The Ghost Writer (11 page)

Oh, this is useless, I thought, this is idiotic—and tore up yet another half-finished letter in my defense. That the situation between us had deteriorated so rapidly—by his going to Wapter with my story, and by my refusal to justify myself to my elders—was as it had to be, sooner or later. Hadn’t Joyce, hadn’t Flaubert, hadn’t Thomas Wolfe, the romantic genius of my high-school reading list, all been condemned for disloyalty or treachery or immorality by those who saw themselves as slandered in their works? As even the judge knew, literary history was in part the history of novelists infuriating fellow countrymen, family, and friends. To be sure, our dispute hadn’t achieved the luster of literary history quite yet, but still, writers weren’t writers, I told myself, if they didn’t have the strength to face the insolubility of that conflict and go on.

But what about sons? It wasn’t Flaubert’s father or Joyce’s father who had impugned me for my recklessness—it was my own. Nor was it the Irish he claimed I had maligned and misrepresented, but the Jews. Of which I was one. Of which, only some five thousand days past, there had been millions more.

Yet each time I tried again to explain my motives, the angrier with him I became. It’s you who humiliated yourself—now live with it, you moralizing ass! Wapter, that know-nothing windbag! That dopey pillar! And the pious belle with her love for the arts! Worth ten million and she chides
me
about “financial gain”! And Abba Hillel Silver on top of that! Oh, don’t waste time on prodigal me about Rabbi Silver’s grandeur, lady, tell my late cousin Sidney and his friends in the Mob—quote Zvi Masliansky to them, like you do at the country club on the eighteenth hole!

At around eleven 1 heard the town snowplow clearing the unpaved road beyond the apple orchard. Later a pickup truck with a snowblade clamped to the front end charged into the driveway and shoved the evening’s snowfall into the orchard atop the snowfall of the previous thirty nights. The little Renault arrived last, swerving slowly into the driveway about half an hour later, one beam on high, the other dim, and with half-dead windshield wipers.

At the first sound of her car returning, I had flipped off all my lights and crawled to the study window on my knees so as to watch her make her way toward the house. For I had not stayed awake simply because I couldn’t forget my father’s dis approval or E. I. Lonoff’s toast—I also had no intention of being unconscious when the enchanting and mysterious houseguest (all the more alluring, of course, as Hope’s imagined erotic rival) got back to change into her nightdress on the floor above me. What I would be able to do about this, I had no idea. However, just to be awake and unclothed in one bed while she was awake and nearly unclothed in another was better than nothing. It was a start.

But predictably, it was worse than nothing and the start of little that was new. The lantern on the half-buried lamppost between the house and the car shed went dark, and then, from where I was kneeling beside the study door, I heard her enter the house. She moved through the hallway and up the carpeted stairs—and that was the last of her that I saw or heard until about an hour later, when I was privileged to audit another astounding course, this one in the adult evening division of the Lonoff School of the Arts. The rest of what I’d been waiting up for I had, of course, to imagine. But that is easier work by far than making things up at the typewriter. For that kind of imagining you don’t have to have your picture in the
Saturday Review
: You don’t even have to know the alphabet. Being young will usually get a fellow through with flying colors. You don’t even have to be young. You don’t have to be anything.

Virtuous reader, if you think that after intercourse all animals are sad, try masturbating on the daybed in E. I. Lonoff’s study and see how you feel when it’s over. To expiate my sense of utter shabbiness, I immediately took to the high road and drew from Lonoff ‘s bookshelves the volume of Henry James stories containing ‘The Middle Years,” the source of one of the two quotations pinned to the bulletin board. And there where I had indulged myself in this most un-Jamesian lapse from the amenities, I read the story two times through, looking to discover what I could about the doubt that’s the writer’s passion, the passion that’s his task, and the madness of—of all things—art.

Dencombe, a novelist “who had a reputation,” is convalescing from a debilitating ailment at an English health resort when a copy of his latest book,
The Middle Years
, arrives from his publisher. Seated alone on a bench looking out to sea, Dencombe reluctantly opens the book—to discover what he believes is the artistic distinction that had always evaded him. His genius has flowered, however, just when he no longer has the strength to develop a “‘last manner’… to which his real treasure would be gathered.” That would require a second existence, and everything tells him that the first one is nearly over.

