Dreams (16 page)

They had never invited me to stay for their little Saturday night party before. This Saturday, they did. I said I was afraid I'd get in trouble if I stayed out too late. They conferred briefly, then Alice asked for my telephone number and called my house. There was a long conversation. When she finally hung up she shook her head, but she said, "It's okay. You can stay over at my place. I had to promise not to take you to Mass with me in the morning, to send you straight home."

David Garfinkel said, "Here, have some of this." He handed me a plate with a piece of sponge cake on it and a little glass of
schnapps
. "You ever try this before? No? Okay, be careful. Maybe you better not drink it from the glass. Break off a corner of sponge cake, good, dip it in the
schnapps
and try it that way."

The glass was a shot glass, that's what they were all drinking their
schnapps
from.

He watched while I followed instructions.

He said, "Did I ever tell you about
Frank Reade and His Steam-Man of the Plains
? No? Great story, I'll never forget it. Byline was 'Noname' but a Jew named Harold Cohen wrote it, isn't that something? He wrote three or four Frank Reades and then he left and a Cuban named Senarens took it over. You can have your E. E. Smiths and your Jack Williamsons, there was never anybody who could write science fiction like Harold Cohen."

I don't suppose that
schnapps
was any stronger than any other liquor, but remember that I was a twelve-year-old boy, I'd never even tasted alcohol before, I'd been working hard moving boxes all afternoon, and all I'd had to eat was a few chunks of sponge cake dipped in
schnapps.

After a little while I think I got woozy, and maybe a little bit drowsy, too. Next thing I knew one of the Jacks was asking me, "What's this?"

He was holding the manila envelope. I must have brought it downstairs with me after my enforced clean-up exercise, and forgot that I had it with me. I told Jack where I had found it. He handed it to the other Jack and said, "Do you recognize this? He found it upstairs." He nodded in my direction when he said that.

The other Jack took the envelope and looked it over. I could see that the back was sealed. Some of those envelopes come with metal clasps, some have two little disks and a string that you wind back and forth to keep them closed, but this one had a plain gummed flap, like a letter-size envelope, and it was sealed shut.

Jack grinned. "I remember this, sure. Did you find this upstairs?"

I said yes.

"What do you think it is?"

I shook my head, or started to, until I realized that it was making me dizzy. So I said, "I don't know what it is."

"Remember, Jack?" he said to the other Jack.

"We got this from that strange guy from Brooklyn."

"Who?"

"What was his name? Dressed like an undertaker. Said he was a big admirer of Poe's."

"Loveman."

"Who?"

"Loveman. Sam Loveman, poet, came from St. Louis, not from Brooklyn."

"Not him. Guy came from Brooklyn, for Christ's sake, not from St. Louis."

"Cool it on the Christ's sake, please." That was Alice Ryter. Fourth Avenue was mostly a Jewish world, for some reason or other, but Alice was a loyal Catholic and she had to stand up for her rights.

"Lovecraft."

"Huh?"

I think everybody was at least a little bit tipsy.

"Howard Lovecraft," David Garfinkel said. "I remember him, a creepy guy, coming through the door." He pointed to the storefront facing onto Fourth Avenue.

"No," one of the Jacks shook his head. "Impossible. That was nineteen twenty—what's the postmark on the envelope?"

The other Jack said, "Nineteen twenty-three."

"See? We were still in the Nineteenth Street store then, he couldn't have come through that door." He pointed. The snow was coming down hard, making drifting halos around streetlights. Once in a while a car would go past, headlights scorching giant white cones in the falling snow.

"It wasn't Lovecraft or Loveman, it was Cornell Woolrich brought that thing in."

"Alice is right," said a Jack. "It was Woolrich. He was trying to be Scott Fitzgerald then, before he started writing for the gangster pulps."

"Pulps killed the dime novels," said David Garfinkel. I thought he was going to cry into his sponge cake when he said it.

Jack said, "As a matter of fact it was John Dickson Carr. Tweedy little dandy with his phony English manners. You'd think he was born on the Sussex Downs. Phony son of a bitch, came from Uniontown fucking Pennsylvania."

