He sat back smiling around at his audience, waiting for their response.
The wife sighed and shadows passed over her face, without leaving a trace of something to say.
The son pushed back from the table and tossed his napkin on his plate.
“Is this supposed to be some sort of insult to me?” he asked.
“No. Only a response,” said the father. “I couldn’t sit still with no future. I was so damned unhappy I had to react. And then suddenly it hit me: start a new life, find the right woman, have a boy child, give it my name, and, twenty years from now—bam. Immortality. More families, more children. God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world!”
“And this stupid woman has gone along with your dumb idea!” cried the son.
“She is not stupid and she has gone along. She is muy simpatica, as they say. She saw my deeps of depression, locked in the graveyard as it were, with a living son who was, in effect, dead. She knew how to cry, ‘Lazarus, come forth!’ And I left the graveyard. And twenty years from now, I will be, well, let me see, nearly seventy, that’s not bad, seventy, and happy. I will give the boy our family name, of course. You need never see him, don’t be afraid of that. Now, the next and final thing is, do we go on as before? Does my wife still love me in spite of this madness? Will my son speak to me, or take affront and move out? I hope both answers from the two of you will be made out of some lopsided understanding and much love. Ah, here comes the dessert cart, not a moment too soon.”
While the father indicated and accepted a strawberry tart the son leaned forward.
“Do you have a name for this—this—” He stopped and flushed.
“Bastard?”
“No!”
“You were going to say ‘bastard.’ Say it.”
“Bastard.”
“There, feel better? Yes, I have a name! Maximilian—”
“Maximilian!?”
“Max. My son Max. God, that sounds good, don’t you agree? A name like that? Royalty. It has a regal sound. Max, my son.”
“And will he move into my room when I move out?”
“Are you moving out? No need. I wouldn’t dream of burdening your mama. Besides, my secretary is pleased to be a mother and looks forward to eighteen or twenty years of work and play with the child. I will visit him, of course, and take him out six or seven times a week, so he has a proper father.”
There was a still longer silence as coffee was placed on the table.
“Well, Mother,” said Ronald, “aren’t you going to say something?”
“Yes.” The mother frowned and then said, “I’ll be Goddamned.”
This time it was the son who plunged out of the restaurant. He sailed out, a trim ship in a high wind, his beautiful nose prowing the air. His mother ran after.
The father stayed, maundering over the bill, then, with some leisure, finished the last of the wine, rose, and walked past me. He stopped with his back to me. At first I didn’t think he was speaking to me, but then he repeated his question: “You read lips, don’t you?”
“What?”
I turned and he looked at me with steady gray eyes.
“Raised in a family of deaf-mutes?”
“Sort of,” I admitted uneasily.
“It’s all right. You a writer?”
“How did you guess?”
“Anyone that watches lips that closely has got to be something. It was quite a story, wasn’t it?”
“I didn’t catch it all,” I lied.
The father laughed quietly and nodded. “Yes, you did. But it’s okay. None of it’s true.”
I almost dropped my dessert spoon. “What!?”
“I had to think of something. I suppose it’s been collecting up all year. All of a sudden, tonight, bam! You going to write it down when you get home?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know. But—”
“But what?”
I swallowed with difficulty. “I—I just wish it were true.”
The father pulled a cigar out of his pocket, looked at it, found a lighter, lit it, smoked a big puff out on the air, and looked at the elusive stuff shaping and reshaping itself and blowing away into nothing. His eyes were watchful and growing wet, with all this.
“So do I, son,” he said, and walked away. “So do I.”
After a long moment I ordered another bottle of wine. When it was opened and poured, the waiter said, “Think you can finish that much?”
“I’m going to try,” I said. “Let me try.”
THE F. SCOTT/TOLSTOY/AHAB ACCUMULATOR
“Why would you want to rewire, revise, and reconceive your Time Machine?” said my friend Billy Barlow.
“It’s one thing,” I replied, “to run back in time and place new printings of books by Melville, Poe, and Wilde on their deathbeds and wake them to see their glory. But …”
I paused.
“But another thing,” I finished, “to seek unhappy people and make them happy. Think of all the lost writers who wrote beautifully and lived miserably.”
“All writers are lost,” said Billy. “And miserable.”
“I’ll change that,” I said.
“Bull,” Billy said. “How, oh Lord God of miracles? With three wishes on a genie lamp? With—”
“Shut up. See that huge device stranded in the library?”
“That giant moth? Does it flap its wings?”
“It hums under its breath and vanishes.”
“The louder it hums the farther back in Time you go?”
“Right. Here’s my list of lost souls.”
Billy scowled at the list. “Hemingway? Melville? No way. Tolstoy? Why? F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda? Drunks!”
“Gimme that!” I grabbed the list, sat in the machine, cursed, pulled a lever, and said: “I’m not here.”
The machine hummed.
And I wasn’t.
The machine settled as gently as a great cellophane butterfly by Papa’s house in Idaho. God, I thought, what do I say?
I pried myself from the trembling wings, and had walked up on the porch to knock when the door opened. Hemingway stood there.
