For the last time we climbed the tall pyramid, El Castillo. "We don't have to go on, you know," I told Mrs. Brown, halfway up. The day was so bright and hot it almost tasted of gunpowder, and she had left her hat in the car, where Jesus was now napping. She paused on the stone step, shading her eyes with one flat hand, her hair blowing back like the mermaid on the prow of a ship. She had removed her gloves to use both hands for the climb, the steps were that monstrous. "Of course we do," she said, sighing deeply as if to say, "Men do this." And that is a fact, men do, unable to resist the same impulse that built the thing in the first place: senseless ambition.
But the view from the top, we convinced ourselves, was worth the pain. We sat on a ledge looking down on the tourists in the plaza, pitying those little ants because they were not up here, and if they ever meant to be, they would have to pay the price. And there is the full sum of it, senseless ambition reduced to its rudiments. Civilizations are built on that, and a water hole.
"Imagine the place crawling with slaves and kings," I said.
"Ten thousand slaves to every one king, I'd imagine."
And barking dogs. And mothers, wondering if their children have fallen down the well. We stayed a good while, reconstructing the scene. She was curious about how a writer decides where to begin the story. You start with "In the beginning," I told her, but it should be as close to the end as possible. There's the trick.
"How can you know?"
"You just decide. It could be right here. In the first light of dawn, the king in maroon robes and a golden breastplate stood atop his temple, glowering down at the chaos. He understood with dismay that his empire was collapsing. You have to get right into the action, readers are impatient. If you dilly-dally, they'll go turn on the radio and listen to Duffy's Tavern instead, because it's all wrapped up in an hour."
"How could the king know his empire is about to collapse?"
"Because everything's in a mess."
"Fiddlesticks," she said. "Everything's always a mess, but people say 'Buck up, we just have to get through this one bad patch.'"
"True enough. But you and I know it was, because we've read about it. Chichen Itza was the center of a vast and powerful empire, art and architecture that flourished for centuries. And then around 900 after Christ, it mysteriously vanished."
"People don't vanish," she said. "Hitler took his life, but Germany is still there. Just for example. People going to work and having their birthdays and what all."
True enough, and the Mayans who now people this forest surely do not think of themselves as a failed culture. They build their huts of ancient design, make gardens, and sing children to sleep. Rulers and generals change without their notice. In the time since Cortes, the great Spanish empire has collapsed into one small landmass of rock and vineyards, the little right paw of Europe. Its far-flung provinces have been lost, the million shackled subjugates set free. Spain outlawed slavery, built schools and hospitals, and its poets, come to think of it, are practically in a contest now to condemn the Spanish history of conquest. Did Cortes see all that roaring toward him like a steam locomotive? Did England or France? All this earnest forward motion, the marches to the mountain, the murals and outstretched hands: which part of it do we ever call failure?
"A novel needs a good collapse," I maintained. "Success and failure. People read books to escape the uncertainties of life. And they build pyramids to last forever, so we can have something to climb on top of and admire."
"You know best," she said. "But there's no use admiring a thing just because it lasted. My brother once had a boil on his bottom a whole year, and it was nothing you'd want to see in the photogravure."
"Violet Brown, the poet."
She laughed.
"I'll remind you of that boil, next time you try to stop me from burning old notebooks and letters."
She didn't like that. She pulled her thin cotton gloves from under her belt where she'd tucked them. Put them on, smoothed ruffled feathers. "Some things are worth remembering, and some are not. That's all I meant."
"And you can say which is which?"
"No, I can't. But piling rocks on top of rocks might not be the ticket. Maybe we should admire people the most for living in this jungle without leaving one mark on it."
"But how would we know about them a thousand years later?"
"In a thousand years, Mr. Shepherd, the cow can jump over the moon."
That was the end of it, because a rising storm cloud began to turn the day a menacing color, driving us down from our aerie. The heavens let loose as we reached the ground. Children who'd been hawking woodcarvings and embroidery now disappeared into the forest for shelter, while the tourists hurried back to their autos. Behind us the temples stood in the strange yellow light with rain darkening their stone pates, dissolving their limestone one particle at a time, carrying off the day's measure of history.
