I found Tom in the book and telephoned him.
“Good God, is that you, Charlie?” he cried. “Good grief, come on over. What’s new? Lord, it’s been years! Why are you—”
I told him what I was calling about.
“Sally? Haven’t seen her in years. Hey, I hear you’re doing okay, Charlie. Salary in five figures, right? Pretty good for a guy from across the tracks.”
There hadn’t been any tracks, really; just an invisible line nobody could see but everyone felt.
“Hey, when can we see you, Charlie?”
“Give you a call soon.”
“She was a sweet girl, Sally. I’ve told my wife about her. Those eyes. And hair color that didn’t come out of a bottle. And—”
As Tom talked on, a lot of things came back. The way she listened, or pretended to listen, to all my grand talk about the future. It suddenly seemed she had never talked at all. I wouldn’t let her. With the sublime dumb ego of a young man I filled up the nights and days with building tomorrows and tearing them down and building them again, just for her. Looking back, I was embarrassed for myself. And then I remembered how her eyes used to take fire and her cheeks flush with my talking, as if everything I said was worth her time and life and blood. But in all the talk, I couldn’t remember ever saying I loved her. I should have. I never touched her, save to hold her hand, and never kissed her. That was a sadness now. But I had been afraid that if I ever made one mistake, like kissing, she would dissolve like snow on a summer night, and be gone forever. We went together and talked together, or I talked, rather, for a year. I couldn’t remember why we broke up. Suddenly, for no reason, she was gone, around the same time we both left school forever. I shook my head, eyes shut.
“Do you remember, she wanted to be a singer once, she had a swell voice,” said Tom. “She—”
“Sure,” I said. “It all comes back. So long.”
“Wait a minute—” said his voice, being hung back on the receiver hook.
I went back to the old neighborhood and walked around. I went in the grocery stores and asked. I saw a few people who I knew but who didn’t remember me. And finally I got a line on her. Yes, she was married. No, they weren’t sure of the address. Yes, his name was Maretti. Somewhere on that street down that way and over a few blocks, or maybe it was the other way.
I checked the name I the phone book. That should have warned me. No phone.
Then by asking questions at some grocery stores down the line, I finally got the Maretti address. Third apartment, fourth floor, rear, number 407.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked myself, going up the stairs, climbing in the dim light in the smell of old food and dust. “Want to show her how well you’ve done, is that it?
“No,” I told myself. “I just want to see Sally, someone from the old days. I want to get around to telling her what I should have told her years ago, that, in my own way, at one time, I loved her. I never told her that. But I was afraid. I’m not afraid now that it doesn’t make any difference.
“You’re a fool,” I said.
“Yes,” I said, “but aren’t we all.”
I had to stop to rest on the third landing. I had a feeling, suddenly, in the thick smell of ancient cooking, in the close, whispering darkness of TVs playing too loud and distant children crying, that I should walk down out of the house before it was too late.
“But you’ve come this far. Come on,” I said. “One more flight.”
I went up the last stairs slowly and stood before an unpainted door. Behind it, people moved and children talked. I hesitated. What would I say? Hello, Sally, remember the old days when we went boating in the park and the trees were green and you were as slender as a blade of grass? Remember the time that—well.
I raised my hand.
I knocked on the door.
It opened and a woman answered. I’d say she was about ten years older, maybe fifteen, than me. She was wearing a two-dollar basement dress which didn’t fit, and her hair was turning gray. There was a lot of fat in the wrong places, and lines around her tired mouth. I almost said, “I’ve got the wrong apartment, I’m looking for Sally Maretti.” But I didn’t say anything. Sally was a good five years younger than me. But this was she, looking out of the door into the dim light. Behind her was a room with a battered lampshade, a linoleum floor, one table, and some old brown overstuffed furniture.
