Time passed. I didn't know how long. I wished fervently that I smoked or drank or did drugs. Because I needed desperately to do something. I made my way to the living room unaware of my passage through the rooms. I gobbled up a few Godiva chocolates without tasting them and felt slightly sickish.
My God. I had stumbled across a posthumous unpublished manuscript by one of the country's most famous writers, secretly kept here by his agent. And now I was part of the secret.
That's what you get for snooping, Susan baby. Maybe this will cure you of that rotten habit.
My conscience talking.
The big problem: What do I do now?
As it turned out, I did not have to do anything. Meredith came into the apartment that evening, windblown, tossed her wide-brimmed straw hat on the table in the foyer, looked at me, looked away, looked again, and said: “You found it, didn't you?”
I began to stammer apologies, didn't know what to do with my hands or legs.
“Please, Susan, no apologies,” Meredith said. “Maybe I wanted you to find it. I could have tucked it away in a better, less accessible place. Down at the office in the big old safe there. Let me soak awhile—I'm beat—and then we'll talk.”
Later, sitting across from each other, the box with the manuscript on the coffee table, Meredith said: “Paul told me once that a writer is allowed one major coincidence in a novel. Maybe that applies in real life too. Anyway, my coincidence is this—the day I received your letter asking about the internship was the day I was brought Paul's manuscript….”
“Where did it come from? Where has it been all these years?” I asked.
“It was sent to me by an attorney in Monument. Lionel Duschenes, an old-timer. He said that Paul personally delivered the manuscript to him a few weeks before his death back in 1967 with instructions to hold it until 1988 and then deliver it to me.” She leaned back, closing her eyes. “Poor Paul. Never seemed happy. Always haunted by—something. I had a special place in my heart for him. Bruises in Paradise, his first novel, was also the first novel I sold as an agent. Both of us starting out together, me, the shy young thing from Kansas and Paul, the shy writer from New England….”
She opened her eyes, they glistened—tears?
“Why are you so troubled, Meredith?” I asked.
“The manuscript troubles me, Susan. I can't get it out of my mind. Is it …” She paused, the question left unasked. “You've read it. Tell me what you think.”
“Well, first of all, it's only a fragment. Incomplete. But I was very moved by it …”
Meredith was as still as the crystal paperweight, shaped like a fawn, on the table next to the manuscript.
Warming up now, because I am a ham when I get the spotlight, I said: “What also struck me is that, for the first time in his writing, Paul used real names of people. Okay, first names only. Moreaux instead of the real family name, Roget …”
“Some real names, though,” Meredith amended. “Silas B. Thornton Junior High is a real name. Monument is also real….”
“Right,” I agreed. “You can also recognize people. Like my grandfather, his cousin Jules. Gramps has told me a lot about Paul. About when they were kids together. And the manuscript sounds exactly the way Gramps described those days …”
“What else?” Meredith asked.
“Well, it certainly resembles his novels and short stories. He always used Frenchtown as his background. Some critics accused him of being an autobiographical novelist, but he really wasn't. I mean, he employed his familiar surroundings, the Franco-American scene, but his plots were fiction. For instance, Bruises in Paradise. It's a story of a father-son relationship in the Depression years …” I realized that I had been quoting myself, reciting verbatim from a paper I wrote for Professor Waronski last semester. “The father worked in a shop and the son wanted to be an artist, dreamed of roaming the world. The climax of the novel was a fire that claimed the life of the father. As a tribute to him, the son gave up his dream of traveling the globe and took his father's place in the shop. In real life, Paul's father died in his own bed at the ripe old age of seventy-six. And Paul became a writer and never worked a day of his life in the shop. This was his usual method of placing a fictional story against a very real background.”
“Right, Susan,” Meredith said. “That was his pattern throughout all his books—Come Home, Come Home and Dialogue at Midnight The same Frenchtown background but the characters—he disguised them all. Why? Because French-town is a small place, everybody knows everybody, would recognize real people … But now he's naming names, actual streets. It's as if—”
A slow dawning on my part as I listened to her speak, watched as she frowned, cleared her throat, positioned the paperweight exactly in the center of the table.