While fearfully contemplating the end of his life, Dencombe is joined on the bench by a garrulous young stranger carrying his own copy of
The Middle Years
. He begins to speak ardently of Dencombe’s achievement to the mild gentleman who he finds has also been reading the new novel. The admirer—“the greatest admirer…whom it was supposable he might boast”—is Dr. Hugh, physician to a rich, eccentric English countess who is at the hotel, like Dencombe, to recover from some grave illness.

Inflamed with passion for
The Middle Years
, Dr. Hugh opens the book to read aloud a particularly beautiful passage; but, having mistakenly seized Dencombe’s copy rather than his own, he discovers that the printed text has been altered in a dozen places by a pencil. With this, the anonymous and ailing author on the brink of being discovered—”a passionate corrector” never able to arrive at a final form—feels his sickness sweeping over him and loses consciousness.

In the days that follow, Dencombe, bedridden, hopes that some remedy miraculously concocted by the attentive young physician will restore his strength. However, when he learns that the countess plans to disinherit Dr. Hugh of a magnificent fortune if he continues to neglect her for the novelist, Dencombe encourages Dr. Hugh to follow her to London. But Dr. Hugh cannot overcome his passionate idolatry, and by the time he acts on Dencombe’s advice to hurry to his employer, he has already suffered “a terrible injury” for which Dencombe almost believes himself to be responsible: the countess has died, in a relapse brought on by her jealousy, bequeathing to the young physician not a penny. Says Dr. Hugh, returning from her grave to the dying soul whom he adores, “I had to choose.”

“You chose to let a Fortune go?”

“I chose to accept, whatever they might be, the consequences of my infatuation,” smiled Doctor Hugh. Then, as a larger pleasantry: “The fortune be hanged! It’s your own fault if I can’t get your things out of my head.”

A thin black line had been drawn beneath the “pleasantry” in Lonoff’s book. In script so tiny it was almost unreadable, the writer had noted beside it a droll pleasantry of his own: “And also your fault if I can.”

From there on, down both margins of the final page describing Dencombe’s death, Lonoff had penned three vertical lines. Nothing resembling drollery here. Rather, the six surgically precise black lines seemed to simulate the succession of fine impressions that James’s insidious narrative about the novelist’s dubious wizardry had scored upon Lonoff’s undeluded brain.

After Dencombe has learned the consequences of the young man’s infatuation—consequences so utterly irreconcilable with his own honorable convictions that, upon hearing of his place in it all, Dencombe utters “a long bewildered moan”—he lies “for many hours, many days…motionless and absent.”

At the last he signed to Doctor Hugh to listen and, when he was down on his knees by the pillow, brought him very near. “You’ve made me think it all a delusion.”

“Not your glory, my dear friend,” stammered the young man.

“Not my glory—what there is of it! It is glory—to have been tested, to have had our little quality and cast our little spell. The thing is to have made somebody care. You happen to be crazy of course, but that doesn’t affect the law.”

“You’re a great success!” said Doctor Hugh, putting into his young voice the ring of a marriage-bell.

Dencombe lay taking this in; then he gathered strength to speak once more. “A second chance—
that’s
the delusion. There never was to be but one. We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

“If you’ve doubted, if you’ve despaired, you’ve always ‘done’ it,” his visitor subtly argued. “We’ve done something or other,” Dencombe conceded. “Something or other is everything. It’s the feasible. It’s
you
.”

“Comforter!” poor Dencombe ironically sighed.

“But it’s true,” insisted his friend.

“It’s true. It’s frustration that doesn’t count.”

“Frustration’s only life,” said Doctor Hugh.

“Yes, it’s what passes.” Poor Dencombe was barely audible, but he had marked with the words the virtual end of his first and only chance.

