The Man in the Woods (14 page)

“What?” Pinky began, but Helen hushed him, trembling, her eyes wide. She discovered she’d dropped her books. She didn’t care.

“The shoes ... the shoes ...
his
shoes! He’s in there!” she whispered.

“Okay,” Pinky whispered back. “Let’s go in and see—”

“No,” said Helen. The policeman’s warnings, Sister Ignatius’s doubts, and Barry’s man with the bone in his hair and quick little knife burned in her mind. She pulled Pinky behind a huge horse-chestnut tree, leaving her books on the sidewalk.

“Don’t talk,” Helen whispered. “Just see who gets on the bus.” Minute after minute they watched the legs moving, crossing and uncrossing, through the window at a distance of about twenty feet.

At last the bus lumbered down the street. Hidden behind the trees, Helen counted the seconds until it stopped, and the door opened with an asthmatic squeal. Out of the bus shelter crept a large-boned woman, known locally as Dora, her hair flying in her face in the wind. She was dressed entirely in towels, safety-pinned together, and carried two shopping bags crammed with newspapers. The door closed, and the bus left.

Dead leaves scurried along the cobblestones as they did in December. Helen and Pinky picked up Helen’s scattered books and papers and, that done, sat in the wind-filled shelter against a graffiti-covered wall. Helen kicked a spiny horse chestnut into the gutter. “Everything ... everything turns into nothing,” she said at last.

“Please,” said Pinky. “Don’t cry. Don’t shake like that.”

“I can’t help it.”

Pinky took off his worn brown cardigan and laid it over Helen’s bent shoulders. “We’ll find him. Don’t worry,” he said.

“No, we won’t,” said Helen. “We’ll never, ever find him. Look, he’s even thrown his sneakers away in some trash heap for a bag lady to find. We’ll never find him.”

“Yes, we will. I promise we will.”

“Pinky,
how
? We went through every file in the Preservation Society looking for that Thurber. A whole week of dusty papers for nothing. I went through the Fairchild papers under
F
on Wednesday. There was no Thurber there in all their records. Everything was handwritten. I had a little hope back then, when Asa Roche started talking about Lucy. I thought, well, just maybe this will lead somewhere. But old Elizabeth Fairchild took care of that. Lucy was just a figment of Asa’s imagination.”

The next bus showed as a speck at the end of the street. Pinky picked up Helen’s books with his own. He took her hand in his and, holding it tightly, said, “I wouldn’t believe old Dizzy Lizzy Fairchild if she told me there was ten cents in a dime.”

S
ATURDAY MORNING AT ELEVEN
o’clock Pinky was kicked out of the Fairchild mansion for dropping a priceless piece of scrimshaw, point down, on the parquet floor. The scrimshaw, being pure ivory, did not break, but the parquet was visibly dented, and so the custodian told Pinky to leave and never come back. Pinky left. He called the custodian a fish-faced old barnacle as he went out the door.

It took until Sunday afternoon for the custodian to get over this and warm up to Helen. In the end, Helen guessed, he was a lonely man. Not many people came to the Fairchild mansion after the summer tourists left. He wore a livery uniform, dark green with gold braid, like a doorman. He knew by heart the regulation spiel about the Fairchild family history that he obviously gave to all visitors. Helen was not interested in the relics of whaling days or the relics of the old Slater Mills. She listened with half an ear to stories of pirates attacking Fairchild ships and Roger Peddie Fairchild, who crossed the Delaware River with George Washington himself.

She was interested only in the Thurber, and through Lorenzo and the Fairchild sisters she hoped to find it.

The custodian had scoffed at the idea of there ever having been such a thing as a Thurber typewriter in the family. And by Sunday at three Helen had concluded he was right. She had gone through all Lorenzo’s diaries and fifty-eight boxes of correspondence belonging to his daughters, Virginia, Blanche, Clara, and Constance. Every letter, diary entry, list, every snippet of paper in the place was handwritten. And there was no Lucy. No Lucy anywhere.

Helen was about to go. The custodian took off again on one of his sermons. Helen sat respectfully at a long English-oak table in the middle of the library. The custodian pulled up a chair. He tweaked his military mustache, and his pink cheeks glowed with the happiness of having someone to talk to. “Good manners,” Aunt Stella had told Helen many times, “mean being considerate of others’ feelings when you yourself are tired, bored, or out of sorts.” Helen was all three and terrified. Her father was going to pick her up at the mansion because she thought somebody might follow her down the street, although she hadn’t told him this.

