And Sons (16 page)

You should go
.

And the sweet everything slipped from his hands.

Now Isabel was remarried and living in Litchfield, Connecticut.

Andrew, trying to fall asleep, wished his cramped arms could detach.

He wondered what A. N. Dyer would say when it came time for his last words?

James Joyce had asked, “Does nobody understand?”

And Heine had requested pencil and paper; Goethe more light.

Emily Dickinson had muttered, “I must go in, the fog is rising.”

We all have our last words, no matter our status. A week before my father labored through his, Andrew had visited the Morgan Library on Madison and 36th Street. Arthur Sinkler, its director, was courting him in hopes he might secure his papers, and he was showing Andrew a few of the library’s treasures, such as the original manuscript of
Lady Susan
, in Jane Austen’s lovely hand. But all Andrew could think of was poor Jane dying in bed, only forty-one years old, her beloved sister Cassandra asking if she needed anything, anything at all, and Jane answering, “Nothing but death.”

Arthur Sinkler mistook this silence for appropriate awe. “Fabulously immediate, isn’t it?” His enthusiasm was honest yet annoying, like a seller of high-end men’s apparel. Andrew assumed he came from nowhere, one of those self-made intellectuals who modeled themselves on the type of Ivy Leaguer Andrew so disliked: the premeditated WASP. That said, it was hard to rage against his dedication to form and pedigree; people like Arthur Sinkler gave meaning to these small implications, like an archeologist fitting together the shards of an ancient trash heap. “The ink still seems wet,” he practically gushed.

Andrew removed a handkerchief and coughed.

They were sitting around a table spread with various manuscripts, and if Andrew and Arthur were cordial at eleven and one o’clock respectively, an impatience negotiated the quarter-tos, with Sidney Garrow, the Morgan’s curator for literary and historical manuscripts, on one side, and Dennis Gilroy, A. N. Dyer’s literary agent, on the other.

“Never heard of
Lady Susan
,” Dennis said.

“It’s certainly not her finest work,” Sidney Garrow confirmed. “But it is the only surviving full manuscript of one of her novels, so in that way it’s quite important.”

Arthur frowned at this opinion. “Oh, I think the book’s quite wonderful, almost subversive. Lady Susan is this wicked Venus flytrap of a woman who catches these charmed men. It’s early Austen, and it was never published in her lifetime, but you can see her honing her craft and working through her eventual themes. It’s more novella than novel, an epistolary novella.”

Sidney Garrow slumped closer to twenty-to-whatever while Dennis Gilroy tried to smile without his usual smirk, which resulted in an approximation of good humor, like one of those rigged carnival games involving a water pistol and a clown’s open mouth. “An epistolary novella, hmm,” he said. “I’m sure her agent was pleased with that, and yes, I know dear Jane didn’t have an agent, only her brother Edward, and I know there’s a long, proud history, from
Pamela
to
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
to her own
Sense and Sensibility
, my personal favorite, but my God, talk about a hard sell.” This was classic Dennis Gilroy: to offer himself as a buffoon, a mere moneyman, then undercut that impression with an offhanded display of scholarship, thus deflating all pretension and leaving only cash, great piles of it, on the table. Many a writer owed him their second home. Dennis wooed A. N. Dyer after his longtime agent, Teddy Moran, retired to Greece so he could get pickpocketed by the local boys. “I’ve cut holes in all my pockets,” he wrote to Andrew from Naxos a few years before he drowned, “and glued a drachma to my inner thigh.” Teddy was a functional if expansive drunk who started his career as a copyright lawyer with a penchant for verse. “Give me the fringe rather than the infringement,” he would pronounce with a loony Irish accent by way of New Paltz. But Teddy had an eye for young talent, as well as a sharp editing pen, and even if you only understood 80 percent of what he muttered, the remaining 20 twisting around a warped and non sequiturial universe, you were charmed by his obscure delight. Once as a favor to Andrew (who was doing a favor for my father ((who was pressed by my mother to do a favor for me (((whom I begged not to ask for any favors)))))) Teddy Moran read my first unpublished novel, a miscarriage of deformed autobiography, and he was nice enough to treat me to a midtown lunch like a real writer. “You have the look of the dog chasing you,” he told me near the end of our meal, “and that dog won’t tire so you better grab a big fucking stick and start swinging. Do that and then give me a call.” Evidently Teddy Moran was obsessed with dogs. A. N. Dyer dedicated
Here Live Angry Dogs and Brutal Men
to
TM and his drugged honeycakes
.

“She was in terrible pain when she died,” Andrew said of Jane Austen.