We stood looking at each other across twenty-five years. What could I say? Hello, Sally, I’m back, here I am, prosperous, on the other side of town now, here I am, a good car, home, married, children through school, here I am president of a company, why didn’t you marry me and you wouldn’t be here? I saw her eyes move to my Masonic ring, to the boutonniere in my lapel, to the clean rim of the new hat in my hand, to my gloves, to my shined shoes, to my Florida-tanned face, to my Bronzini tie. Then her eyes came back to my face. She was waiting for me to do one thing or the other. I did the right thing.
“I beg your pardon,” I said. “I’m selling insurance.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “We don’t need any.”
She held the door open for just a moment as if at any moment she might burst open.
“Sorry to have bothered you,” I said.
“That’s all right,” she said.
I looked beyond her shoulder. I had been wrong. There were not five children, but six at the dinner table with the husband, a dark man with a scowl stamped on his brow.
“Close the door!” he said. “There’s a draft.”
“Good night,” I said.
“Good night,” she said.
I stepped back and she closed the door, her eyes still on my face.
I turned and went down the street.
I had just stepped off the bottom of the brownstone steps when I heard a voice call out behind me. It was a woman’s voice. I kept walking. The voice called again and I slowed, but did not turn. A moment later someone put a hand on my elbow. Only then did I stop and look around.
It was the woman from apartment 407 above, her eyes almost wild, her mouth gasping, on the point of tears.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and almost pulled back but then gathered herself to say, “This is crazy. You don’t happen to be, I know you’re not, you aren’t Charlie McGraw, are you?”
I hesitated while her eyes searched my face, looking for some halfway familiar feature among all the oldness.
My silence made her uneasy. “No, I didn’t really think you were,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Who was he?”
“Oh, God,” she said, eyes down, stifling something like a laugh. “I don’t know. Maybe a boyfriend, a long time ago.”
I took her hand and held it for a moment. “I wish I were,” I said. “We should have had a lot to talk about.”
“Too much, maybe.” A single tear fell from her cheek. She backed off. “Well, you can’t have everything.”
“No,” I said, and gave her back her hand, gently.
My gentleness provoked her to a last question.
“You’re sure you’re not Charlie?”
“Charlie must’ve been a nice fellow.”
“The best,” she said.
“Well,” I said, at last. “So long.”
“No,” she said. “Good-bye.” She spun about and ran to the steps and ran up the steps so quickly that she almost tripped. At the top she whirled suddenly, her eyes brimmed, and lifted her hand to wave. I tried not to wave back but my hand went up.
I stood rooted to the sidewalk for a full half minute before I could make myself move. Jesus, I thought, every love affair I ever had I ruined.
I got back to the bar near closing time. The pianist, for some obscure reason, hating to go home was probably it, was still there.
Taking a double shot of brandy and working on a beer, I said,
“Whatever you do, don’t play that piece about wherever she may go, wherever she may be, if no one wants her now, please send her back to me …
”
“What song is that?” said the pianist, hands on the keys.
“Something,” I said. “Something about … what was her name? Oh, yeah. Sally.”
Nothing Changes
There is this truly wonderful bookstore by the ocean where you can hear the tide under the pier, shaking the shop, the books on the shelves, and you.
The shop is dark and has a tin roof above the ten thousand books from which you blow dust in order to turn pages.
And it is not just the tide below but the tide above that I love when storm rains shatter that tin roof, banging it like orchestras of machine-gun-cymbal-and-drum. Whenever it is a dark midnight at noon, if not in my soul, like Ishmael, I head for the storm beneath and the storm above, tambourining the tin and knocking silverfish off forgotten authors, row on row. With my smile for a flashlight, I linger all day.
Pure hyperventilation in storms, I arrived one noon at White Whale Books, where I walked, slowly, to the entrance. My anxious taxi driver pursued with his umbrella. I held him off. “Please,” I said. “I want to get wet!”
“Nut!” cried the cabbie and left.
Gloriously damp, I ducked inside, shook myself like a dog, and froze, eyes shut, hearing the rain bang that high tin roof.
“Which way?” I said to the darkness.
Intuition said left.