“As if what?”
“This sounds crazy, I know, but—as if he were writing an autobiography. The details check out. Paul was thirteen years old in 1938 and so is the fictional character—whose name also happens to be Paul. During the years I was his agent, I visited Monument several times because Paul would never come to New York. Even when Dialogue at Midnight won the Coover. The Coover is even greater than the Pulitzer—it's not awarded every year, only when a deserving novel comes along. But Paul would not attend the banquet to receive the award, something other writers would kill for. He wrote a speech that he asked me to deliver. He also avoided publication parties—Harbor House is famous for the fancy bashes they throw when their important writers publish. Paul skipped them. He always threw a party in Monument but invited no one from the publishing world, except me. So, I got to know him and his family. Your grandfather Jules. His mother and father. His brother Armand, and his twin sisters, especially his youngest sister, Rose, whom he obviously adored. They are all there in the manuscript, Susan. The entire family, exactly as he described them to me when he talked about his childhood.”
I said nothing, waited for her to go on, knew there was more to come.
“What also puzzles me is this—why did he ask that lawyer to hold the manuscript until 1988? So that people who are recognizable in the story might not be alive?”
“But most of them are alive, Meredith. My grandfather, his brother Armand, his sisters …”
“The old folks aren't. His mother and father. Most of his aunts and uncles are dead—those who aren't are very old now. Perhaps Paul wanted that time span to protect them. He probably figured that his contemporaries, like your grandfather, would not be hurt or upset by the story….”
“Why should anybody be upset?” I asked. “They weren't upset by his other novels.”
“This isn't like his other novels….”
What she was hinting at was preposterous, of course. And yet—
I felt the color draining from my cheeks. At the same time wondered if a person could actually/èe/ color draining from her cheeks. Ridiculous.
“What is it?” Meredith asked.
“Nothing.” But it was something, something my grandfather had told me during one of my visits to Monument. But I did not want to talk about that now. Not yet.
“Meredith, what are you planning to do with the manuscript? Is it publishable? It seems like only part of a novel….”
“Oh, it's publishable, all right. Not as a novel, naturally, but as part of a collection of Paul's writings.” Her tone was now businesslike, untroubled, the agent speaking. “Harbor House has been talking for some time about bringing out a collection of Paul's essays, reviews, some of the short stories that have not been published in book form before. This manuscript would fit right in. Imagine, an unpublished work by Paul Roget. Could be the centerpiece. But—”
“Why are you so doubtful?”
She sighed, hugely, sank back onto the sofa, no longer the agent. “Did Paul mean it to be published?”
“He arranged to have it sent to you, didn't he? You are his agent—your business is getting stuff published.”
“I know, I know …” She picked up the manuscript. “
But I realize how troubled his later years were. He stopped writing, secluded himself. And then this manuscript appears out of nowhere. A puzzling manuscript. I wondered whether I should be the person to make a decision about it. Whether someone in Paul's family should be involved. Someone who could give me an objective opinion. So, I went to your grandfather …”
“Gramps? But he was Paul's cousin, grew up with him. How could he be more objective?”
“He's a detective. An investigator. His job is finding facts, the truth. So, I went to Monument, two weeks ago. Took the manuscript with me. Asked him to read it, to give me an opinion. What kind of opinion, he wanted to know. I said— but wait, Susan. You can read what he said.”
On the way to her desk, she spoke over her shoulder: “As I suspected, your grandfather is a very methodical man. He sent me a report.” She pulled open a drawer and withdrew an ordinary white envelope. Paused as she pondered the envelope, and then brought it across the room. Handed it to me.
“Read it,” Meredith said. “Then we'll talk….”
As I opened the envelope I realized that not once during our conversation had Meredith and I mentioned the fade.