"Jack! There's a child present."

Thanks, Alice,
I thought,
I needed you to remind him of that.
But I didn't say anything.

"Whoever it was," one of the Jacks said.

"He wanted to sell it to us," the other Jack said.

"What a
goniff
," the first Jack said.

The room got quiet. Alice refilled everybody's glass with
schnapps
except mine, there was still some in my glass. But I leaned over her desk and took another square of sponge cake. Alice reached over to a shelf next to her desk and turned on a radio. I didn't know there was a radio there, until now. She twirled the dial and the radio made weird squealing noises, then she stopped and dance music came on.

David said, "I hate this modern junk, can't you get something decent on there?"

Alice ignored him.

I got up my nerve to ask, "But what was in the envelope?"

"The complete text of
The Lighthouse
," a Jack said.

"What's that?" I asked.

"A Poe story."

I knew all about Poe.
The Pit and the Pendulum, Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Purloined Letter, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.
But I'd never heard of
The Lighthouse.
I said, "I never heard of
The Lighthouse.
"

"That's because it's the story he was working on when he died. It's only a fragment."

I thought about that for a minute. Then I said, "But you said that was the complete text." I pointed to the manila envelope. It had found its way to Alice's desk by now, and there were a couple of fresh drops of
schnapps
on it, and some sponge cake crumbs.

"That's right," said Jack, "the complete text."

"But you said—"

"Oh, let's don't pick on the kid," David said. I wished I'd had him for a teacher, but he was retired. He was big and strong but he was old. "Tell him the story," David said.

"Okay," said a Jack. "We were on Nineteenth Street then—"

"I don't think so," the other Jack interrupted, "I think we were in this store."

"Look," Jack tapped a square-tipped finger on the manila envelope, "look at the postmark. Nineteen twenty-three. We were still on Nineteenth Street."

"No, I think it was later than that, that postmark doesn't mean anything. It could have been an old envelope that Woolrich had lying around his apartment for years."

"John Dickson Carr."

"Tweedy little runt."

"He needed the money."

"See, it had to be Carr. Woolrich was a millionaire."

"But he lost his money in the Depression."

"That wasn't 'til twenty-nine."

"That's exactly my point. We were on Fourth Avenue by then."

"Damned Republicans. It was Hoover's fault. If FDR hadn't come along to save this country—" David wiped a tear with a paper napkin.

"See, so it was Loveman after all."

"Lovecraft."

"Where the hell would he have got the Poe? I remember that guy. He loved Poe but he didn't have any money either."

"Nobody did in the Depression."

"He said he had something wonderful to show us." Jack finally got the story rolling. That was Jack Tannen. He'd been a small-time stage actor when he was young, and he still had great stage presence. He said the whole trick was vocal dynamics.

"He said it was something priceless. It was the complete Poe story,
The Lighthouse.
"

He paused and looked around, an old acting trick, I guess, to make sure that everybody was paying attention or something.

"I said, 'Of course,
The Lighthouse
, everybody in the world has read that. It's in the 1909 Woodberry book. There are three or four copies in the store. In
Literature
.' But Carr, that little fairy, said—"

"Jack!" It only took one word from Alice to bring him back into line.

"Carr said, 'Yes, everybody knows about the Woodberry fragment but this is
the whole story.
'"

"It wasn't Carr."

"God damn it, Jack, please don't interrupt me. All right, whoever the hell it was, Carr or Woolrich or a person from Porlock—"

"Okay, good, it was a person from Porlock."

Everybody stopped talking, as if by unanimous telepathic agreement, and knocked back their
schnapps
, even me, even though it nearly strangled me and I could feel my face getting hot and red.

Then Jack said, "So I figured I'd humor this pathetic nobody. I said, 'How much do you want for the complete
Lighthouse
?' and he said, 'Fifty dollars,' and I kept a straight face and said, 'All right, let's have a look at it.'"

Alice Ryter said, "Show it to the boy."

