The Mulberry Tree

  That was closer to the truth, because none of my books were fiction. They were fiction enough that my uncles and cousins couldn’t sue me, but, basically, they were the truth. “Distorted truth” as Pat said. As she’d pointed out on that long ago, happy day, I’d had enough bad in my life to write many books. I’d written about every rotten thing that had ever been done to me.

  But the truth that no one knew, not anyone at my publishing house or any friend, was that I’d written myself dry long before Pat died. The only book that was left in me was the one about Pat, and I was years and years and years away from being able to write that one.

  In the six years since her death, I’d wandered around the country, moving the few belongings I still owned from one house to another. I’d settle into a community, look around and listen to see if anything sparked my appetite, and hope to find a reason to start writing again.

  But nothing interested me. Now and then my publishing house would reissue some old book of mine, or put my few novellas into one book so it looked as though I was still publishing, but most people knew I wasn’t. When I typed my name onto the Internet, I found three groups that were discussing my death. They listed “facts” that they believed were proof that I’d taken my own life the day my wife died.

  The latest town I’d moved to was supposed to have great weather, but I hadn’t seen it. It was also supposed to be “charming,” but I didn’t find it to be so. I’m not sure why I didn’t move out the day after I moved in, except that I was tired. I was tired . . . not tired of living so much as tired of being brain-dead. I felt like those women who go through college, then get married and pop out three kids right away. They went from brain-overuse to not using their brains at all. I guess that’s where I was. In six years I’d had a few brief affairs, but since I compared every woman to Pat, I’d found each one wanting.

  About a year ago, I’d read something—I was a voracious, eclectic reader in those six years—about a witch that haunted some old house somewhere and it had sparked a tiny interest in me. I began to think about putting together a collection of true stories about ghosts or witches in America. Every state has those poorly written, locally printed books about regional ghosts, so I thought about collecting the books, doing masses of research, and publishing an anthology. A sort of Ghosts of the U.S. kind of thing.

  Anyway, doing the research appealed to me. All I needed was an assistant. But it turned out to be nearly impossible to find someone who was really useful.

  Did I have a knack for finding losers? Was it something in me that attracted them? Several of the women seemed to be living in a romantic novel. They seemed to believe that I’d hired them because I wanted to marry them and share all my worldly goods with them. I got rid of those women fast.

  Then I went through the ones who wanted everything spelled out for them. They wanted what they called a “job description.” I gave in to one of them and spent an hour and a half of my life writing the thing. Two hours later, when I told her I wanted her to go to the grocery for me, she said, “That’s not my job,” and I fired her.

  Some of them I fired and some of them quit. Truthfully, I think that all of them had an ideal in their minds of what it would be like to work for a best-selling author and I didn’t live up to what they expected.

  From my viewpoint, not one of them could follow an idea. They were like robots and would do what I told them to—as long as it didn’t interfere with their “job description”—but they didn’t take the initiative. And, too, many of them used their brains only for trying to seduce me to an altar. Free sex I would have taken, but it was “community property” that I saw in their eyes.

  Just before I was to move yet again—to where I had no idea—I was having lunch with the president of the local university, and he said, “You ought to get an assistant like ol’ Professor Hartshorn has. She’s writing a book for him.”

  I wasn’t much interested in what he was saying because I’d already scheduled the movers for next week, but I was being polite so I said, “What kind of book?”

  He chuckled. “It’s about Harriet Lane, with a great many passages about her violet eyes and her magnificent bosom.”

  I’d never heard of the woman, so he went on to tell me that she was President James Buchanan’s niece. “I don’t know where Hartshorn’s assistant got her information, but I’d be willing to bet it’s accurate. Miss Lane was an equal political partner to her uncle—who, by the way, was nicknamed ‘Old Gurley.’ If you know what I mean,” he added, waggling his eyebrows.

  Interesting, I thought. I needed an assistant who could think. “Is she writing the book with the professor?”

  The president grimaced. “Hell, no. One time when I confronted him, he said there was already too damn much written about everybody, so he wasn’t going to add to the pollution. But the trustees were on my case to fire him because he wasn’t published, so Hartshorn started using his students to pretend he was writing.” The president waved his hand, meaning he didn’t want to explain that particular story. “Anyway, a couple of years ago, I received this hilarious chapter of a book about an obscure president’s niece, and it had Professor Hartshorn’s name on it as the author. Right away, I knew he hadn’t written it so I gave it to my secretary—who knows everything that goes on in this town—and asked her who was capable of writing such a paper. She started telling me about a man who had a crush on a Victorian woman named Harriet Lane. Had pictures of her all over his office and always wore something violet because Miss Lane had violet eyes.”

  I was confused. “Hartshorn’s assistant is a man?”

  The president frowned at me. I knew that look. For a writer, you’re not very smart, it said. I’d found out long ago that when you’re a writer people expect you to understand everything about everything.

  “No,” he said, speaking slowly as though to an idiot, “that man was Hartshorn’s assistant’s father. He’s dead. Her father is dead, not Hartshorn. Anyway, Hartshorn’s young, female assistant sends me an extremely entertaining chapter every three months. They’re too naughty to be published, but the Trustees and I love them. The Misadventures of Miss Harriet Lane, we call them.”

