“I wonder who the other woman is.”
She shook her head. “This bothers me a lot. It’s fairly obvious now that Jeffords was a player of some kind in Grayson’s life and I missed it. Damn.”
I wanted to move her past it, beyond her own shortcomings. I took the handle of my spoon and changed the subject, nudging the chip of paper until my words still and whisp lined up opposite her Fr .
“I’m no expert,” I said. “But this typography looks the same to me.”
“They seem to be the same point size. But the letters are different so it’s hard to be sure.”
I unfolded the library copy I had made of the original “Raven” and showed her the words still and whisp where I had circled them in the fifth stanza. “Here’s where your Fr comes from. Fourth line, second stanza, first word. ‘From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore.’”
But I could see she had already accepted the inevitability of its being there. She picked up the yellow pages and read Richard’s poem. I watched her face as she read it, but she went through the entire thing deadpan.
“What do you make of this?” she said, putting it down.
I told her what I thought, the obvious supple-mented with guesswork. It was a rough draft of something, hand-dated July 1967, two years before the Graysons died. There were numerous strike-outs and places where lines had been rewritten between lines. In the margins were long columns of rhyme words, many keyed to the dominant suffix ore . Mixed among the common words— core, store, door, lore — were exotic and difficult possibilities such as petit four, centaur , and esprit de corps .
“Whore,” she said, looking up from the page. “That’s one Poe couldn’t use.”
In technique it was like “The Raven,” written out in eighteen full stanzas with the Poe meter and cadence. The tone was allegorical, like the old Orson Welles version of Julius Caesar in a blue serge suit. You couldn’t quite be sure what was real and what had been skewed for effect, or how much might just be the author’s own grim fantasy.
The style was in part mythic. It told the story of two young gods, one fair, the other dark: brothers forced to choose between good and evil when they were too young to understand the consequences. The road to hell was an orgy without end, lit up with laughter and gay frolic. Salvation came at a higher price.
One took the path of least resistance and tumbled into hell. The other chose the high road, finding strength in purpose and contentment in his work. But temptation was a constant, and in the end the darkhaired god was his own undoing.
Rigby was the symbol of blind youth. His was the only proper name in the tale. Richard had chosen to write it that way, the entire eighteen stanzas a lecture to youth.
On paper he could do that. He could sit Rigby down and make him listen. He could turn whores into saints and make the dark-haired god bow at the devil’s feet.
“There are a couple of lines crossed out,” she said, “as if he had changed his mind about something and took off in another direction.”
“He wanted to take his brother’s name out. You can still read it, though: all he did was draw a squiggly line through it.”
She read aloud.
Rigby was a fresh young boy when he arrived like
Fauntleroy
And took his bashful place beyond the shadows of
the Grayson door;
Little did he know that Grayson had a legendary
place in
Bedrooms: everywhere he’d hasten, wives and
daughters to explore.
Grayson had them everywhere; on the stair and on
the floor,
Grayson lusted, evermore.
“Why take that out?” she said.
“It’s too blunt. He wanted it to flow differently, he wanted that godlike flavor. He felt he could do that better by keeping himself and his brother nameless.”
The telephone rang. She picked it up and said a few words, scribbled a few notes, asked a few questions about when, where, and how. “That’s great, friend,” she said. “Yeah, do send me copies of those clips, and listen, that’s one I owe you if you ever need a Seattle angle.”
She hung up and looked at me. She didn’t say anything and I didn’t need to ask. She looked down at the poem and said, “I think you’re right, if it matters. Richard had a well-honed sense of bitter satire. A frontal attack was never as much fun as a hit-and-run.”
“The title was blatant enough.”
“‘The Craven.’ What an insult that would’ve been to a man like Darryl Grayson.”
“It belittles his genius. It reduces Grayson’s life to the level of his own. And yet it has moments of real…what?”
“Love.”
“Read it again.”
She read aloud from the top: the world according to Richard, first revised version.
One night sitting with dear Gaston, as the night
fell deep and vast in
All its blackened glory: such a night to chill him
to the very core;
A colder wind I blew upon him, one I thought
would shake and stun him
And might even break and run him far away from
sorrow’s door.
But the child remained undaunted: all his faith
again he swore
Was in his god forevermore.
“I don’t believe this,” she said. “It doesn’t square with what I know about Richard or Rigby.”
“You can’t take it literally, you’ll end up doubting it all. I admit it strikes a false note at the top. We know Rigby wouldn’t sit still for what comes later, but that doesn’t mean other parts of it aren’t true.”
She read two flashback stanzas telling of the gods’ humble origins.
“I had it right,” she said. “If anything, I underwrote it.”
The father was a mean drunk and drunk much of the time. The mother was dead and unforgiven. If she wanted understanding, she’d have to find it in the next world because the son she’d left on earth had none to give her.
Lines in the middle of the third stanza made short work of these two and the sorry life they’d given their sons.
Brute and whore together spawned ‘em; then
forsook ‘em; tossed and pawned ‘em
To the devil who upon them did his vile and
wicked powers pour…
I joined her reading, quoting from memory.
One would join Old Scratch the devil, while he
watched the other revel
In himself, and gaze with level eyes upon the
predator…
“I don’t see that in here.”
“He squiggled it out. But it’s there, off to the side of the verse he kept. You can read it through the squiggle.”
“Yeah, I see it now.”
Up to this point Richard had worshiped his brother blindly, much as Rigby would do a generation later. “At that time, he was buying his own god scenario,” I said. “Grayson was his protector, the only real constant in his life.”
“Then it all changes. The god proves false.”
“He has his first serious romance, and Richard rankles with fear and jealousy.”
“Cecile Thomas,” Trish said. “I talked to her. She had gone to grammar school with the Graysons, then her parents moved away to North Carolina and came back to Atlanta when she was a teenager. A classic coming-of-age romance. Grayson thought of her as a brat when they were kids. Then suddenly there she was again, eighteen and lovely.”