The Lincoln Highway (23 page)

R
ealizing that he had
been frittering away not only the fortune his father had left him, but the more valuable treasure of time, the young Arabian sold what few possessions he had left, joined the ranks of a merchant vessel, and set sail into the great unknown . . .

Here we go again, thought Emmett.

That afternoon—while Emmett had been laying out the bread and ham and cheese that he’d secured from the Pullman car—Billy had asked Ulysses if he wanted to hear another story about someone who had traveled the seas. When Ulysses said that he would, Billy took out his big red book, sat at the black man’s side, and began reading of Jason and the Argonauts.

In that story, the young Jason, who is the rightful king of Thessaly, is told by his usurping uncle that the throne is his to reclaim if he can sail to the kingdom of Colchis and return with the Golden Fleece.

In the company of fifty adventurers—including Theseus and Hercules in the years before their fame—Jason sets course for Colchis with the winds at his back. In the untold days that follow, he and his band travel from trial to trial, variously facing a colossus made of bronze, the winged harpies, and the
spartoi
—a battalion of warriors who spring from the soil fully armed when the teeth of a dragon have been sown. With the help of the sorceress Medea, Jason and his Argonauts eventually overcome their adversaries, secure the Fleece, and make their way safely back to Thessaly.

So enthralled was Billy with the telling of the tale and Ulysses with
the hearing of it, when Emmett handed them the sandwiches that he’d made on their behalf, they hardly seemed to notice they were eating them.

As he sat on the other side of the boxcar eating his own sandwich, Emmett found himself mulling over Billy’s book.

For the life of him, Emmett could not understand why this so-called professor had chosen to mix Galileo Galilei, Leonardo da Vinci, and Thomas Alva Edison—three of the greatest minds of the scientific age—with the likes of Hercules, Theseus, and Jason. Galileo, da Vinci, and Edison were not heroes of legend. These were men of flesh and blood who had the rare ability to witness natural phenomena without superstition or prejudice. They were men of industry who with patience and precision studied the inner workings of the world and, having done so, turned what knowledge they’d gained in solitude toward practical discoveries in the service of mankind.

What good could possibly come from mixing the lives of these men with stories of mythical heroes setting sail on fabled waters to battle fantastical beasts? By tossing them together, it seemed to Emmett, Abernathe was encouraging a boy to believe that the great scientific discoverers were not exactly real and the heroes of legend not exactly imagined. That shoulder to shoulder they traveled through the realms of the known and unknown making the most of their intelligence and courage, yes, but also of sorcery and enchantment and the occasional intervention of the gods.

Wasn’t it hard enough in the course of life to distinguish between fact and fancy, between what one witnessed and what one wanted? Wasn’t it the challenge of making this very distinction that had left their father, after twenty years of toil, bankrupt and bereft?

And now, as the day was drawing to a close, Billy and Ulysses had turned their attention to Sinbad, a hero who set sail seven different times on seven different adventures.

—I’m going to bed, Emmett announced.

—Okay, the two responded.

Then, so as not to disturb his brother, Billy lowered his voice, and Ulysses lowered his head, the two looking more like conspirators than strangers.

As Emmett lay down, trying not to listen to the murmured saga of the Arabian sailor, he understood perfectly well that when Ulysses had happened upon their boxcar it had been a stroke of extraordinary luck; but it had been humbling too.

After Billy had made introductions, in his excited way he had recounted everything that had happened from the moment of Pastor John’s appearance to his timely departure from the train. When Emmett expressed his gratitude to Ulysses, the stranger had dismissed the thanks as unnecessary. But the first chance he got—when Billy was retrieving his book from his backpack—Ulysses had taken Emmett aside and given him a thorough schooling.
How could he be such a fool as to leave his brother alone like that? Just because a boxcar has four walls and a ceiling doesn’t make it safe, not remotely so. And make no mistake: The pastor wasn’t simply going to give Billy the back of his hand. He had every intention of throwing him from the train.

