25
On the way downtown I stopped at a Chinese joint. I ate some great moo-shoo and arrived back at the Ramada at eight o’clock. I sat on the bed and made my phone checks. Leith Kenney was still incommunicado: in Taos, the recorded welcome mat continued on the Jeffordses’ phone. By nine o’clock I was tight in the grip of cabin fever. I tried Trish Aandahl, but there was no answer. Outside, the rain had resumed its hellish patter. Nothing to do at this time of night but wait it out.
At quarter after nine a knock at the door made me jerk to my feet, knocking the phone to the floor. I stood for a moment, that line from Poe running through my head…
“ ‘Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door— Only this and nothing more.“
. . . and slowly I moved to the window and parted the curtains. I could see the dark outline of a man, his shoulders and legs and the back of his head. He knocked again: he meant business. He had probably heard the phone falling and knew I was here, and he didn’t seem interested in helping me by moving back out in the light so I could see his face. I bit the bullet: went to the door and opened it.
It was the deskman. “Sorry to disturb you, I just wanted to check and see if that’s your car. I didn’t recognize it from anybody who checked in today.”
I assured him it was mine: the other car had belonged to a friend. He apologized and went away. But he stopped in the courtyard and looked back at the Nash, just long enough to give me the jitters. He didn’t write the plate number down, and I watched him through the curtain until he disappeared into the office.
If I had any thought about staying here past tonight, that ended it. I’d be gone with the dawn, looking for a new place and a new name. I sat on the bed and tried the phone again, but the world was still away from its desk. Kenney and Jeffords I could understand, but Trish had asked me to call, you’d think she’d be there. I would try her each half hour until she came in. I was reaching over to make the ten-o’clock call when it rang almost under my hand. It caught me in that same tense expectancy, and again I knocked it clattering down the table to the floor. I gripped the coiled wire and the receiver bumped its way back up the nightstand into my hands.
“Hello.”
“Mr. Hodges?”
“Yes…yeah, sorry about the racket.”
“It’s okay, I’ve done that a few times myself.” There was an awkward pause. “It’s Allan Huggins.”
“Ah.”
“I’ve been thinking about that chip of paper you showed me.”
I waited, letting him get to it in his own way.
“Actually, I haven’t thought about anything else since you left.”
“Have you changed your mind about it?”
“No…no.” I heard him breathe…in, out…in, out. “No, I feel sure it’s a photocopy. The question I can’t get out of my mind is, what’s it a photocopy of?…And where’s the original?…And how and when was it made?”
“Interesting questions.”
“I’m wondering if I could see it again. I know I wasn’t too hospitable when you were over earlier. I apologize for that.”
“It’s no problem.”
“Would it be asking too much…Could I perhaps make my own photocopy from your sample? I’d like to study it at greater length.”
“I don’t think I want to do that just now. You can see it again, if you’d like.”
“I would like, yes…very much. The lettering’s what’s getting to me. The more I think of it…I’ve never seen that exact typeface, and yet…”
He didn’t have to elaborate: I knew what was going through his head.
“Tomorrow, perhaps,” he suggested hopefully.
“I’ll give you a call if I can.”
“Please do…please.”
“You could do something for me while we’re at it Call it a trade-off.”
“Surely,” he said, but his voice was wary.
“Tell me why the name Rodney Scofield set you off like a fire.”
“Don’t you really know?”
“No,” I said with a little laugh. “I keep telling you, I never heard of the guy.”
He grunted a kind of reluctant acceptance. “Tomorrow, then. We’ll talk about it then.”
He hung up. I made my phone checks yet again, to no avail. Outside, the rain fell harder, bringing my spirits down with it.
In this mood of desolate pessimism, having exhausted for the moment my last best hopes by telephone, I lay back on the bed and started reading Trish Aandahl’s book on Darryl and Richard Grayson.
26
The earliest Grayson alphabets were etched in the cool, hard sand of Hilton Head Island in the fall of 1937. It was a wild beach then: there were no luxury hotels or golf courses, and the beach was fringed by strips of jungle. On Sunday mornings Grayson would crank up his ‘29 International pickup and clatter out on the oyster-shell road from Beaufort. Never again have I known such a sense of freedom and raw potential , he wrote, years later, to a friend in Atlanta. Never have I had such a clear vision of the road ahead . He was seventeen and on fire with life. He walked the beach alone, glorying in the solitude and in the wonder of his emerging wisdom. His cutting tool was a mason’s trowel. He covered the beach with alphabet, running with the sunrise and racing the tide. He knew all the classic typefaces: he could freehand a Roman face that was startling, and when the tide came up and washed it all away, it left him with a feeling of accomplishment, never loss. It was all temporary, but so necessary—the sweet bewilderment, the sudden clarity, the furious bursts of energy that sometimes produced nothing more than a sense that in his failure he had taken another vital step. It would come, oh, it would come! He could do things at seventeen that he could not have dreamt at sixteen. His youth was his greatest ally, as fine an asset as experience would be when he was forty. A photograph exists—two photographs, reproduced back-to-back in Trish’s book. The young Grayson stands on the beach, his face in shadow, the sand behind him etched with letters. The same scene on the verso, a young woman standing where Grayson had been. The capsule identifies her as Cecile Thomas, the day, September 15, 1931. He was my first love, the dearest, most desperate, most painful. I was eighteen, a year older than he was, but he was in all ways my teacher . On that moonlit night, warm for early autumn, they had become lovers on the sand, obliterating the writing he had done by firelight. Never mind , he said, I’ll make you another one , and he did, running blind in the dark with the tide going out, and when they came back in the morning, the incoming tide had not yet reached it.
Oh, it’s perfect , she had said: when the tide finally did come up and wash it away, I cried, and he laughed and said it was nothing . Someday, Grayson told her, he would create something that couldn’t be washed away, so why cry now for trifles such as this? God, I loved him…still do in a way. I couldn’t believe how it affected me when I read of his death, and I hadn’t seen him in more than twenty-five years . The world was a poorer place when he died. He cared nothing for money or roles or the things that drove others. He learned his art the only way an artist ever learns, by probing the secrets of his own vast heart. He always took the road less traveled, always: he rose up on the page and strode across it, an unspent force even in death. Here he comes now, walking up Hilton Head alone. He carves up the sand with his trowel, running an alphabet of his own creation, knocked off on the spot. The tide licks away the A even as he touches off the small z , and he stands ankle-deep in the surf, breathing the pure Carolina air and tasting his coming victories. Only the spirit of Trish Aandahl is there to keep him company, this woman yet unborn, a kindred essence wafting in the wind. Somewhere in the cosmos they connect, inspiring her to better prose, perhaps, than she can ever do. And slowly as she writes of Grayson, a dim picture emerges of herself. She’s there beside him, coaxing him along the sandy shore. She tells me things about Grayson that would leave a photographer baffled. The camera would miss it all. A magnificent picture is never worth a thousand perfect words. Ansel Adams can be a great artist, but he can never be Shakespeare. His tools are too literal.