  While he was smiling in memory of Miss Lane’s bosom, I was thinking. “If she’s so dedicated to Professor Hartshorn she won’t want another job.”

  “Hartshorn is an”—he lowered his voice—“what is colloquially known as an a-hole. I doubt if he’s ever even told her thanks for saving his job. Although I did hear that he gave her a raise for decorating his office with a life-size mannequin of Miss Lane.”

  This was beginning to sound good. She was creative. And smart. Took the initiative. I needed those things. I didn’t find out until after Pat died that I was a person who co-wrote. I need lots of feedback. I’ve never understood how other authors survived with the two or three words they got from their editors. You could spend a year writing a book and at the end all you’d get was, “It’s good.”

  If I were honest with myself—and I tried not to be—I wanted a partner, someone I could bounce ideas off. I didn’t want a fellow writer who was going to be competition, but I wanted . . . Pat. I wanted Pat.

  But I had to take what I could get. “So how do I meet her?” I asked. “Through Hartshorn?”

  The president snorted. “He’d lie. If he knew you wanted her, he’d drug her before he let you meet her.”

  “Then how—?”

  “Let me think about it and see what I can come up with. A social setting might be best. I’m sure I know someone who knows her. For the next two weeks, accept all invitations.” He looked at his watch. “Uh oh. I have a plane to catch.”

  He stood, I stood, we shook hands, then he left. It was only after he was gone that I remembered I hadn’t asked what the assistant’s name was. Later, I called Hartshorn’s office and asked what his assistant’s name was. “Which one?” the young woman on the phone asked. “He has five of them.” I couldn’t very well say, “The one who’s writing
the book for him,” so I thanked her and hung up. I called the president’s office but he’d left town.

  “Two weeks,” the president had said. I was to accept every invitation for the next two weeks. No one can imagine the number of invitations a celebrity in a small town receives in two weeks. I did a reading of Bob the Builder for a local nursery school—and was vociferously told that I had mispronounced Pilchard’s name.

  I had to give a speech at a ladies’ luncheon, (chicken salad, always chicken salad) and had to listen to one shirtwaist-clad little old lady after another tell me that I used too many “dirty words” in my books.

  I had to give a speech at a local tractor dealership, and ended up talking about the internal combustion engine—something I had to do to keep the attention of my audience.

  I also accepted an invitation to a party at someone’s house and that’s when I finally met Professor Hartshorn’s assistant.

  At the party, I watched the people and tried to guess which one might be Hartshorn’s assistant.

  I noticed a group of girls who seemed to be friends. One of them was so beautiful she made me dizzy. Face, hair, body. Wherever she went in the room, eyes followed her—mine included. But after a while of watching, I began to detect a blankness in her eyes. The proverbial dumb blonde—or Titian red in this case. And her name was Autumn—which made me feel old. Her parents were no doubt former hippies—and my age.

  There was a Jennifer who seemed to be angry about something and seemed to have set herself up as the boss of everyone. I knew it was her parents’ house, but I’d be willing to bet that she bossed people wherever she was.

  Heather and Ashley seemed normal enough, but Heather wasn’t very pretty so, to compensate, she wore too much makeup.

  The fifth girl was Jackie Maxwell and, instantly, I knew she was “the one.” She was short, with a mass of softly curling, short dark hair, and she looked like a poster advertising “physically fit.” Just looking at her made me stand up straighter and suck in my stomach.

  She had a cute face and dark green eyes that seemed to see everything that was going on around her. A couple of times I had to look away so she wouldn’t know I was watching her.

  After a while, an odd thing happened. In the midst of the party, lovely little Autumn sat down on a chair smack in the middle of the room and began to cry. And cry right prettily, I might add. If Pat had been there she would have made a snide comment about how the girl managed to weep without squinching up her facial muscles.

  But the girl going from laughing to tears in a second—and doing it in the middle of the room—wasn’t what was odd. What was strange was that when this raving beauty began to cry, all eyes turned toward Jackie.

  Even the woman who was blathering on at me about how she was writing a book “not like yours but deep, you know what I mean?” turned and looked at Jackie.

  Did I miss something? I wondered. I watched with interest as Jackie went to this girl Autumn, squatted in front of her like some African native, and began to talk to her in the tone of a mother. Jackie had a voice that made me want to curl up with a blankie and have her soothe me. Turning to a man next to me, I started to say something, but he said, “Ssssh, Jackie’s gonna tell a story.”

  Everyone in town—and eventually even the bartenders—tiptoed over to surround the big chair and listen to this girl tell a story.

  Okay, I was jealous. No one had ever spontaneously listened to me like that. Only if there was a lot of advance publicity and I arrived in a limo did people listen to me with rapt attention.

  So what story was she going to tell? I wondered. As all of us waited, she proceeded to cheer up this brainless little beauty queen with a story on how to write a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel.

  Since my sales kept me out of the prize-winning circles, (“Money or prizes,” my editor told me. “Not both.”) I listened. And as she talked, I found myself wanting her to be even more critical than she was. What about the overuse of metaphors and similes? What about emotion? My editor called them “Connecticut books.” Not too much emotion in them. Cool. Dignified. Cerebral.