Arthur and Sidney Garrow dipped their heads, ever respectful, but Dennis hoisted his smirk to full sail. “Oh, thanks for that fun thought.”

“They think she had Addison’s disease,” Andrew continued. “Suffered terribly, just terribly, severe vomiting and diarrhea, awful convulsions.” He picked up a pair of white conservator gloves and held them like a memento from the days when girls wore white gloves, dancing school days, debutante days, fifty years ago or two hundred years ago, the good old days. The gloves seemed tiny yet they fit his hands rather easily. Andrew regarded them theatrically. “Maybe ending that pain is what makes the end bearable.”

“You feeling all right?” asked Dennis. “Or is this just a mood?”

“I feel fine,” Andrew said, the words dank with disgust.

Arthur Sinkler changed subjects by reaching for another manuscript, wisely passing over Keats’s
Endymion
and Poe’s
Tamerlane
and Wilde’s
Dorian Gray
before landing on Trollope and pushing forward
The Way We Live Now
. “Have a look,” he said. “Hardly a revision on the page, the absolute cleanest working draft you will ever see. The man just wrote and wrote and wrote, finished
Ayala’s Angel
in the morning and after lunch started
Dr. Wortle’s School
.”

“I always hated his titles,” Andrew said. Without much enthusiasm he turned a couple of the pages housed inside a clamshell box, like a secret book hidden within a fake book. The words flowed free of second thought, not even an inky pause. Trollope wrote for money, hence the speed and output, and sometimes Andrew envied that motivation and was curious if he himself would have written more books, looser, faster, funnier books, if he had lived more hand to mouth and needed a real job, not in the postal service like Trollope, but maybe in advertising, with its brainstorming and sloganeering, its hard-to-please clients, its everyday exotic camaraderie. Andrew realized this was an absurd fantasy. Advertising? Please. And who could ever feel sorry for him? By all rights, A. N. Dyer’s life was enviable. Success came fast with
Ampersand
and, combined with a supportive and loving wife and a generous trust fund, he no longer had to pretend to have a job and could focus all of his attention on writing. A real privilege. Whatever baseless torments he suffered from he kept to himself, the amorphous misery that stagnated into self-fulfilling loneliness, like an affectation
that turns into a twitch. Hearing a kind word about one of his books was like going through a seppuku ceremony with his insides acting as the blade. Was it shame? Guilt? We all know how meeting a favorite writer can often be a disappointment, but imagine being that favorite writer who understands the disappointment intimately, who might manage to charm you by signing your book with one of twenty time-tested witticisms but who in the end knows the truth all too well, that this thing of beauty, this kind solace in a dying hour, is nothing more than a well-crafted ruse.

Arthur Sinkler reached for
Our Mutual Friend
. “Now look at Dickens.…”

Andrew had hoped that spending the morning at the Morgan would somehow push him away from the oncoming bus of his own head, plus Dennis had been begging him to take this meeting, since this was an opportunity to finally mint some real money from the A. N. Dyer name. But being in the presence of these manuscripts just made Andrew feel, well, to use a humble word, sad. The handwriting seemed too personal. Here were these people beyond their undying name; here was the evidence of their brief human existence. Where John Harmon was an abstraction, the hook of the
J
and the double cruciform of the
H
was pure Dickens, with his mess of revisions, his revisions of revisions, the unwieldy scratch and scrawl of a man more than a century dead. Andrew peeled off the gloves and let them drop on top of
Our Mutual Friend
. Arthur Sinkler was going on about the Trollope Society and how they pointed to the sloppiness as evidence of Dickens’s inferiority, but all Andrew heard was his own breath, innocuous yet terribly evident.

It was mid-morning.

The sunlight slanting through the window seemed delivered mid-dream.

He needed another Vicodin, maybe three.

In an office nearby a telephone rang.

Dennis Gilroy, sensing the drift, suggested moving the conversation forward, and after a nod from Arthur, Sidney Garrow removed his glasses, as if speaking and seeing were exclusive acts. “Over the course
of a week I made a cursory, and I do mean cursory, inspection of Mr. Dyer’s papers. I very much enjoyed my time in their company, and I thank you, Mr. Dyer, for your hospitality.”

“I hardly knew you were there,” Andrew said.

“Before I start I want to stress that in no way is this a proper catalog of your papers, which is something the Morgan can do and do extremely well. But let’s start with your letters. I made a rough count of three hundred twenty, which span six decades. Within that grouping there’s a very nice and full correspondence with your mother where we have both sides of the exchange. There’s also a complete but smaller correspondence between you and your stepfather.”