She tried to listen to the old man describe what he called the Bedford Ladies’ Aide Society. He had given her a large box of Fairchild family photographs and a pair of white cotton gloves to put on so as not to get fingerprints on them. “The earliest ones,” he said, “were called daguerreotypes. The others were called tintypes or ambrotypes.”

Helen looked through the photographs.

“I suppose you’re fascinated by all those lists the Fairchild sisters kept,” he said.

“Oh, yes,” answered Helen. She had been bored to pieces by them. Fifty-eight boxes of letters and lists of bandages, splints, slings, blankets, pills, and something awful called amputation saws.

“Well,” said the custodian, “the four sisters ran a splendid charity during the Civil War. You know about the Great Stone Fleet of course.”

“Of course,” said Helen. Every schoolchild in New Bedford knew that the City of New Bedford had sent all its old whaling ships, fifty of them, laden with rocks and had sunk them in Charleston Harbor, blockading it so that the Confederate government could not get supplies in. Every New Bedford schoolchild believed that as a result New Bedford was solely responsible for the Union and Abraham Lincoln’s winning the Civil War.

“Well, those four sisters,” the custodian buzzed on, “knew the South was low on supplies. They knew southern boys, children of God as much as northern boys, were suffering the tortures of the damned in makeshift field hospitals. Nothing but tents, most of the time. The southern armies couldn’t get any medicines at all. Young men were dying right and left of gangrene and septicemia, screaming in agony as the few doctors they had bound their wounds with old shirts and prayed over their agony. I think the Fairchild sisters felt a little guilty about that Great Stone Fleet depriving these human beings of any comfort, and so they raised money all over town, much of it at their own expense, and sent the southern boys all of these things you see here in the lists. It was a selfless Christian effort on their part and one of the many noble acts of this fine family. The sisters devoted themselves to charity and God’s work. They were so dedicated that none of them even married until long after the war.”

Above the custodian’s head was a splendid portrait of Lorenzo Fairchild. Asa Roche’s words ran through Helen’s head: “War profiteer. Made a mint off the Civil War.”

“Don’t you think so?” asked the custodian.

“Oh, yes,” said Helen. She stifled a yawn, and when the custodian’s back was turned, she gave the glowering face of Lorenzo Fairchild an evil look, before she went to telephone her father. It would take half an hour, her father said. He had to stop first at the supermarket before it closed.

Helen settled back into her chair in the library. In a corner wing chair the custodian had fallen asleep over his Sunday crossword. The library was totally quiet but for the ticking of a grandfather clock and the hissing of a dehumidifier in the corner. In the box of pictures was one of the gardens of the Fairchild mansion as it had been in the year 1870. Helen looked out through the French windows at the end of the room. The garden now was much as it had been then. The same chrysanthemums and asters and roses filled the same oval beds. The trees had grown since then, but almost everything else, the fountain, the rose arbor, and the feeling of great wealth combined with peace, was identical. She remembered guiltily to put on the white cotton gloves as she idled through the pictures.

Some were printed on thick cardboard, some on metal, and some in ornate ebony frames looked like mirrors, as she could see both the positive and negative images, depending on how the light struck them.

The people paraded before her, stilled in their sepia landscapes, numb and distant as the moon.

In the corner the grandfather clock ticked on. Over its face was a window. A painting of the sun with a huge grin rose slowly on a metal disk in the clock’s window. The clock had been there two hundred years, the custodian had told her earlier. Its sun had smiled on all these Fairchilds. It was smiling now on her, and something told her that in this silent house, which smelled of leather and lemon oil, there was an answer.

One after another she pored over the pictures. She wished she could will one grim Fairchild mouth to life and ask it to speak out about its time. She tried with all the vigor of her imagination to yank the stiff, formally posed bodies out of the photographer’s chairs, out of the iron clamps that held their heads motionless for the slow glass plates that would have blurred with the slightest movement. Their time had been as full of colors and odors and noises as the day dying outside the French windows, but she could not stir a breeze that would so much as ruffle a watered-silk hoop skirt or a feathered hat. Each picture remained still and bloodless, frozen away in the land of the dead.