Jack reached over and took the envelope off her desk and took a letter opener and slit the manila envelope and showed me the contents. The thing was about ten or twelve or fifteen pages, typed on onionskin. It started,
Jan. 1—1796. This day
—

Jack took the envelope back and slid the pages inside and handed it to Alice. She put it on her desk, reached under the desk for her purse, and put the purse on top of the envelope. As if an errant wind was going to whip through the store and carry it away.

I said, "Poe died in 1849." I knew that much. "Did they even have typewriters then?"

"No," Jack laughed. "I pointed that out to the fellow and he said, 'Oh, this was typed from Poe's manuscript a few years ago. Around 1910, I think. I knew the person who typed it. He was a descendant of Rufus Griswold's. There were two versions of the manuscript in the Griswold family all those years. The one in Woodberry was just a false start. Poe put it aside and began all over again and wrote the complete story. That's the one that my friend had. He typed it up from Poe's holograph.'"

David said, "Well, at least he knew a few things."

"So I asked him where was the Poe manuscript," Jack continued, "and he said, 'My friend threw it away after he finished typing it up.'"

The building must have been resettling from all the weight I'd shifted that afternoon, because it gave a loud creak right then.

Jack said, "The guy must have been desperate to try a crazy stunt like that, so I told him I couldn't give him fifty dollars for the thing, I could go maybe a dollar, dollar and a half at the most. He came down, I went up, he came down, I went up. Finally I said, two bucks, absolute tops. Take it or leave it."

Okay, there was the envelope, there was the typescript, so obviously the guy took it.

"He said, 'Do me a favor,'" Jack said. "'I can't sell this for two dollars but if you'll lend me two I'll leave the Poe story with you for security, I'll come back as soon as I can and buy it back from you for the two plus interest.' So I said okay, and I gave him two bucks and he left the manuscript with me but he never came back for it."

"He went home to Porlock," David suggested.

Alice looked pointedly at her watch and said, "It's getting awfully late. I think we'd better call it a day. Or a night. Time to head for home. You boys can sleep late on Sunday, I go to early Mass."

David said, "What about the kid?"

Alice said, "He can sleep on my couch. I'll feed him an early breakfast and send him home safe and sound. That okay with you?" she asked me.

I said, "Sure." Then everybody stood up and put on their coats because of the weather. I said, "Can I read that thing?"

A Jack said, "What thing?"

"
The Lighthouse
."

Jack hesitated a second, then he shrugged. He was shrugging into his topcoat and I think he was shrugging in answer to my question, too. "Sure, why not, it isn't worth anything."

That was a long time ago. A long, long time ago. Look at me now, would you? You think I'm the same person who moved a few tons of boxes in one afternoon and only worried about getting dirty? White hair, stiff joints, did I ever tell you about how I got my job, working for Biblo and Tannen? Oh, I did. Okay.

I always loved books. I thought I'd wind up working on Fourth Avenue at Schulte's or Stammer's or Eureka Bookshop or the Raven Bookshop. Come to think of it, I wonder why that poor guy didn't sell his Poe item to the Raven. Maybe he tried and they wouldn't take it. Jack only took it because he felt sorry for the guy. He never thought he'd come back for his piece of junk. And he never did. Did I mention that? He took the two dollars and said he'd come back for his typescript but he never showed his face at Biblo and Tannen again.

Yes, I thought I'd wind up a bookman, maybe I'd quit school and work for Biblo and Tannen full time. That would teach that wicked witch of a stepmother a lesson. But I'd miss my brother. But if I could do that, maybe they'd let me sleep in the store, I could sleep upstairs in the overstock room, and maybe someday they'd make me a partner or I could even start my own bookstore.

It didn't happen that way. I guess I just wasn't brave enough to go out on my own. After all, I was only twelve. So I was
bar mitzvah
and I finished high school and I went to Columbia the same as Cornell Woolrich only I didn't drop out, I finished my degree and spent a few years in the Army and then I got out and became a writer.

Oh, it's been a long life. I've written a whole shelf of novels. Plus a few screenplays, a bunch of short stories, some essays and books of what I like to call cultural history, literary biography and criticism. Biblo and Tannen would call it
Literature
.