chapter 5

About three months or so after I met Katherine Mancuso I brought her home one night; I don't remember now where we'd gone. We'd been out in the MG, and I bumped it up over the curb, parked it in its slot between her store and the next building, and we crawled out over the back end. Up in her apartment over the store, Kate put water on for tea. All this was about as usual, yet I think we both knew even while taking our coats off that in some mysterious way tonight— mysterious because the evening until now hadn't seemed any different from a lot of others—we'd crossed some sort of invisible line, and that our relationship was no longer tentative but was headed somewhere. Because Katie began telling me all about herself. She carried in our tea, a full cup on its saucer in each hand—I knew she'd added sugar to mine in the kitchen—handed me mine, sat down beside me on the chesterfield, and began talking as though we'd both understood she was going to, as I guess we did. Most of what she told me that night is of no importance to this, but after a while she said, "You know I'm an orphan?" I nodded; she'd told me that much long since. When Kate was two, her parents took a weekend trip, and as usual left her with Ira and Belle Carmody next door; this was in Westchester. They were much older than the Mancusos but good friends, childless, crazy about Kate. Her parents were killed driving home. In the days that followed, the Carmodys kept Kate with them. And when it turned out there were no relatives to take her except a cousin of her mother's in another state who had never seen her, the Carmodys legally adopted Kate, the cousin glad to agree. They raised her, and of course to Katie they were her parents; she didn't remember her own. I nodded; yes, I knew she was an orphan. And Kate got up, went to her bedroom, and came back with an accordion folder, the kind made out of shiny red cardboard that ties with an attached red cord. She opened it on her lap, found the right compartment, reached in, and—we're all actors by instinct, hams from birth—she didn't withdraw her hand but sat talking, letting my curiosity build. She said, "Ira's father was Andrew Carmody, a fairly well-known financier and political figure of nineteenth-century New York, though not one of the really famous ones. Later on he seemed to lose his moneymaking ability, and whatever fortune he had along with it. His chief claim to fame was that he was some sort of adviser to President Grover Cleveland during Cleveland's second term in the nineties, which is when Ira was born."I nodded and, just for something to say, said, "What'd he advise him about?" Kate smiled. "I don't know. Nothing much, I imagine; as an historical figure he was pretty minor. Ira used to say that in a very complete history of Cleveland's second administration his father would probably rate one small footnote. But he was important to Ira, because when Ira was small, I don't know how old, his father killed himself. And for the rest of Ira's life I don't think his father was ever very far from his mind." Kate brought her hand out from the folder; she was holding a square little black-and-white snapshot. "Andrew Carmody was broke, the last of his money finally gone, and in 1898 he and his wife moved to Montana, a little town called Gillis. Years later in the thirties, long after Ira was grown and had left Gillis, he drove back there, halfway across the country, just to make sure he was right and that his father's grave was really the way he remembered it as a child. "It was—exactly." Kate handed me the little photograph. "That's the picture Ira took that summer: That's his father's gravestone. I suppose it's still there; someday I'd like to go see." I couldn't make out what I was looking at, staring at the glossy little snapshot on my palm. Then I recognized the shape: It was the kind of gravestone cartoonists draw, the old-fashioned straight-sided slab with the top rounded into a perfect half-circle. This one seemed to stand no more than a foot and a half or so above ground—it was much shorter than most—and was no longer perfectly upright, but canted to the left. It was sharp and clear; he'd taken this when the light was just right. There stood the stone at the head of a sparsely grassed grave, several gone-to-seed dandelions plainly visible. It was an old grave, the mound shallow, almost level again with the surrounding earth. Then I realized with a small sense of shock that the markings on the stone weren't letters; there was no inscription on the headstone, only a design, and I brought the little snap closer, tilting it toward the lighted lamp at the end of the chesterfield. The design was a nine-pointed star inside a circle. It was formed of what must have been ninety or a hundred or so dots. The engraver had simply tapped it out, one dot after another, the points of the star touching the circle, the design covering almost the entire surface of the tombstone right down to the ground. The photograph was good, each dot a tiny shadow-blackened pit in the flaking stone surface, the weathered round-topped shape of the tombstone sharply outlined against the much darker background of hard-packed earth and sparse grass behind it, other