“Can’t believe I wrote to him at all,” Andrew said.

“Excuse my prying,” Sidney Garrow said, either grinning or cramping, “but are there any letters between you and your first wife?”

“First and only wife,” Andrew corrected. “If she hasn’t burned them, yes.”

“Any idea the number?”

The number? Well, there was a letter a week for five years, when he was in college and in the army, the letters short and superficially charming, giving Isabel a brief rundown of their time apart, all romance buried in the very-sincerely-yours and the hope-to-see-you-soons, once going as far as thinking-of-you. Only a few kisses had been exchanged and he was using these letters as more of a bookmark, hoping Isabel might remember their place when she ran into him in New York and maybe kiss him again. Which she did. Her lips were thin but strong and always tasted of the ocean. During his military service at Fort Jackson in South Carolina (he was trained in demolitions) Andrew began to fear her loss of interest as she attended Smith and came in contact with all types of Williams and Amherst men, God forbid those Harvard asses. His letters took on more incident, with the day-to-day labors embellished, such as blowing up the latrine or witnessing the sapper lose both legs, a few of them turning into outright fraud, as in the duck hunting trip to Meccapeek Plantation, where Charlie Topping made an appearance since Andrew knew Isabel liked Charlie and maybe liked Andrew for liking Charlie; in that letter Andrew had
Charlie chasing down a crippled teal through a flooded corn field, tripping all over and getting soaked and generally ruining the hunt, all in pursuit of a dying bird. As Andrew grew more confident with his writing, the truth became shorter, the bulk of the letters taken up by short stories he enclosed for Isabel to read, love, cherish, and possibly obey, secretly proposing to her with his first published piece,
Miserable Army
, though it took another two years before he went on bended knee and unscrambled those letters. “I have no idea,” Andrew said to Sidney Garrow.

“Maybe we can talk to her.”

“Good luck.”

“Of all the letters in the present collection,” Sidney Garrow continued, “the most noteworthy are the correspondences from Mr. Pell at Random House, and from your original agent, Mr. Moran. It’s great material, very apropos in terms of process and career. I particularly like the exchange concerning the cover of
Ampersand
.” Sidney Garrow turned to Arthur. “It seems they originally wanted an image of a tightly knotted school tie rather than the red schoolhouse door we know so well. Amazing to think. There’s also a small but strong batch from other writers, artists, figures of the day, but I wouldn’t say it’s an extensive grouping. Then we have friends, in particular Charles Topping. Now, three hundred twenty letters isn’t necessarily a large archive, but perhaps it’s not indicative of how many letters you yourself actually wrote.”

“I’d be shocked if I wrote half as many,” Andrew said.

Sidney Garrow—and always Sidney Garrow and never plain Sidney or Sid or even Mr. Garrow, his deep yet meek intelligence needing the brace of every syllable to prop up what seemed a delicate presence—straightened the single sheet of paper acting as his notes. “To be honest, the letters are not the strongest part. Which brings us to the notebooks. The notebooks, Mr. Dyer, are wonderful. I counted seventy-three, big and small, some full, some half-full, some barely full, but all loaded with terrific material. There are no journals or diaries, as far as I saw. I estimate over a thousand index cards and loose sheets of typescript, and those are jewels in terms of methodology and nuggets of prose. I also found six sketchbooks.”

Dennis gave Andrew a reappraising look. “You draw?”

“And draws quite well,” Sidney Garrow remarked.

Andrew grimaced. “In my youth. My mother saved everything.”

“That kind of ephemera is great,” Arthur told him.

Ephemera. Andrew imagined the most capricious of Greek goddesses.

“This brings us to the manuscripts,” Sidney Garrow said. “First, the short stories, mostly written early in your career, quite a few unpublished, which is always thrilling. I counted thirty-eight; that’s including the fourteen that were in the collection
M
. And then we have the novels. For the most part it seems that three drafts have been preserved for each book: the original draft, with the author’s notes and edits; the working draft with the editor’s notes and edits, for the most part Mr. Pell’s; and the corrected draft, first proof pages, with additional notes and edits from the author. I have to say it’s a real boon to have all these drafts together, to get a sense of the evolution. It’s really quite wonderful.” Sidney Garrow liberated a handkerchief and half-blew, half-wiped his nose. Andrew guessed that this man’s love of books started from a defensive position, a palisade in the palm of his hand. “But there is one issue, a discrepancy really. I couldn’t find any drafts for
Ampersand
. Nothing. Otherwise the manuscripts are very complete. We even have scrapbooks of reviews and articles.”