playing in your head.”

  “An old song. An old story. There’s no getting rid of it. But how do we know there ever was a cave?”

  “That’s what I was going to ask you. You were the one who heard the story. What do you say, M. S.? Was he telling the truth or not?”

  Before I could gather my wits to answer him, Kitty leaned forward on her elbow, looked to her left at me, looked to her copy at Barber, and then summed up the whole complicated problem in two sentences. “Of course he was telling the truth,” she said. “His facts might not always have been correct, but he was telling the truth.”