On the back of each picture was an inscription, neatly written by Lorenzo in the same flawless, elegant script that filled his diaries, a magnificent, strong cursive that had not been taught in any school on the face of the earth in more than a century. There was no Lucy.

The restless white gloves on her hands flicked the pictures faster. Cats, dogs, and servants, babies in wicker prams languishing on lawns and verandas now vanished. The names, the dates, the locations of summer houses on now extinct streets in New Bedford and Saratoga Springs flew by. A woman in a rowboat, her teeth just breaking a smile, was labeled
Virginia, 187?, Uncle Francis’s skiff, Newport.
A very elderly gentleman in one of the mirror-like images was barely visible save for the wispy hair against an antimacassar. Lorenzo had marked it
James Madison Fairchild, 1851, old house.
A small tintype in an oval frame with a gilt mat held her attention. In it was Lorenzo, but not stern and cold as he appeared in his official portrait, where burnsides covered the wattles of his smug jowls and his hand was stuck imperially in his waistcoat. Here he was younger. His arm lay gently across the shoulders of a young girl, no more than fifteen, whose head inclined against his coat and whose face was lit with pleasure. Helen wondered who she was, as the tintype was unmarked. It could have been Virginia. Or Clara. There was a strong resemblance among all four sisters. Maybe it was Lucy, she told herself sadly, but no one would ever know, as it was unlabeled. She put the pictures neatly away and dropped the white gloves on top of the box.

The following afternoon at four, Helen cut her hand for the third time with the X-Acto knife. Under her breath she said the worst words she knew. In the pressroom lavatory was an empty Band-Aid box. Helen ran cold water on her hand for a few minutes and made her third bandage of the afternoon out of masking tape and a piece of bunched toilet paper.

While she was tending to her cut, Pinky took the flat she had been working on, which was now spattered with blood, and redid it cleanly.

“No wonder you had such an easy time getting this job away from Beverly,” he joked when Helen came back. “This is slave labor.”

“Jerry,” said Helen wryly “told me it was an honor to do it.” She sat down heavily on her dirty, nicked, and loose-legged drafting stool. She looked for a moment at Pinky’s usual drooping collar and comfortable pullover with leather patches on the elbows. The X-Acto knife, sharp as a new razor, lay waiting for her to cut more rubylith and finish up one more flat. “I wish I could just pull myself onto a soft cloud and float away,” Helen said.

“Why don’t you go home?” Pinky suggested. “I’ll finish.”

“That’s okay,” said Helen. “This’ll just take five minutes.” She knew it would take twenty. She sheared off a piece of the dark-red rubylith and plopped it down on a piece of acetate. She guessed that Jerry Rosen went through the scrap baskets when he was in one of his money-saving moods to see how much she wasted. She didn’t care. She removed the stick-on backing from the rubylith and began trimming it slowly to fit the photograph of a bowling trophy. “It’s like an awful dream where you keep running and can’t get anywhere, Pinky,” she said, yawning. “I spent twelve hours in the Fairchild mansion this weekend. Nothing. No Lucy. No Thurber. Elizabeth Fairchild was right. Asa made her up.”

“Maybe you’re looking in the wrong place,” said Pinky, cleaning his inky thumbnail with a bent paper clip.

“Well, I wish you’d tell me where the right place is!” Helen snapped without meaning to. “I was down in that hot, moldy old mansion all Saturday and Sunday afternoon while you were sitting home in the sun. Clumsy clod, dropping that scrimshaw! Damn!” The knife slipped, again. Another dot of blood fell onto a clean piece of repro under her hand.

“Keep your hair on,” said Pinky.

Suddenly all the rage and fear and helplessness she felt came surging out of her, with Pinky as its target. “If you get on my hair again, Pinky Levy,” said Helen, “I’ll wreck your press. I’ll pour ink all over it!” She wrapped her finger in masking tape and crouched over the drafting table. A whole line of type was ruined.

“Jeez Louise! It’s only an expression,” said Pinky. “I wasn’t even thinking about your stupid hair!”

“Thanks a lot,” said Helen, “If you hadn’t been such a clumsy clod and dropped that scrimshaw, you would have been able to help me go through the zillion stupid letters in the stupid Fairchild mansion.”

“You’re tired,” said Pinky tolerantly. “Better knock off before the knife slips again and cuts off one of your enormous boobs.” He caught Helen by both wrists as she dived off the drafting stool at him.