DATE: 7/3/88
TO: Ms. Meredith E. Martin
FROM: Lt. Jules J. Roget
SUBJECT: Untitled Manuscript of Paul Roget
What follows is my report on the manuscript you presented to me in my office on 6/30/88.
When you sat across from me that day, I could see that you were obviously troubled by the manuscript. Since I am not a literary critic, I deduced that your concern had to do with facts and figures you wished me to check out or even the possibility of libelous statements. Paul always stuck close to the truth in his books and stories, and often it took someone familiar with the scene to show where reality ended and fiction began.
I must admit that it was a shock to “hear” Paul's voice again so many years after his death. More than once, I had to discontinue reading as emotions overcame me. Despite the sadness, I was pleased that you brought me the manuscript, Meredith. Because of your frequent visits to Monument and Frenchtown through the years and your long devotion to Paul and his career, my family and I feel that you are one of us.
To return to the business at hand:
During the course of reading the manuscript, I realized that you had not been asking me to check facts and figures, after all. I know now the nature of the question that you wanted to ask but hesitated to put into words.
Let me answer the question:
This narrative is not autobiographical.
I will present evidence in this report to support my conclusion that what Paul has written is completely fiction.
Let us first consider invisibility.
The fade—as Paul called it—is impossible to accept as fact. Any rational person has to reject it as being fantasy of the wildest kind. Paul always dealt with realism in his novels and never showed any tendency toward science fiction or fantasy. However, he was addicted to the movies like so many of us who were members of the double-feature generation of the thirties and forties. A great many of those movies, particularly the serials of those days, dealt with the fantastic. For instance: the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials, which dealt with adventures in space. More than that, there was a film that was impossible to forget, which had a definite impact on viewers, both young and old, of that era. The film—The Invisible Man starring Claude Rains. It's possible, I believe, that Paul received the idea for the fade from the movie and waited several years before using the idea in order to find his own approach to the subject.
Aside from all this, I think no one can doubt that invisibility, whether it's called the fade or by any other name, is impossible to achieve.
The fade, all by itself, proves that the narrative is fiction.
This is such an obvious conclusion, however, that I feel that you were searching for other evidence or even searching for something that doesn't exist.
To fulfill what I feel is my responsibility, I will indicate other instances to support my belief that this work is fiction.
The photograph, for instance.
We must deal immediately with the photograph because it is the centerpiece of the story, without which Paul might not have embarked on the narrative at all.
The photograph was certainly real and actually existed. I speak in the past tense because it has evidently been either lost or destroyed. I have spent a good deal of time trying to track down the photograph since reading the narrative and have questioned my aunt Olivine and uncle Edgar about the picture. (They are my only surviving aunt and uncle.) In her old age (she is now eighty-seven) Aunt Olivine speaks constantly of Canada and the small farm on which she grew up. She recalls very clearly the day the photograph was taken because she was heartsick at the thought of leaving Canada and coming to the States. She recalls that Adelard was not in the picture but dismissed his absence as another of his pranks (he was always a pest, she said). She then began to talk about the day she was confirmed in the small church in St. Jacques and it was impossible for me to bring her back to the subject of the picture. When I asked again about Adelard, her eyes glazed over and she soon fell asleep.
My uncle Edgar also has very specific memories of the photograph. Although in his late seventies, he works as a handyman around St. Jude's Church doing odd jobs. He says that his father —Paul's grandfather and mine—would never discuss the photograph because he had thought Adelard's absence from the picture on the eve of starting a new life in a new country was a bad omen. Uncle Edgar is a very practical man. He does not believe in omens. He has always believed that Adelard tricked the photographer by ducking out of sight at the crucial moment.
Uncle Edgar did not know what had become of the picture. He also did not know what had happened to the photo album itself. He said that when his parents died (within five weeks of each other in 1965), their sons and daughters, Edgar included, each took pictures of particular personal value to them from the album. Uncle Edgar selected a photograph of his sisters posing on the front lawn of the family home on Eighth Street. He never saw the album or the other pictures again.