When Ulysses had turned back to Billy and sat down at his side, ready to hear about Jason, Emmett had felt the sting of the reprimand burning on his cheeks. He felt the heat of indignation too, indignation that this man whom he had only just met should take the liberty of scolding him as a parent scolds a child. But at the same time, Emmett understood that his taking umbrage at being treated like a child was childish in itself. Just as he knew that it was childish to feel resentment that Billy and Ulysses hadn’t lingered over their sandwiches, or to feel jealous over their sudden confederacy.

Trying to calm the roiling waters of his own temperament, Emmett turned his attention away from the events of the day toward the challenges that lay ahead.

When they had all been seated together at the kitchen table in Morgen, Duchess had said that before going to the Adirondacks, he and Woolly were going to stop in Manhattan to see his father.

From Duchess’s stories it was clear that Mr. Hewett rarely had a steady address. But on Townhouse’s last day in Salina, Duchess had encouraged Townhouse to look him up in the city—by contacting one of his father’s booking agencies.
Even if a has-been is on the run from creditors, wanted by the cops, and living under an assumed name
, Duchess had said with a wink,
he’ll always leave word of where he can be found with the agencies. And in New York City, all the biggest bookers of has-beens have offices in the same building at the bottom of Times Square.

The only problem was that Emmett couldn’t remember the name of the building.

He was fairly certain it began with an
S.
As he lay there, he tried to jog his memory by going through the alphabet and systematically sounding out all the possible combinations of the first three letters of the building’s name. Beginning with Sa, he would say to himself: Sab, sac, sad, saf, sag, and so on. Then it was the combinations flowing from Sc and Se and Sh.

Maybe it was the sound of Billy whispering, or his own murmuring of alphabetical triplets. Or maybe it was the warm, wooden smell of the boxcar after its long day in the sun. Whatever the cause, instead of recalling the name of a building at the bottom of Times Square, Emmett was suddenly nine years old in the attic of his house with the hatch pulled up, building a fort with his parents’ old trunks—the ones that once had traveled to Paris and Venice and Rome and that hadn’t traveled anywhere since—which in turn brought memories of his mother wondering where he could have gotten to and the sound of her voice calling out his name as she went from room to room to room.

W
hen I knocked on the door
of room 42, I heard a groan and a labored movement on the bedsprings as if the sound of my rapping had woken him from a deep sleep. Given it was nearly noon, that was right on schedule. After a moment, I could hear him put his hungover feet on the floor. I could hear him look around the room as he tried to get his bearings, taking in the cracked plaster of the ceiling and the peeling wallpaper with a hint of bewilderment, as if he couldn’t quite grasp what he was doing in a room like this, couldn’t quite believe it, even after all these years.

Ah, yes
, I could almost hear him say.

Ever so politely, I knocked again.

Another groan—this time a groan of effort—then the release of the bedsprings as he rose to his feet and began moving slowly toward the door.

—Coming, a muffled voice called.

As I waited, I found myself genuinely curious as to how he would look. Barely two years had gone by, but at his age with his lifestyle, two years could do a lot of damage.

But when the door creaked open, it wasn’t my old man.

—Yes?

Somewhere in his seventies, room 42’s occupant had a genteel bearing and the accent to go with it. At one time, he could have been the master of an estate, or served the man who was.

—Is there something I can do for you, young man? he asked, as I glanced over his shoulder.

—I was looking for someone who used to live here. My father, actually.

—Oh, I see. . . .

His shaggy eyebrows drooped a little, as if he were actually sorry to have been the cause of a stranger’s disappointment. Then his eyebrows rose again.

—Perhaps he left a forwarding address downstairs?

—More likely an unpaid bill, but I’ll ask on my way out. Thanks.

He nodded in sympathy. But when I turned to go, he called me back.

—Young man. By any chance, was your father an actor?

—He was known to call himself one.

—Then wait a moment. I believe he may have left something behind.

As the old gent shuffled his way to the bureau, I scanned the room, curious as to his weakness. At the Sunshine Hotel, for every room there was a weakness, and for every weakness an artifact bearing witness. Like an empty bottle that has rolled under the bed, or a feathered deck of cards on the nightstand, or a bright pink kimono on a hook. Some evidence of that one desire so delectable, so insatiable that it overshadowed all others, eclipsing even the desires for a home, a family, or a sense of human dignity.

Given how slow the old man moved I had plenty of time to look, and the room was only ten by ten, but if evidence of his weakness was present, for the life of me I couldn’t spot it.

