The Fall of the Year (20 page)

The ceremony opened with a lengthy invocation from Reverend Johnstone, issuing some firm marching orders to God and the new citizens alike. Then P.W. Bull gave a short talk about the rights and responsibilities of American citizens and the crucial role in the universe played by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. He ended by announcing that for the first time in his recollection, every member of a citizenship class had scored one hundred percent on the test. The audience, including the selectmen, applauded enthusiastically.

To take the citizenship oath, the class members lined up in front of the judge's bench. When Abel hobbled forward with his chain still attached, everyone craned to see him. Frenchy wore a herringbone jacket from the 1930s, Louvia was arrayed in all her gypsy finery and held her Daughter in her left hand as she raised her right hand to take the oath.

At last I introduced Abel Feinstein, who, chain clanking, stepped up between the defense table and the prosecutor's table and turned to face the town. Outside it was dusk. Inside the courtroom was quiet. Mr. Feinstein wore a brown worsted suit, the fresh shirt I had brought him from his shop, a wide brown tie. His newly shined shoes gleamed in the overhead lights like the polished oak benches and tables. Never a man who carried an extra ounce, he looked more gaunt than ever.

“Greetings,” he said, smiling, his voice a little rusty, his lips quivering slightly. “I am Abel Feinstein, tailor of Kingdom Common. But tonight Abel comes before you not as tailor. Comes instead as fellow citizen.”

He looked around. “Three weeks ago began night school I and eleven others. Our teacher was Mr. Frank Bennett. Him we thank. Also we thank Judge Forrest Allen. For allowing us to stay. And Inspector P.W. Bull of U.S. Immigration.”

Mr. Feinstein took a deep breath. “At first, when decided the night class who would give the valedictory, Abel did not want to speak. What says a man who has been silent for twenty years? I will try.

“Twenty years ago, in Poland, I am a student. Just started at university, sixteen years old, youngest in class. Of a tailor the only child. I am studying to be a teacher. Then comes war. My parents, Abraham and Sarah, say, ‘Abel, you must leave. You must go to America. There you will study and teach. In America, everything is possible.' But by then the trains are too dangerous. So Abel begins to walk. He walks west.”

Mr. Feinstein pointed out the window toward the afterglow of the sunset behind the mountains. He shook his head. “West is no good. Too many soldiers, taking people to camps. So I turn around and head the other way. East. I walk. Through forests. Through fields. Around small villages. Sometimes the people help Abel, sometimes they drive away with dogs and sticks. Two times soldiers shoot at. Winter comes. Summer again. Then winter. Always I am walking, away from. From soldiers, towns, camps, railroads. I seek empty places. Woods, fields, rivers. When for work or a little food I must ask, I say nothing of my past. I am silent like the woods. I walk.

“Goes by three years this way. I have walked hundreds of miles. Somehow I have come to Russia. There I manage to get on a boat. For Canada, for Vancouver. In Vancouver I work as a tailor, like my father. I save money and go to Montreal. Ten years ago from Montreal I come here. At last, America. I set up as tailor. Here I promise myself: Abel, teach you may never do, but walk away from a place again you also will never do. This place will be your home.

“In Kingdom Common, Abel works as tailor, shoemaker, jack of all trades. This already you know. Yet always he wishes to teach. To teach is his dream. Finally in night school, comes true. He is appointed the helper. Then he and his classmates are told they must leave. This part I make quick. I blame no one. But Abel decides he will not leave.” He reached down and picked up the slack in the logging chain. He shook it. “Not if must chain himself to bench. For Abel, no more walking away from.”

He dropped the chain. “What means an American? Means free speech, assemble peaceably, fair trial, no cruel punishment. Means no more walking away. Means farewell to old lives, hello to dreams, whatever that they are being.”

He fumbled in his suit coat pocket and removed a small key. He bent down and unlocked the padlock fastening the chain to his ankle. He rubbed the ankle, winced, grinned, tossed the chain aside. “Hello, our neighbors,” he said. “As Americans we greet you. Together as fellow citizens we will walk out with you tonight.”