He looked sleepless. His broad pale face somehow expected me and here I was. He turned and walked back to a hall table, sat down, and nodded to a chair. I advanced, staring at what lay gleaming on the table: a steel African hunting rifle, the sort that knocked echoes off Kilimanjaro, and once killed elephants as white as the hot Kenya dust. Nearby lay a double-barreled shotgun.
I sat and saw on the table two glasses of clear grappa. I took one glass while Papa slugged his back.
“Well?” he said.
I ignored the table and said: “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Whatever you were going to do.”
“I wasn’t going to do anything,” said Papa.
“You were thinking it.”
“You read minds?”
“No. Just some of your stories. There was a doctor in one of them, your father? We all know what happened to him.”
“We all know that,” said Papa.
“Some say you still have his weapon.”
“Somewhere.”
“Well, let’s not mince words. If you do something silly, people will guess all the wrong motives.”
“There are no wrong motives for getting out when the getting’s good.”
“No. It’s not what you think, it’s what the academics write. They’ll pee on your grave, then change your title to The Sun Never Rises.”
“It can’t be touched. What I was once, for a while. I hate to brag, but …”
“Why not? You are Papa.”
Papa almost smiled, then lit a cigarette.
“How long have you read me?”
“Since algebra, behind the book. Eighth grade.”
“Great place, behind other books. In The Sun Also Rises, what was that to you?”
“Big doors opening, big gates, a whole world pouring out with places, pretty women, and torero
s, both with nice backsides, and how to survive not being a man anymore.”
“That’s a lot to know when you’re a kid.”
“I was hungry. Don’t change the subject. If you leave now …”
“I haven’t left yet.”
“They’ll eat your entrails, Papa.”
“If they tear them out.”
“Eat your guts, throw them up, and eat them again.”
“Will they leave my manhood?”
“That goes first, so you can’t fight.”
“Hyenas, eh?”
“Dingos, buzzards, zopilotes, sharks.”
“The whole Harvard English Department?”
“And Ohio State.”
“That’s some list.” Papa stared into my face. “And who are you to make it? Why are you here? A nut?”
“A lover.”
“Blush when you say that.”
“Why should I, when it’s true?”
“Hell. A true believer.”
“No, someone who loves writing. Not fine. Just good.”
“Always was,” said Papa quietly.
“And you can be good again.”
“With a ruptured spleen, two broken ribs, a fractured fibula, and a cracked skull?”
“All that. Let the medics really cure your ribs, your leg, your head. With your body fixed, your nerves renewed, and the pain gone …”
“My writing will come back, too?”
“It must.”
“I don’t know if I can wait,” he said. “It’s bad to get up early, stand at your typewriter and work, then find it’s nothing and take a bottle to bed. Who do I do this for?”
“For yourself. Hell, no. Me.”
“Selfish bastard.”
“Damn right.”
He stared at me.
“Jesus, go write a book on philosophy.”
“No, just hygiene, if you’ll listen.”
Papa glanced at the door.
“Get outta here,” he said.
“If I can take the guns.”
“You crazy?”
“No, you. Pain makes you crazy. Your writing didn’t fail. It stopped because you were sick. You can’t think when pain cuts in. Ever try to write hungover? Never works. The critics knock your writing and forget that plane crash in Africa that wrecked it, left you mad. But maybe next week you’ll wake with no knife in your chest, no bad leg, no headache, and know how mad you were.”
“Am I mad now?”
“With yourself, and me for telling you.”
“You finished?”
“No, empty, Papa. Just remember, if you’re gone next year they’ll call your story ‘The Short Unhappy Life of Francis Macomber.’ Then For Whom No Bell Tolls. See?”
“I don’t need a third crash.”
“Well, then.” I reached for the guns.
“Don’t,” said Papa. “I’d find another way.”
“Take four aspirin. Kill the pain. I’ll call tomorrow.”
I walked to the front door.
“What’s your name?” he called.
I told him.
“Have a good life,” he said.
“No, Papa. You.”
I went out the door.
I was about fifty feet from the house when I thought I heard a loud sound, shut my eyes, and ran.
The vast monarch wings whispered, folded, stopped.
I looked in through a twilight door and saw:
An old man stamping, stamping, stamping forms in the customs shed at Nantucket.
I drew close and said, “Mr. Melville?”
He lifted the blind gaze of an ancient sea tortoise.
“Sir?” he said.
I suddenly did not fit my skin within my clothes.
“Sir, are you hungry?”
The old man searched his appetite.
I said, “May we dine and perhaps stroll the wharves?” I raised a small sack of apples and oranges, plus, in the other hand, a nameless book. He studied that book and at last took an immense time shrugging on an overcoat and let himself be led out into the clouded light of a sunless day. Facing away from the sea, he said: “You are a critic? From Boston?”
“No,” I said, “a mere reader.”
“There are no mere readers,” said the old man. “You are either out of a library or safely in. Book dust fills that air. Inhaled, it firms a man’s bones, brightens his eye, tunes his ear. Thus a man is renewed breath by breath, when he swims the library deeps where multitudinous blind creatures wait. Your mind says rise and they swarm, over-brim, drown you with their stuffs. Drowned but alive, you are the atoll it floods without end. Thus, you are no mere reader, but a survivor of tides that surf from Shakespeare to Pope to Molière. Those lighthouses of being. Go there to survive the storms.