neighboring headstones slightly out of focus in the near distance. I have an idea that I sat staring at the little photograph for as much as a full minute, which is a long time. It had the fascination of absolute reality; somewhere far across the country outside a small Montana town this strange stone still stood, very likely, stained and roughened by years of heat, cold, and the alternate wetness and dryness of many seasons. I looked up at Kate finally. "This is what his wife put up at his grave?" Kate nodded. "It disturbed Ira all of his life." Her hand was rummaging in the folder again; then she brought out a paper, a long rectangle of robin's-egg blue. It was an envelope, and Katesaid, "His father shot himself. One summer afternoon. Sitting at his desk in a little frame house. And this is what he left on his desk." I took the envelope. It bore a canceled three-cent green stamp bearing a profile of Washington in a design I'd never seen before, and the postmark circle read: "New York, N.Y., Main Post Office, Jan. 23, 1882, 6:00 P.M." Under this it was hand-addressed in black ink to "Andrew W. Carmody, Esq., 589 Fifth Avenue, City." The lower right corner of the envelope was slightly charred as though it had been lighted and almost immediately put out. I turned it over—the back was blank—and Kate said, "Look inside." There was a white sheet inside, folded in half and charred at one side as though it had been in the envelope when the envelope was lighted. In black ink above the fold, in the same neat script as the address, was written: If a discussion of Court House Carrara should prove of interest to you, please appear in City Hall Park at half past twelve on Thursday next. In blue ink below the fold, in a large half-illegible scrawl, blot-stained in four places, it said: That the sending of this should cause the Destruction by Fire of the entire World (a word seemed to be missing here at the end of the top line where the paper was burned) seems well-nigh incredible. Yet it is so, and the Fault and the Guilt (another word missing in the burned area) mine, and can never be denied or escaped. So, with this wretched souvenir of that Event before me, I now end the life which should have ended then. I felt a corner of my mouth move up into a faint smile; this seemed unreal. As I looked down at the charred little sheet, it was hard to understand that once people could actually write a florid overblown note like this, then pick up a gun and kill themselves. But it was real; however written, this thing in my hand—I glanced down at it again, and stopped smiling—was a desperate message from the last moments of a man's existence. I slid it back into its envelope and looked up at Kate. "End of the world?" I said, but she shook her head. "No one ever knew what it meant. Except, I suppose, Ira's mother. She came running—I've pictured this so often, Si, though I hate to, I don't like it—and with the sound of the shot still in her ears, the room filled with the smell of gunpowder, she stood beside her husband's body sprawled across the desktop, read this, then set it afire. Suddenly she slapped out the flame instead, and kept it. She didn't call a doctor. He'd shot himself through the heart, she said at the inquest after the funeral; any fool could see he was dead. Instead, and immediately, she washed and dressed the body for burial. It wasn't unusual at that time and place not to have a body embalmed; but she didn't let an undertaker or anyone else set foot in the place till the body was ready for its coffin. "It was a town scandal, as Ira was reminded more than once as a boy. But she faced it down. She looked them in the eye at the inquest, said she had no idea what the note meant and that what she'd done was nobody's business but hers. Ten days later she had the stone you saw erected at the grave, and no one ever heard one word of explanation about that either. "It shadowed Ira's life. As long as he lived he wanted to know—why, why, why? And so have I."I did, too. We talked a lot that night. I told Kate a good deal about myself; mostly about my marriage and divorce and what I understood and did not understand about it. It wasn't something I'd ever much felt like discussing with anyone before. But even blabbing away about myself to an interested and willing listener, part of my mind was still thinking about Andrew Carmody, and wondering why, why, why. It may be that the strongest instinct of the human race, stronger even than sex or hunger, is curiosity: the absolute need to know. It can and often does motivate a lifetime, it kills more than cats, and the prospect of satisfying it can be the most exciting of emotions. And so on Friday morning in Dr. Danziger's office I sat hardly able to wait till he was ready to give me an answer. He'd listened. He'd looked at the little snapshot and the blue envelope I'd borrowed from Kate. And now he sat regarding me from behind his desk; today he wore a dark-blue double-breasted suit, a white shirt, and a maroon bow tie; I wore the same gray suit I'd worn yesterday. After a moment or so he picked up the blue envelope again, and read aloud, " 'That the sending of this should cause the Destruction by Fire of the entire World ... seems