—Here we are, he said.

Shuffling back, he handed me what he’d rummaged from the bureau’s bottom drawer.

It was a black leather case about twelve inches square and three
inches tall with a small, brass clasp—like a larger version of what might hold a double strand of pearls. The similarity wasn’t a coincidence, I suppose. Because at the knee-high height of my father’s fame, when he was a leading man in a small Shakespearean troupe performing to half-filled houses, he had six of these cases and they were his prized possessions.

Though the gold embossing on this one was chipped and faint, you could still make out the
O
of
Othello
. Throwing the clasp, I opened the lid. Inside were four objects resting snuggly in velvet-lined indentations: a goatee, a golden earring, a small jar of blackface, and a dagger.

Like the case, the dagger had been custom made. The golden hilt, which had been fashioned to fit perfectly in my old man’s grasp, was adorned with three large jewels in a row: one ruby, one sapphire, one emerald. The stainless steel blade had been forged, tempered, and burnished by a master craftsman in Pittsburgh, allowing my father in act three to cut a wedge from an apple and stick the dagger upright into the surface of a table, where it would remain ominously as he nursed his suspicions of Desdemona’s infidelity.

But while the steel of the blade was the real McCoy, the hilt was gilded brass and the jewels were paste. And if you pressed the sapphire with your thumb, it would release a catch, so that when my old man stabbed himself in the gut at the end of act five, the blade would retract into the hilt. As the ladies in the loge gasped, he would take his own sweet time staggering back and forth in front of the footlights before finally giving up his ghost. Which is to say, the dagger was as much a gimmick as he was.

When the set of six cases was still complete, each had its own label embossed in gold:
Othello
,
Hamlet
,
Henry
,
Lear
,
Macbeth
, and—I kid you not—
Romeo
. Each case had its own velvet-lined indentations holding its own dramatic accessories. For Macbeth these included a bottle
of fake blood with which to smear his hands; for Lear a long gray beard; for Romeo a vial of poison, and a small jar of blush that could no more obscure the ravages of time on my old man’s face than the crown could obscure the deformities of Richard III.

Over the years, the collection of my father’s cases had slowly diminished. One had been stolen, another misplaced, another sold. Hamlet was lost in a game of five-card stud in Cincinnati, appropriately to a pair of kings. But it was not a coincidence that Othello was the last of the six, for it was the one my old man prized most. This was not simply because he had received some of his best reviews for his performance as the Moor, but because on several occasions the jar of blackface had secured him a timely exit. Sporting the uniform of a bellhop and the face of Al Jolson, he would carry his own luggage off the elevator and through the lobby, right past the debt collectors, or angry husbands, or whoever happened to be waiting among the potted palms. To have left the Othello case behind, my old man must have been in quite a hurry. . . .

—Yes, I said while closing the lid, this is my father’s. If you don’t mind my asking, how long have you been in the room?

—Oh, not long.

—It would be a great help if you could remember more precisely.

—Let’s see. Wednesday, Tuesday, Monday . . . Since Monday, I believe. Yes. It was Monday.

In other words, my old man had pulled up stakes the day after we left Salina—having received, no doubt, a worrisome call from a worried warden.

—I do hope you find him.

—Of that I can assure you. Anyway, sorry for the bother.

—It wasn’t a bother at all, the old gent replied, gesturing toward his bed. I was only reading.

Ah, I thought, seeing the corner of the book poking out from the
folds of his sheets. I should have known. The poor old chap, he suffers from the most dangerous addiction of all.

As I was headed back toward the stairs, I noticed a slice of light on the hallway floor, suggesting that the door to room 49 was ajar.

After hesitating, I passed the stairwell and continued down the hall. When I reached the room, I stopped and listened. Hearing no sounds within, I nudged the door with a knuckle. Through the gap, I could see that the bed was empty and unmade. Guessing the occupant was in the bathroom at the other end of the hall, I opened the door the rest of the way.

When my old man and I first came to the Sunshine Hotel in 1948, room 49 was the best one in the house. Not only did it have two windows at the back of the building, where it was quiet, in the center of the ceiling was a Victorian light fixture with a fan—the only such amenity in the whole hotel. Now all that hung from the ceiling was a bare bulb on a wire.