  We always want more, don’t we? Prizewinners want sales; best-sellers want prizes.

  When Jackie finished her story, I expected everyone to burst into applause. Instead, they acted as though they hadn’t been listening. Odd, I thought.

  She got up (even at her age my knees would have been killing me) looked straight at me, ignored my smile, then went over to the bar to get a drink. I followed her and nearly fell over my tongue trying to give her a compliment. Since the people who knew her hadn’t said anything, I thought maybe they knew she hated praise.

  Then I really messed up because I blurted out that I wanted her to work for me.

  Brother! Did she laugh. When she told me that she’d work for me only if she had two heads, it took me a full minute to understand what she was saying. I didn’t know exactly where the quote came from but I could guess.

  Okay, so I can take a hint. I turned around and walked away.

  I would have gone home then and probably forgotten about the whole thing (and would have had to work to not use the woman’s “How to Write a Pulitzer Prize–Winning Novel” speech in a book—if I ever wrote again, that is) but Mrs. Lady of the House grabbed my arm and started pulling me from one room to another to introduce me to people. After several minutes of this, she told me that I needed to forgive Jackie, that sometimes she could be, well . . .

  “Abrasive?” I asked.

  Mrs. Lady looked at me hard. “My cousin worked for you for four and a half weeks and she called me every day to tell me what you put her through. Let’s just say that Jackie doesn’t have the franchise on abrasive behavior and leave it at that, shall we? Mr. Newcombe, if you’re looking for an assistant, I think Jackie Maxwell just might be the only woman who could work for you.”

  When she turned away and left me standing there, if it hadn’t been late at night I would have called the moving company and said, “Come and get me now!”

  A few seconds later, I was trapped by a dreadful little woman who wanted me to personally publish her 481 church bulletins, many of which no one—meaning no congregation—had ever read. “Original source,” she kept saying, as though she’d found George Washington’s unpublished diaries.

  I was rescued by Jackie. I meant to get her alone outside so I could apologize and maybe start over, but when I turned around, I saw she had been followed by an entourage of gawking girls. Within seconds I was bombarded with questions.

  As the girls took me over, I could see Jackie inching away. I was beginning to adopt the philosophy of “if it was meant to be it will happen” when one of the girls dropped a bombshell on me. She said Jackie knew a true devil story.

  Through my limited (mostly assistantless) research I knew that devil stories were rare. Ghost and witch stories were abundant, but devils . . . Rare.

  After persuasion, Jackie told the story in a couple of sentences, but she told all of it in those two sentences. Someone once told me that if a person was a really good storyteller he could tell the story in one word and that word would be the title of the book. Exorcist is an example. Says it all.

  Her story intrigued me so much that I thought maybe my ears would start flapping and pull me straight up. Wow! A woman loved a man the townspeople believed was the devil. Why did they believe that? And they killed her. Not him. Her. Why didn’t they kill the man? Fear? Couldn’t find him? He’d gone back to hell? What happened after she was murdered? Any prosecutions?

  But before I could ask anything, Jackie dropped her glass—on purpose but I had no idea why—and all the girls turned into squawking hens and ran for the nearest bathroom.

  I took a few moments to try to turn myself into their idea of a cool, calm, sophisticated best-selling author, then hightailed it after Jackie.

  As soon as she came out of the bathroom some guy went up to her, said he had to leave and called her “Pumpkin.” No one on earth looked less like a
“Pumpkin” than that curvy little creature.

  I didn’t like him. He was too slick-looking for my taste. A used-car salesman trying to look like a stockbroker. And he was with a tall young man who looked like someone had turned the lights off inside his head. I’d be willing to bet six figures that those two were up to no good.

  But then, maybe it was just that I really was beginning to want this young woman to work for me so I was getting possessive.

  I again tried to get into a conversation with her and find out more about the devil story, but she seemed to be embarrassed because her friends had said that she should write a book. First of all, I didn’t remember hearing that. It was probably when my ears were twitching and I was floating. Second, I wanted to say, “Honey, everybody wants to be a writer.”

  But as I chatted with her about her not wanting to be a writer, I found out she was getting married in three weeks (I guess to the salesman-broker). Then she more or less told me that she wouldn’t work for me if I were the last man . . . Et cetera.

  I went home.

  Early the next morning I called the moving company and indefinitely postponed my move. I decided I really did need to figure out where I was going before I packed up.

  By this time, I didn’t have an assistant or a housekeeper, so I lived with dirty clothes and TV dinners—both of which made me think of my childhood. For weeks, I used every resource I had to try to find out about Jackie’s story. I went on the Internet. I called Malaprop’s in Asheville and had them send me a copy of every book they had on North Carolina legends. I called my publisher and she got me phone numbers of several North Carolina writers and I called them.

  No one had heard of the devil story.

  I called Mrs. Lady of the House (had to fish her invitation out of the garbage can where it was, of course, stuck to something wet and smelly) and asked her to please, pretty please, find out the name of the town in North Carolina where the story had happened, but not to tell Jackie or any of her friends I’d asked.