PART 5
Asheville, North Carolina
1948-1950
(VB)
Star Week, February 1, 1948
Southern Star Shines on Shepherd Romance
Young men in the Land of Sky seem to prefer the taste of old wine. A decade ago in Ashville, North Carolina, young writer Thomas Wolfe rocketed to fame, fleeing Southern scandal for Manhattan's forgiving bohemian scene and the arms of a lady seventeen years his senior. The writer's family tried to squelch the match with comely theater designer Aline Bernstein--that's Mrs. Bernstein--and so did Mr. Bernstein, we're guessing. But Wolfe carried the torch to an early grave.
Now Harrison Shepherd is out to prove history repeats. This Ashville writer rode his pen to the heights with Vassals of Majesty and last year's Pilgrims of Chaltepec, ringing up more sales than Wolfe saw in a lifetime. Thanks to secretive habits and a well-known scorn for press correspondents, Shepherd has nudged over Wolfe as the talk of his town. In a new move plainly inspired by his tutor, Shepherd has now linked up with a lady exactly seventeen years his senior. Married? At least once, say our sources.
Little else is known about the mysterious Violet Brown, but the trim brunette must have some powerful lure for snaring this diffident bachelor and his piles of cash. You could hear the hearts crack on both sides of the Mason-Dixon last month as the couple took a pre-honeymoon tour through Mexico, Shepherd's boyhood home, where his family still resides.
Did Mamacita approve the January-May romance? Do wedding bells toll for Harrison Shepherd? Not just yet, says airport clerk Jack Curtis, who viewed the couple's passports on their recent return to the Ashville-Hendersonville airport. Mr. Tall, Dark and Handsome kept a tight hand on his Shrinking Violet, but as of January 26 she is on the books as "widowed." And the bachelor? Curtis reports: "still single."
February 6
When she came in with both arms loaded and dumped the mail and papers in a heap on the dining room table, my first thoughts were purely selfish. Alas, this mess. The world comes in. I'd wanted her to take more days off after our return, craving time upstairs undisturbed. To be in my pajamas still at suppertime, the shades still drawn, reeling out my tale of Lord Itza and his troubles. A story needs a good collapse.
She began talking before she'd unbuttoned her coat, plainly out of sorts. She is not like that, filling up a silence with idle talk, the goings-on at Mrs. Bittle's while we were away. Then came the report that Mr. Judd had died, on Christmas Day.
So that was it, I thought. I gave condolences.
"Well, it was his time. Even Marian Bittle thought so, and she is not one for philosophy. She said the son came right away and took care of everything, so she could go on with her Christmas. But this is what floored her. Before the old man was even buried, nine people read the obituary and came asking to let the room. Some of them had families, can you imagine? Wanting to bring a wife and children, all to live in the one room. There's no rooms for let anywhere. It's all the war marriages, and now these babies nobody thought to expect. Mrs. Bittle says a man bought a potato field outside town and is putting up two
hundred houses out there, just houses, she says, not a single shop for them to get their goods. I suppose they'll have to come all the way into town for that. And the houses all alike, maybe each one is a little different shade of color, but the same house over and over, lined up in a row."
"Goodness. It sounds like Moscow. Who would live in a place like that?"
"Well, that's the thing. The plan is for two hundred houses. But seven hundred families are already lined up to buy them."
Then she sat down at the table and began to sob. It has never happened before. The day the agent came to the door she felt faint afterward, and put her head on the table, but this was different. Her shoulders racked. She let out a thin, throbbing wail.
"Now, it can't be as bad as that." I sounded like an actor in a play. Two absurd people in this room, and I had not been introduced to either one. I was still thinking somehow her distress went back to the housing shortage.
She'd seen the first of the stories several days ago, but didn't phone, hoping to spare me embarrassment for a while. Or else, not knowing what to say. All the stories linking us romantically, she has been carrying that alone. Remarks and stares at the library and the market. I know she is often recognized.