Within moments of hearing muffled voices coming from above my head, I stood up on the daybed—my finger still holding my place in the book—and, stretching to my full height, tried to make out what was being said up there and by whom. When that didn’t help, I thought of climbing onto Lonoff’s desk; it was easily a foot or so higher than the daybed and would put my ear only inches from the room’s low ceiling. But if I should fall, if I should alter by a millimeter the placement of his typing paper, if somehow I should leave footprints—no, I couldn’t risk it and shouldn’t even have been thinking of it. I had gone far enough already by expropriating the corner of the desk to com pose my half dozen unfinished letters home. My sense of propriety, not to mention the author’s gracious hospitality, required me to restrain myself from committing such a sordid, callow tittle indecency.

But in the meantime I had done it.

A woman was crying. Which one, over what, who was there comforting her—or causing the tears? Just a little higher and maybe I could And out. A thick dictionary would have been perfect, but Lonoff ‘s Webster’s was down on a shelf of fat reference books level with the typing chair, and the best I could manage under pressure was to gain another couple of inches by kneeling to insert between the desk and my feet the volume of stories by Henry James.

Ah, the unreckoned consequences, the unaccountable uses of art! Dencombe would understand. James would understand. But would Lonoff? Don’t fall.

“Now you’re being sensible.” Lonoff was the speaker. “You had to see for yourself, and so you saw.”

A light thud directly overhead. Someone had dropped into a chair. The weary writer? In his bathrobe now, or still in suit and tie and polished shoes?

Then I heard Amy Bellette. And what was she wearing at this hour? “I saw nothing—only more misery either way. Of course I can’t live here—but I can’t keep living there, either. 1 can’t live anywhere. I can’t
live
.”

“Quiet down. She’s had it for today. Let her rest, now that she’s asleep.”

“She’s ruining everyone’s life.”

“Don’t blame her for what you hold against me. I’m the one who says no around here. Now you go to sleep.”

“I can’t. I don’t want to. We can talk.”

“We’ve talked.” Silence. Were they down on their knees listening through the old floorboards for met Then they had long since heard my drumming heart.

Bedsprings! Lonoff climbing in beside her!

But it was Amy getting out of bed I heard, not Lonoff climbing in. Her feet lightly crossed the floor only inches above my lips. “I love you. I love you so, Dad-da. There’s no one else like you. They’re all such dopes.”

“You’re a good girl.”

“Let me sit on your lap. Just hold me a little and I’ll be fine.”

“You’re fine now. You’re always fine in the end. You’re the great survivor.”

“No, just the world’s strongest weakling. Oh, tell me a story. Sing me a song. Oh, imitate the great Durante, I really need it tonight.”

At first it sounded like somebody coughing. But then I could hear that, yes, he was singing to her, very quietly, in the manner of Jimmy Durante—“So I ups to him, and he ups to me”—I could catch just the one line, but that was enough for me to recall the song itself being sung by Durante on his radio show, in the celebrated raffish voice, and with the hoarse, endearing simple-hearted delivery that the famous author was now impersonating overhead.

“More,” said Amy.

Was she now on his lap? Amy in her nightie and Lonoff in his suit?

“You go to sleep,” he told her.

“More. Sing ‘I Can Do Without Broadway.’”

“’Oh, I know don well I can do widout Broadway—
but
… can Broadway do widout meeeee?’”

“Oh, Manny, we could be so happy—in Florence, my sweetest, we could come out of hiding.”

“We’re not in hiding. We never have been.”

“No, not when it’s like this. But otherwise it’s all so false and wrong and lonely. We could make each other so happy. I wouldn’t be your little girl over there. I would when we played, but otherwise I’d be your wife.”

“We’d be what we’ve always been. Stop dreaming.”

“No, not so. Without her—”

“You want a corpse on your conscience? She would be dead in a year.”

“But I have a corpse on my conscience.” The floor creaked where her two feet had suddenly landed. So she had been on his lap! “Look!”

“Cover yourself.”

“My corpse.”

Scuffling on the floorboards. The heavy tread of Lonoff on the move. “Good night.”

“Look at it.”

“Melodrama, Amy. Cover up.”

“You prefer tragedy?”

“Don’t wallow. You’re not convincing. Decide not to lose hold—and then don’t.”