I turned and found, in the tintinnabulation of downpour (what a great word: tintinnabulation!) stacks of shelves of old high school annuals which I usually avoid like funerals.
For bookshops are, by their nature, graveyards where old elephants drop their bones.
Uneasily, then, I prowled the high school yearbooks to read the spines: Burlington, Vermont, Orange, New Jersey, Roswell, New Mexico, big sandwiches of memorabilia from fifty states. I did not touch my own godforsaken yearbook, which lay buried with its scribbled time-capsule insults from the Great Depression: “Get lost, sappo. Jim.” “Have a great life, you should live so long. Sam.” “To a fine writer, lousy lover. Fay.”
I blew the dust off Remington High, Pennsylvania, to thumb through scores of baseball, basketball, football braves no longer brave.
1912.
I scanned ten dozen bright faces.
You, you, and you, I thought. Was your life good? Did you marry well? Did your kids like you? Was there a great first love and another later? How, how did it go?
Too many flowers here from too many biers. All those eager eyes staring above their wondrous smiles.
I almost shut the book but …
My finger stayed on the pictures of the 1912 graduating class, with World War I not yet, unimagined and unknown, when I blinked at one snapshot and gasped:
“My God! Charles! Old Charlie Nesbitt!”
Yes! Framed there in a far year, with his freckles, roostercomb hair, big ears, flared nostrils, and corncob teeth. Charles Woodley Nesbitt!
“Charlie!” I cried.
The rain buckshot the tin roof above. The cold blew down my neck.
“Charlie,” I whispered. “What’re you doing here?”
I carried the book out to a better light, heart thumping, and stared.
The name under the picture was Reynolds. Winton Reynolds.
Destined for Harvard
Wants to make a million.
Likes golf.
But the picture?
“Charlie, dammit!”
Charlie Nesbitt was god-awful homely, a tennis pro, top gymnast, speed swimmer, girl collector. How come? Did those ears, teeth, and nostrils make girls swarm? To be like him, we would have signed up for lessons.
And now here he was on a wrong page of an old book in a lost year with his berserk smile and crazed ears.
Could there once have been two Charlie Nesbitts alive? Identical twins, separated at birth? Hell. My Charlie was born in 1920, same as me. Wait!
I dodged back in the stacks to grab my 1938 yearbook and riffle the graduate photos until I found:
Wants to be a golf pro.
Heads for Princeton.
Hopes to be rich.
Charles Woodley Nesbitt.
The same goofy teeth, ears, and multitudinous freckles!
I placed the two annuals to study these seeming “twins.”
Seemed? No! Absolutely the same!
Rain drummed the high tin roof.
“Hell, Charlie, hell, Winton!”
I carried the books up front where Mr. Lemley, as old as his books, peered at me over his Ben Franklin specs.
“Found those, did you? Take ‘em. Free.”
“Mr. Lemley, look …”
I showed him the pictures and the names.
“I’ll be damned.” He snorted. “Same family? Brothers? Naw. Same fella, though. How’d you find this?”
“Just did.”
“Give me the collywobbles. Coincidence. One in a million births, right?”
“Yeah.” I turned the pages back and forth, over and over. “But what if all the faces in all the annuals in all the towns in all the states, hell, what if they all look alike!
“What’d I just say?” I cried, hearing myself.
What if all the faces in all the annuals were the same!
“Outta the way!” I shouted.
Tearing up the cabbage patch is how Mr. Lemley told it later. If the God of Vengeance and Terror was Shiva with many arms, I was a small but louder god, with a dozen hands seizing books, cursing at revelations, frights, and elations, alone, as witness to a big parade marching nowhere, with separate bands and different choirs in towns strewn across a blind world. From time to time as I leaped through the stacks, Mr. Lemley brought coffee and whispered: “Rest up.”
“You don’t understand!” I cried.
“No, I don’t. How old are you?”
“Forty-nine!”
“Act like a nine-year-old running up the aisle at a bad movie, peeing.”