I couldn't read much of it. It made me feel too helpless, lost in some landscape of murdered truth. Lev would have been scientific, tracking the trail of this particular prevarication, studying how the branches diverged and where the thing started. Probably in Star Week or the Echo, though the story also made the reputable papers, and of course the Trumpet. It always begins somewhere, one howler waking up the others. They pass it on, embellished, not through any creative drive but only a pure slothful failure to verify a fact. If the reporters made any calls, it would have been for soliciting a denial. Failing that, they run it as truth, upping the ante just enough to put their own byline on it. The lady is "demure" and then "fatally demure" and then has a "tragic past." I am evidently now locked in a battle with an "old-fashioned Mexican family" over my right to pursue the love match.
Only when I made the coffee did I see my hands were shaking. I have had dreams of being shot, watching the blood pour out, and wondering whether it hurts.
I set a cup near her elbow, but couldn't sit down opposite her, not like a husband facing a wife across a meal. We used to do that at Mrs. Bittle's, of course, when I was the cook and she the worldly secretary. A lot of water under the bridge. I stood.
After a time she sat up, and looked at the coffee strangely, as if it had been delivered by fairies. It struck me like a draught of cold air then, about Mrs. Bittle and the housing shortage. "Is she making you move out because of this?"
"She raised my monthly rate. She said she would have to, if I meant to stay there. Due to the publicity."
"That's ridiculous. You're in a bind, and she's taking advantage. Do you want me to call her?"
"How would that look, Mr. Shepherd? You protecting me."
"I don't know."
"I'll pay it. She knows I couldn't find a single other room in town, with things the way they are."
"Is the shortage really as bad as that?" Of course it is in the papers, everywhere. It just didn't occur that everywhere was here.
"Folks read the obituaries and the homicides now, Mr. Shepherd, to find a room let open. But the police and the undertaker families get those. The rest of us had just as well reckon the next house to open up for us will be the cedar box."
"Mrs. Brown, goodness. This isn't like you." It weighed: these rooms I have, riches undeserved. For a single person who could easily live in little more than a cedar box, and frequently has.
"Anyhow, I've gone years without a hike at Mrs. Bittle's," she said. "The new man is paying twice as much. I'm lucky to have what I have."
"I'll raise your salary to compensate for it."
"You needn't."
"No, I will. If you can find another place suitable, tell me what it costs."
She went to the water closet and ran the water in there, probably washing her face. When she came out she retrieved the letter opener from the drawer where she keeps it, like the woman in a play who draws the revolver from the bureau. Instead of shooting the villain, she sat down and began to sort envelopes into piles. Not glancing up.
"Look. I'll talk to the presses about this, or send out a statement. Denying the romance business. Whatever you want me to do, to defend your name."
"I'm nobody, I don't have any name. It's your own you have to think about."
"Well, in that case there's nothing to be done. This is just more of the usual, we could have expected it. I should have thought, before I asked you to go with me."
She began slitting envelopes open. Her hair was in a net, her wool sweater buttoned to the throat; she looked ten years older than when I'd seen her last.
"At least it can't get any worse now. We're walking away from the wreck," I said. "It's just what happens."
"What happens?" she asked, in a curiously snipped tone.
"Del arbol caido todos hacen lena. From the fallen tree everybody makes firewood."
At that she looked up. "Mr. Shepherd, where did we fall?"
February 14
Dear Shep,
What's tickin? Be my valentine? Oops--you're taken! I read all about it in the papers. Well, hats off to you pal, I've thought of bagging an older pigeon for myself. She wouldn't ask for a lot in the boodle department and it throws everyone else off the scent. But the hell you yell. One of the hearts you cracked north of the Mason-Dixon was mine. Did I have to read about it in the Echo?