From the courtroom came polite clapping. The ceremony was over. People were shaking hands with the graduates. Everyone wanted to shake Mr. Feinstein's hand. Roy Quinn and Reverend Johnstone were among the first to congratulate him. I overhead Judge Allen tell Father George that it was gratifying to see that for once democracy had worked in Kingdom Common the way the founding fathers had intended it to.

I needed some air and found myself standing on the common, near the right-field foul line of the baseball diamond.

“Good job, son.”

That was all Father George said. But that was enough, as he and I stood on the ball diamond and watched the villagers head home together, among them Abel Feinstein, limping across the green toward his tailor's shop, dark these past seven nights, now soon to be light again.

7

One of the wonders of Kingdom County in those days was a mural of the village, painted on the backdrop of the town hall stage, which changed subtly with the amount of sunlight falling on it through the tall side windows of the auditorium, so that the time of day actually seemed mirrored in the painting.

—Father George, “A Short History”

 

T
HE POSTERS APPEARED
in the village at the beginning of the third week of August. About two feet wide by three feet tall, they announced in blazing red, green, yellow, and blue:

 

Mr. MORIARITY MENTALITY
and
His Ravishing Assistant
THE PETROGRAD PRINCESS
Will Present an Astonishing Exhibition of
MIND READING and ILLUSIONISM
on
Friday August 22nd 7:30
P.M
.
at
The Kingdom Common Town Hall

 

Framing this bold announcement were two figures. On the left was a tall magician in an emerald top hat and a swallowtail coat with a crimson lining. The illusionist was staring over his shiny black mustache and goatee into the golden eyes of a lovely young woman wearing high-heeled silver slippers and a low-cut gold-colored gown.

Under the announcement, in smaller type, the poster said: “The direct stage descendant of the celebrated Messrs. Washington Irving Bishop and Randall Brown, and the erstwhile student and protege of Mr. Harry Houdini, Moriarity Mentality will perform many astounding and unprecedented feats of mnemonic agility.” Then, at the very bottom: “Co-sponsored by the United Church of Kingdom Common and St. Mary's, Queen of the Green Mountains. Adults $2. Children 12 and under $1.”

I remembered seeing Mr. Mentality's show once or twice when I was a boy. At the time I'd been mightily impressed by the mind reader, who multiplied large numbers in his head, memorized that week's
Kingdom County Monitor
and several entire pages from the local phone book, and, in a question-and-answer exhibition at the end of the show, repeated private conversations between members of the audience he'd never met, told people where to find lost items, and even divined what they were thinking.

Father George was sure that the mind reader used a stalking horse: a confederate, somebody posing as a salesman or an out-of-state fisherman, say, who drifted around the village a few days before the performance keeping his ears open. The stalking horse didn't call attention to himself, Father George said. But all the while he was soaking up information like a human sponge. At some point before the show, this confederate passed his information along to the mind reader.

“So who's Mr. Moriarity Mentality's stalking horse?” I said.

“I've never been able to figure it out, Frank. Maybe you can. In connection with your next job. I want you to escort Mr. Mentality around town, son. Make sure he gets to the hotel and the town hall all right, look after him while he's here. If you figure out who his stalking horse is, good for you. But I'll make a prediction.”

“What is it?”

“You won't,” Father George said. “Have fun with Moriarity. He's due in Friday morning on the 7:14.”

 

A run of bright warm days and cool mountain nights held all week, and Friday dawned clear as well. Mr. Mentality didn't arrive on either the 7:14 or the 9:28 train. By 10:30, when I walked over to the station to meet the Combination bringing the morning mail up from White River Junction, I was beginning to wonder whether he'd appear at all.

Today, besides the windowless mail car, the Combination was hauling five empty Quebec North Shore and Gaspe newsprint boxcars, two flatbeds, and one dusty Pullman coach. The train stopped just long enough to leave a single sack of mail and take on another. Only at the last moment did two passengers get off: a heavyset middle-aged woman with her hair in pink curlers and an older man in a shabby gray suit.