In the corner, the little wooden desk was still there. It was another amenity that added to the value of the room in the eyes of the tenants, despite the fact that no one had written a letter in the Sunshine Hotel in over thirty years. The desk chair was there too, looking as old and upright as the gentleman down the hall.

It may have been the saddest room that I had ever seen.

Down in the lobby I made sure that Woolly was still waiting in one of the chairs by the window. Then I went to the front desk, where a fat man with a thin moustache was listening to the ball game on the radio.

—Any rooms available?

—For the night or by the hour? he asked, after glancing at Woolly with a knowing look.

It never ceased to amaze me how a guy working in a place like this could still imagine that he knows anything at all. He was lucky I didn’t have a frying pan.

—
Two
rooms, I said. For the night.

—Four bucks in advance. Another two bits if you want towels.

—We’ll take the towels.

Removing Emmett’s envelope from my pocket, I thumbed slowly through the stack of twenties. That wiped the smirk off his face faster than the frying pan would have. Finding the change that I’d received at the HoJo’s, I took out a five and put it on the counter.

—We’ve got two nice rooms on the third floor, he said, suddenly sounding like a man of service. And my name’s Bernie. If there’s anything you want while you’re here—booze, broads, breakfast—don’t hesitate to ask.

—I don’t think we’ll be needing any of that, but you might be able to help me in another way.

I took another two bucks from the envelope.

—Sure, he said, with a lick of the lips.

—I’m looking for someone who was staying here until recently.

—Which someone?

—The someone in room 42.

—You mean Harry Hewett?

—None other.

—He checked out earlier this week.

—So I gather. Did he say where he was headed?

Bernie struggled to think for a moment, and I do mean struggled, but to no avail. I began to put the bills back from whence they came.

—Wait a second, he said. Wait a second. I don’t know where Harry went. But there’s a guy who used to live here who was very tight with him. If anyone would know where Harry is now, he would.

—What’s his name?

—FitzWilliams.

—Fitzy FitzWilliams?

—That’s the guy.

—Bernie, if you tell me where I can find Fitzy FitzWilliams, I’ll give you a fin. If you’ll loan me your radio for the night, I’ll make it two.

Back in the 1930s when my father first became friends with Patrick “Fitzy” FitzWilliams, Fitzy was a third-rate performer on vaudeville’s secondary circuit. A reciter of verses, he was generally shoved out onstage in between acts in order to keep the audience in their seats with a few choice stanzas in the patriotic or pornographic vein, sometimes both.

But Fitzy was a genuine man of letters and his first love was the poetry of Walt Whitman. Realizing in 1941 that the fiftieth anniversary of the poet’s death was right around the corner, he decided to grow a beard and buy a floppy hat in the hope of convincing stage managers to let him honor the anniversary by bringing the words of the poet to life.

Now, there are all manner of beards. There’s the Errol Flynn and the Fu Manchu, the Sigmund Freud and the good old Amish underneck. But as luck would have it, Fitzy’s beard came in as white and woolly as Whitman’s, so with the floppy hat on his head and his milky blue eyes, he was every bit the song of himself. And when he premiered his impersonation at a low-budget theater in Brooklyn Heights—singing of the immigrants continually landing, of the ploughmen ploughing and the miners mining, of the mechanics toiling away in the numberless factories—the working-class crowd gave Fitzy the first standing ovation of his life.

In a matter of weeks, every institution from Washington, DC, to Portland, Maine, that had planned on marking the anniversary of Whitman’s death wanted Fitzy. He was traveling the Northeast Corridor in first-class cars, reciting in Grange halls, liberty halls, libraries,
and historical societies, making more money in six months than Whitman made in his life.

Then in November 1942, when he returned to Manhattan for an encore performance at the New-York Historical Society, one Florence Skinner happened to be in attendance. Mrs. Skinner was a prominent socialite who prided herself on giving the most talked-about parties in town. That year she was planning to open the Christmas season with a glamorous affair on the first Thursday in December. When she saw Fitzy, it struck her like a bolt of lightning that with his big white beard and soft blue eyes, he would be the perfect Santa Claus.