When are you coming to New York? The new job at the museum is steady, mostly sweetening up the top cats for cash. I've got an apartment in the Lower East Seventies now, very voot. Kerouac was spotted in the neighborhood, and Artie Shaw plays in a joint on the corner. But forget about bebop, keep your eye out now for a potent lad named Frankie Laine. Tell him Tom-cat sent you.
Are you the only news in Asheville these days? Howzabout that old girl Zelda, think she'd marry me? I hear she resides in one of the white-coat joints there in your fair city. Did Scott come around on visiting days, when he was still kicking? You need to cut me in on the juicy stuff. Or are you riding so high on the rocket to fame, you can't throw your old pal a saludo? From now on I'll just have to read Star Week to find out what's oop-pop-a-da with Harrison Shepherd.
Dig you later,
TOM CUDDY
March 11, 1948
Dear Tom,
It's strange you asked about Zelda Fitzgerald. She died in a fire two nights ago. It started in the hospital kitchen and went up the dumbwaiter shaft into her room, a freak tragedy. There's no guessing what the national presses will say, but I'm cutting you in on the scoop as you asked. I heard about the dumbwaiter from the fire marshal himself, this morning at the tobacco stand where I get the morning papers. Highland Hospital is just at the top of my street. Zelda and I have been neighbors for years, but I haven't given her much thought. Now I feel like a bum. It could have been any of us in that hospital, Tom.
The rest of my news is not such a bring-down. I am coming along very well on the new book, and have signed a motion-picture package on the last one. Most definitely, I am not married, or involved in any secret romance. Those stories are completely invented. The Violet Brown in question is my stenographer. She wears cotton gloves indoors and unless some terrible accident has deceived us, never has shared a coffee cup that touched my lips. She accompanied me on the research trip to Yucatan, so the gossip-marketers must have learned about it and fallen in love with their fantasies. Believe me, the lady is chaste. This latest run of stories has been very troubling, harder for her than for me. I'm constantly stupefied that anyone believes the nonsense that runs in the papers. And yet they do, time and again. Tommy, you ought to know I am not one for marriage, any more than I was one for the army, back when you and I were ducking bullets for the National Museum. So put your poor cracked heart back together, soldier. I didn't snub you from any wedding list.<
br />
I have no plans for New York soon, but you should visit here. Asheville has changed since the war, we are said to be a tourist destination, first rate. Out on the Tunnel Road they have a brand-new contraption that will wash and wax an auto with the driver still in it. We have instant coffee here too, and lady drivers. Are we voot? You shall have to come and see for yourself. Until then I am, as you may have heard,
Still single,
SHEP
March 22
Dear Shep,
My friends are all green that I am hep to Shep, especially when I told them about your movie package. Holy Joe, congrats on that. Could you find a tiny role for me? I'll be the lad in the loincloth sitting on a rock, smoking a herd of Camels during the battle scene, trying to sneak a gander at Robert Taylor. Lord and Butler, that fellow is cuter than snappers. And pointing the finger at anything pink now, I see in the papers.
Please advise: a friend here seems to be in that kind of hash. He works in radio but has the looks for television--Puerto Rican, a Latin dreamboat type. With brains, even, this boy reads, and very impressed I know you, by the way. Up until last year he was a steaming romeo. Now he can't get hired for anything. He was mixed up with the Communists ages ago, and it's a gestanko scene for those cats now, people are even getting deported. It happened to a Negro lady I knew from the museum, a writer who reviews our shows for the Harlem papers. I didn't even know she was foreign. Evidently her family came from Trinidad in the '20s when she was a tiny tot. So one day this lady is typing her story on Negro artists, then the FBI knocks on her door and she's cooling her heels on Ellis Island, next stop Trinidad. You can see why my Puerto Rican pal is worried. You're a foreigner too. He says to ask if you know some cat in the higher-ups who could help him out.
The hell you yell, Asheville has instant coffee now? I might have to come and review the action myself. The boss sends me out on the trail to beat the gums with the richie riches, so they'll loan out their Picassos for our big shows. Lately he's been scobo for the Vanderbilts. So wipe your feet on the mat, cat, I might be headed for your roost.