The travelers looked nothing at all like the dashing figures on Mr. Mentality's posters. The man's suit was rumpled and baggy and hung limply from his emaciated frame. His gray hair was uncombed, his eyes a sickly yellowish hue and sunk far back in his skull. His face was sallow, as if a long illness was now fast gaining the upper hand. He was holding a frayed carpetbag with shiny wooden handles. His shoes looked as though he'd walked to Kingdom Common in them from his last engagement. The woman in hair curlers carried a large battered suitcase, far from new.

As the train pulled away from the station, the strangers peered around. The man blinked rapidly several times, as if wondering whether they'd gotten off at the right stop.

“Mr. Mentality?” I said. “I'm Frank Bennett. Father Lecoeur from the church committee sent me over to welcome you.”

The stranger took my outstretched hand and gave it a single slack shake. His fingers were as cold as icicles, and he continued to look everywhere but at me as he said, in what I thought might be a slight Texas accent, “Moriarity Mentality. This would be the Princess. Princess, Bob Bennett, from the local sponsor.”

The Petrograd Princess nodded. To Mr. Mentality she said, “It's Frank. Frank Bennett.”

The mind reader gazed at me with his amber-colored eyes. “Sorry, son,” he said at last. “But the sad fact is, once you commence to get along in years, your memory isn't what it once was. Which, when you're a mentalist by trade, is a crying shame.”

Mr. Mentality was looking at me with an unmistakable air of satisfaction. “What can you do about it?” he said.

“About—?”

“Becoming forgetful?”

The Princess rolled her eyes in my direction, an amused and indulgent expression, as if we were old friends who had affectionately relished Mr. Mentality's idiosyncrasies together over the years.

“I guess I don't know,” I said.

“Neither do I, Bob. Neither do I. Lodging's this-a-way, right?”

And, handing me his carpetbag, Moriarity Mentality struck off down the street in exactly the opposite direction from the hotel.

 

Oh, the Common took it all in in a flash. Within scant minutes of the unprepossessing arrival of the vaudevillians, the hundred-eyed village knew exactly how tawdry and vulnerable and confused the little mind reader had become in the seven or eight years since they'd seen him last. And when the Princess and I finally did get Mr. Mentality turned around, as we passed the railway platform again I distinctly heard Harlan Kittredge say to Bumper Stevens, “Pathetic old bastard, ain't he?”

“Part of my trouble,” the reader was telling me as we headed back up the cracked slate sidewalk in front of the courthouse and the Academy, “is I have too long a memory for riprap.”

“Riprap?”

“That's it. I mought, for instance, misremember to pull on my left stocking in the morning because I'm recollecting riprap. Numbers outen the 1942 Portland, Maine, telephone directory. Answers to multiplication sums set for me by ranchers in Tulsa. Numbers, names, dates from history, whole long columns in fine print from various hefty cyclopedias. No doubt it's a given gift, but it clutters the mind.”

Mr. Mentality had forgotten to make reservations at the hotel, but Armand St. Onge had two adjoining rooms on the third floor. Then the mind reader forgot which pocket he carried his money in, necessitating a fairly lengthy search, after which he forgot my name again as he handed me a lone tarnished dime out of his black snap purse.

“Keep it,” the Princess whispered. “Makes him happy.”

I put the dime in my pocket for a souvenir.

Upstairs in his room, Mr. Mentality said, “Come back at, say, two o'clock, Bob. Right now I need me a little lie-down. Come two, we'll meet in the lobby and go for a walkabout.”

The mind reader sat down on the bed and unlaced his dusty shoes. Then he stared at them for some seconds, as if unable to muster the energy to pull them off.

“Are you all right?” I said.

“Fetch along this week's issue of your newspaper when you come back,” Mr. Mentality said. He switched on the reading lamp on the bedside table and stretched out on top of the covers with his shoes still on.

“If you want to read, I'll get you a paper right now.”

“That water spot on the ceiling up above? It puts me in mind of the state of Idaho.” Staring at Idaho, Mr. Mentality said, “I don't want to read. I want a little shuteye. Can't get to sleep with the light off. I'll meet you down in the lobby at two sharp. And Bob? Leave the hall door ajar on your way out. I don't sleep good in a room with the door shut.”