I also questioned Paul's brother Armand and his twin sisters about the photograph, all on separate occasions. (His youngest sister, Rose, died of a brain tumor in 1978.) Armand and Yvette said they had been aware of the picture and remembered glancing at it now and then with a measure of curiosity but no more than that. Yvonne told me that she had never actually seen the photograph and only dimly remembered hearing it discussed. In my conversations with them, I brought up the subject of Paul's idiosyncrasies—his refusal to have his picture taken or to drive a car—hoping to find other clues to his behavior that might lend credence to the events in the manuscript. The answers were negative.
Fearing that I was taking a terrible risk, I asked each of them, “Did Paul ever disappear from sight?” I learned that there was no risk, really, because none of them took the question literally. Armand's reply was typical: “Oh, he dropped out of sight now and then but always came back to Frenchtown.”
I have withheld my own comment on the photograph until I had reported on the reactions of others. Yes, I remember it well, but I don't remember, as Paul claims on page two of his manuscript, that I first told him of its mystery and swore him to secrecy. I have underlined those words to emphasize their importance as an instance where I am directly involved in the manuscript and where my own memory does not support what Paul has written. I cite this as vital evidence that Paul embarked on a work of fiction when he began to write about the photograph and the fade. I heard the same stories Paul heard but did not pay much attention to them. My uncle Adelard was such a vagabond character in my life that he hardly existed for me.
So much for the photograph. I admit that it remains an enigma and that its existence, with or without explanation, was enough to inspire someone with Paul's sense of drama to make an imaginative leap from the impossible to the possible. After all, his trade has always been
the writing of fiction. He once told me that his entire literary career was the answer to a very simple question: “What if?”
Let me now turn to the characters and the setting of the narrative. It is obvious that Paul again is demonstrating his talent for taking real people in a real place and transforming them into fictional characters in an artificial setting. He seizes the truth and molds it to the design he has in mind. His characters, particularly those in this fragment, appear to be real when seen from a distance but they are much different when viewed close up.
Aunt Rosanna, for instance.
Aunt Rosanna was not the person in real life that Paul created on the page. I have a vivid picture of her and I also heard my parents discussing her at length through the years. If he loved her—and this, of course, is possible—I saw no inkling of his passion, no hints at all. I don't wish to disparage her looks or her character but she was not exactly the beauty or the sweet victim that Paul made her out to be. She was pretty, yes, but in the common everyday manner of any healthy young woman. She was plump, if anything, and liked garish clothing—her favorite color seemed to be orange—and always wore high heels, as Paul indicated. Her hair was her best feature (I remember my mother saying) and she had a flair for hairdressing. Other people's hair, that is. Her own hair always looked frowsy and windblown. She was a person of good nature, however, an easy mark for a loan and would not hurt a fly, my mother said. But she had bad luck with men.
As far as her relationship with Rudolphe Toubert is concerned, there was no doubt among members of the family that he was the father of her child. (It was not the well-kept secret Paul made it out to be.) But I don't think anyone believed that Rudolphe seduced an innocent girl. There is no reason to suppose that Rosanna was even a virgin when she took up with him.
Rosanna was one of the few students actually expelled from St. Jude's Parochial School. In the seventh grade when she was thirteen years old, she was caught by Mr. LeFarge in the boys’ basement (the nuns’ name for toilet) doing a striptease while six or seven boys cheered her on, tossing coins at her feet. Mr. LeFarge, who believed in live and let live—probably because he spent most of his time at the cemetery among the dead—did not report the incident to the nuns or the priests (the boys themselves spread the word), but Rosanna was discovered later that year by Mother Superior in one of the broom closets off the second-floor corridor. She was with two boys, performing an act that Mother Superior could not bring herself to describe, although she let it be known that it was certainly a mortal sin worthy of damnation to hell.