well-nigh incredible. Yet it is so....' " He grinned suddenly. "And you'd like to watch the 'sending of this,' would you? Well, who could blame you? So would I. But what good would it do you, Si? What would you learn? If anything, only a meaningless fragment more of a mystery that would continue to tantalize you and which you could not pursue. Because surely you've understood"—he leaned across the desk toward me—"that there cannot be the least intervention of any kind in events of the past. To alter the past would be to alter the future which derives from it. The consequences of that are unimaginable, and it is an utterly unacceptable risk." "Of course! And I understand. But just to watch that letter mailed, Dr. Danziger! I wouldn't learn much, I know. Nothing, probably. But... well, I can't explain." "You don't have to. Because I understand. Nevertheless—" "If this should succeed, I'll be watching something. Why not that?" "In theory I suppose there's no reason why not; I was afraid you might put it that way. All right, Si. After you left yesterday I phoned the board members. We have a bimonthly meeting scheduled for later this week, and I asked them to move it up to today. I didn't know last night what you had in mind but I thought it might be something they'd have to decide; I don't have an entirely free hand, you know. I'll present this to them. And they'll say no, too." A little later Danziger introduced me, in the board room. It was a fairly large conference room typical of the kind in many an ad agency: a portable blackboard up front; a good many enlarged photographs and sketches pinned to the cork-board walls, most of them of settings or the plans for settings down on the Big Floor; a long conference table surrounded by men in shirt-sleeves, sweaters, or suit coats. Danziger led me around the table, introducing me. Some I'd met already— Rube was there, wearing a suit today; he just grinned and winked at me—and there was an engineer Rube had introduced me to in the hallways. Now I met a history professor fromColumbia, an intelligent-looking, surprisingly young man; a bald, chubby meteorologist from Cal Tech; a professor of biology from Chicago University who looked like a professor; a professor of history from Princeton who looked like a nightclub comedian; a tense bright-eyed army colonel named Esterhazy, in a civilian suit; a mean-looking U.S. senator; and several others. It was a fairly distinguished gathering, I suppose, but I realized from the way each of them looked at me as we'd speak and shake hands that I was the guest of honor for the moment. Each of them in turn would stand, smiling and speaking, and I'd smile and respond, but as we shook hands he'd be searching my face. It made me realize that I and a half-dozen others were what this and every other meeting was about: We were the project, and I felt suddenly important, walking to the cafeteria, where I sat over a cup of coffee waiting for Danziger. He walked in about twenty minutes later, looking pleased and a little surprised. Sitting at my table then, he told me that the board had agreed to my request. It was Rube, the Princeton professor, and Esterhazy who'd carried the ball for me, he said. They argued that there was no harm and there might even possibly be some advantages in what I wanted to do, and presently it was so decided. Danziger smiled and said, "So now you present me with a temptation. My mother was sixteen years old in 1882. She was born February sixth, and on her birthday her father, mother and sister took her to Wallack's theater, and that was the occasion on which she met my father; it was a family anecdote all their lives. He arrived at the theater, an exuberant young man-abouttown, saw Apple Mary, a character of the day who sold apples outside the theaters, and on impulse handed her a five-dollar gold piece, saying it was good luck for her and good luck for him. She replied that his evening would be blessed; he walked on into the lobby and his eye was caught by a green velvet dress, and by the girl who wore it. He knew the people she and her family were talking to, went over, was introduced, and they were married several years later. You can guess the temptation you've presented me with now." I nodded, smiling, and Danziger sat back in his chair. "There are many times when I have no least faith in this project; none. The whole thing seems absurd, hopeless. But if it should succeed, Si, if you should actually reach the New York of that time, and standing inconspicuously in a corner of the lobby were able to witness that meeting ... well, if we're to have one personal purpose, we can have a second. I'd value very very much, Si, your sketch, a portrait of them as they were then." He stood up abruptly. "And now we're in a hurry." They could be ready for me on Monday, he said, by working over the weekend, and I sat nodding, listening, aware that in the very moment of elation I'd felt at the news Danziger had brought me the excitement had perversely subsided, and that all belief in this odd old man's project was draining away as though some sort of plug had been pulled. It was a feeling I was to have again and again and even get used to in the time that began on Monday morning.