“That is,” he caught himself, “if I shut up and you had time to read.” He let his faint smile fade. “Why are we here on this dock?”
“Sir,” I said. “There is the sea, where you should go forever.”
“Swim round the Cape? Surprise China?”
“Why not?”
“Do you see this old man’s hand palsied from stamping and stamping the damned inspection forms?”
“No,” I said, “I see a sailor at sea with a dark islander, all tattoos, and a lost first mate whose captain struck God’s sun when it insulted him.” I continued: “Oh, dear Melville, stay off the land. The sea is yours. You’re like that ancient god who, thrown down, revived his life. Held high, he lost his power. On earth, his life grew tall. But your power is water! Cast off now, be a sea beast reborn to compass points, arms spread to smite hurricanes from white whales’ flukes. Take St. Elmo’s fires to shave. Earth, shore, town, and docks are tombs, coffin law-sheds, sunless days, lost burials. Earthbound, you dig your grave. Curse the land, throw down the customs stamp, be young ape-clambering the mast to dive, swim fast, the fair isles wait. I’m shut.”
“Shakespeare opened you.”
“Forgive.”
“Forgive me, then, who gave the White Whale’s oil to light the towns. Be you a Christian?”
“God counts me in.”
“Then Christian soul, be still as I judge ships and guess the tides.”
Old Melville stared long at the horizon, then gazed at the salt-worn fronts of the customhouse which knew no sound but the eternal stamping and stamping of sea forms out and in.
“Jack!” I whispered. Melville flinched. I caught my breath and thought: Jack, young Christ, far from Galilee, fine of form and face, Jack, good shipmate, like the morning sun. And Hawthorne? Do we kidnap and jog along with him? Such talks you’d have! I’ll serve him for our feast of Time, while Jack thrusts his gaze to seize your heart and crack your eyes. Hawthorne for loud noons. Jack for speechless midnights, endless dawns.
“Jack,” whispered Herman Melville. “Alive?”
“I can make him live.”
“Your God machine, does it bless or curse? Does it create or act Time’s infidel?”
“It’s nameless, sir. A centrifuge to spin off years to make us young.”
“Can you do this?”
“And win King Richard’s crown? Yes!”
“Ah, God.” Melville’s voice broke as he pulled at his feet. “I cannot move!”
“Try!”
“It’s late,” he said. “I’m neither fish nor fowl. On land, Stonehenge. At sea I sink. Is there no place between?”
“Here.” I touched my head. “And here,” I touched my heart.
The old man’s eyes burned with tears.
“Oh! If I could live in that head or hide in that breast!”
“You are safely there.”
“I accept a night’s lodging,” he wept.
“No, Pequod’s captain,” I said. “A thousand days.”
“This joy breaks me! Hold!”
I held his quaking elbows.
“You,” he said, “have opened the library and let me breathe my past. Am I taller? Straighter? Is my voice clear?”
“Most clear.”
“My hands?”
“Are the hands of a sailor newborn.”
“Stay off land?”
“Stay off.”
“But look.” He pointed. “My legs are anchors! Much thanks for your miracle of words. Oh, thanks …”
And he wandered off into the customs shed.
I looked in upon this old man a thousand miles distant on the dark earth, saw his hand fly up, down, up, down, stamping the forms, eyes shut, gone blind, as I backed off to feel the huge wings brush my neck. I spun to let the great moth take me.
“O, Herman, stay!” I cried, but the shed was gone.
And I was spun forth in another time, a house, a door opened and shut, a small round man confronting me.
“How,” he said, “did you get in?”
“Down the chimney, under the door. And you are?”
“Count Leo Tolstoy!”
“Of War and Peace?”
“Is there another!?” he exclaimed. “How did you enter? For what purpose?”
“To help you run away!”
“Run—?”
“Away,” I said, “from home. For you are crazed. Your wife is berserk with jealousy.”
Count Leo Tolstoy froze. “How—?”
“It’s all in the books.”
“There are no books!”
“Not now, but soon! To claim your wife accused the chambermaids, the kitchen help, the gardener’s daughters, your accountant’s mistress, the milkman’s wife, your niece!”
“Stop!” cried Count Leo Tolstoy. “I refuse those beds!”
“They lie?”
“Yes, maybe, no, how dare you!”
“Because your wife threatens to tear the sheets, burn the bed, lock the door, decapitate your modus operandi.”
“No, yes! Guilty, innocent, guilty, innocent! Damn! Guilty! What a wife. Repeat!”
“Home. Run away from it.”
“That is what boys do!”
“Yes!”
“And you’d have me act half a life younger? You are a lunatic of solutions.”
“Better than a maniac of punishments.”
“Lower your voice!” he whispered. “She’s in the next room.”
“Then, let’s go!”
“She has stolen my underwear!”
“Wash and wear on the way.”
“To?”
“Anywhere!”
“But how long do I hide?”