“Good advice!” I ran and came back.
Mr. Lemley checked the linoleum for wet spots. “Continue.”
I seized more annuals:
“Ella, there’s Ella again. Tom, there’s Tom who looks like Joe, and Frank, a dead ringer for Ralph. Ringer, hell, spittin’ image! And Helen who’s a twin to Cora! And Ed and Phil and Morris to fit Roger and Alan and Pat. Christ!”
I had two dozen books butterflied, some torn in my haste. “I’ll pay, Mr. Lemley, I’ll pay!”
In the mist of the storm-fever I stopped on page 47 of the Cheyenne 1911 Book of High School Remembrances.
For there was the sap, the simpleton, the ignoramus, the shy wimp, the lost soul.
His name, in that lost year?
DOUGLAS DRISCOLL.
His message to the future?
Admired as a thespian.
Will soon join the unemployed.
Headed for literary distinction.
Poor fool, lost dreamer, final achiever.
Douglas Driscoll, Cheyenne, 1911.
Me.
My eyes streaming tears, I bumped my way out of the twilight stacks to show my melancholy gift to Mr. Lemley.
“Gosh.” He touched the picture. “That can’t be someone named Driscoll.
“That’s got to be,” he said, “you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Damn,” he said, softly. “You know this boy?”
“No.”
“Got any relatives in … Wyoming?”
“No, sir.”
“How’d you come on this?”
“Wild hunch.”
“Yeah, you really tore up the tundra.” He studied my identical twin, half a century ago. “What will you do? Look this fella up?”
“If graveyards count for looking.”
“It is a long time back. How about his kids, or grandkids?”
“What would I tell them? They wouldn’t necessarily look like him anyway.”
“Hell,” said Mr. Lemley. “If one kid looks like you, 1911, why not someone close. Twenty years ago, or, hot damn, this year?”
“Repeat that!” I cried.
“This year?”
“You got some? This year’s yearbooks?”
“God, I dunno. Hey, why are you doing this?”
“You ever feel,” I shouted, “you’re on the verge of a bombshell annihilating discovery?”
“Swimming once I found a big chunk of something awful. Ambergris! I thought. Sell it to a perfume factory for thousands! I ran to show the damned stuff to the lifeguard. Ambergris? Horseflies! I flung it back in the sea. That kind of annihilating discovery?”
“Maybe. Genealogies. Genetics.”
“From what year?”
“Lincoln,” I said. “Washington, Henry the Eighth. God, I feel as if I found all Creation, some obvious truth that’s been sitting right in front of us forever and we didn’t see. This could change history!”
“Or spoil it,” said Mr. Lemley. “You sure you ain’t been drinking back there in the stacks? Don’t stand there. Go!”
“One side or a leg-off,” I said.
I read and tossed, tossed and read, but there were no really new annuals. Phone calls and airmail was the answer.
“Jeez Christopher,” observed Mr. Lemley. “Can you afford to do that?”
“I’ll die if I don’t.”
“And die if you do. Closing time. Lights out.”
The annuals streamed in during the week before graduations all across the country.
I stayed up two nights, sleepless, riffling, Xeroxing pages, tallying lists, twinning pasteups of ten dozen new faces against ten dozen old.
Christ, I thought, you damn stupid blind idiot on a runaway train. How do you steer? Where the hell is it going? And, oh God, why?
I had no answers. Gone mad, I mailed and phoned, sent and got back, like a blind man in a closet sorting clothes, trying inanities, discarding reason.
The mail was an avalanche.
It could not be, and yet it was. All biological rules? Out the window. The history of flesh was what? Darwinian “Sport.” Genetic accidents that birthed new species. Derailed genes which spun the world afresh. But what if there were freak/sport replays? What if Nature hiccuped, and its needle jumped back? Then, having lost its genetic mind, wouldn’t it clone generation after generation of Williamses, Browns, and Smiths? Not related by family, no. But mindless rebirths, blind matter trapped in a mirror maze? Impossible.