They sat for perhaps an hour. The sun was beginning to set. There was a chill. He wanted to be released but the reverend was not ready to let him go. Or he wasn’t ready.
Then George sighed.
“You said he didn’t want me to find out about the Millses. You said she got him to promise that he wouldn’t tell.”
“Yes,” Wickland said.
“But I did find out about them. He has told me.”
“Yes. He still thinks there’s a Corinth. He thinks it’s Cassadaga.”
“I don’t—”
“Because he’s no rebel,” Wickland said, “because there’s nothing you can do to him to make him one. Because telling you was his trump card, and playing it was the only way he had to avenge what I did and to stand by history.”
“What you did?”
“You told me you saw her, you said you could see her. She’s going to have a baby.”
He did not return to Kinsley’s. It was already dark when he left Cassadaga. In the sky the stars must have looked like salt.
PART THREE
1
Messenger, running late, found the little street off Carondolet and parked. It was his second day on Judith Gazer’s route. When he took Mrs. Carey’s tray from the insulated box there were three left. He locked the door on the driver’s side, found the house and opened the gate of the little low fence, low as a fence in storybooks.
He had called first, phoning from Albert Reece’s apartment, the man’s permission grudgingly granted.
“That wasn’t long distance, was it?” Reece asked when Messenger had hung up. “If it was only across the river they’d charge me a toll.”
“It was in the city,” Messenger said.
“Could I see that paper?” Messenger showed him the number and Reece studied it for a moment. “All right then,” he said. “Call it a dime.” Cornell handed him the coin. “If this was Russia you could call for free. They got Socialized Telephone in Russia.”
“Long distance too?”
“Kids,” Reece said, “don’t ever talk about you. You get a free ride with kids. Kids don’t give a shit about your morals or your politics. I’m talking infants, toddlers, boys on tricycles. Kids just ain’t shockable. If a little golden fairy was to tip his cap to a kid in the street, the kid would just look at the fairy and tell him good morning. The only way to shock a kid is to hold his finger to the socket. The elderly is different. Old-timers love to correct you. They enjoy it that you’re a traitor or that you live in sin. They love that you sit with your legs apart or are on the take. It warms their hearts the parks ain’t safe and you’re going to hell.
“Don’t get me wrong, Professor. The old are just as hard to shock as any six-year-old. They not only seen it all, they done eighty-six percent of it. Christ, they’re as crazy about bad news as you are. Why shouldn’t things stink if you’re going to die soon? It’s just that we love to correct, show our disapproval like preserves we’ve put up. If we had the strength we’d throw stones. So just don’t underestimate us. Don’t be sly and don’t be disrespectful. Don’t ask an old-timer ‘Long distance too?’ when he’s trying to explain Socialized Telephone in the USSR to you.
“All I want to know is this. How’d a son of a bitch like you get into this line of work?”
“What do you want from me?” Messenger asked. “Tomorrow we have chunks of braised beef served with noodles in a rich broth, buttered Texas toast, French-style green beans and glazed pineapple tidbits. Or you could have breaded beef cutlet, Wisconsin whole-grain corn and red beet slices. What do you want from me?”
“Wise guy,” Reece said. “That’s all right. We love it you’re a wise guy. We think it’s terrific you’re a horse’s ass.”
Messenger, understanding that they didn’t like him, was untroubled. He only found it a little unfair. He brought their dinners, he did for them, even helping to feed those one or two of his clients who could not manage for themselves. He spent perhaps fifteen minutes with each of them, twice as much as Judith told him would be necessary. At some other time of his life he would have been bothered perhaps by their hostility, but now it was a matter of indifference to him, as things were a matter of indifference to him to which he had never thought he would become accommodated.
Messenger had had what he thought of as a curious life. He had published a collection of stories and three novels, all of which were out of print, none of which had ever come out in paperback. And though he was still occasionally invited to read from his work on various campuses, the fees were always small and the invitations invariably came from friends who themselves hoped to be invited to his school in return. (It was a point of pride with him that he never returned the favor.) There were seldom more than thirty or forty people in his audiences, half of whom were there because they had been asked to the party in his honor afterward. He was forty-five years old and accepted these offers not for the money and certainly not for the opportunity they gave him to see his old friends but because on one such trip, shortly after the publication of his second novel, he had met a really beautiful young graduate student who had driven him back to his motel after the party and spent the night with him in his room. She said she was nuts about his work, but when he ordered breakfast for them the next morning it turned out she had read only one of his stories. It was the single story he had published in The New Yorker, the title story of a collection he was to publish a year later, and the only thing he’d ever written to be optioned for the movies. The amiable madman who had purchased the option, Amos Ropeblatt, a hopeful fellow who had once had something to do with an Orson Welles film made back in the fifties, renewed it annually for five hundred dollars.
Messenger felt he was clearly second string, a man who had been granted tenure by his university when he was still in his mid-thirties, on the basis, it seems, of that same New Yorker story that had gotten him laid a dozen or so years before, the memory of which incident kept him returning to those campuses neither for his token fees nor for those sparse audiences to whom he read from what even he could not seriously think of as his “work,” and still less for his friends, but for those parties.
Then, at a time of his life when he no longer really needed it, he came into an inheritance, or an inheritance by default. An aunt, preceded in death by her maiden daughters, left him three hundred thousand dollars. On two occasions he had himself almost died, once from a heart attack and once from a bone stuck in his throat on which he had nearly choked. And he was troubled by his children.
And something else. He had grown tolerant of his own bad driving. Regularly he dinged cars in parking lots, gouging metal divots from his once smooth fenders and altering the face of his grille, the delicate crosshatching piecemeal collapsing as he sought to negotiate parking spaces at four and five and six miles an hour. There was one car, a black ’76 Gremlin, that, parked by the curb in the narrow faculty lot behind his building, seemed always to be in his way, the dark molding about its left rear wheel an obstacle he seldom missed as he attempted to move into his slot in the single cramped row of cars. Each accident, each small engagement, brought a brief anger, then a queer, righteous, irrational fulfillment. The car was never not there, always, it seemed to Messenger, in a favored position among the automobiles lined up like race horses at a starting gate. Messenger cursed its owner’s regularity, the long-suffering smugness of the scarred and battered Gremlin. He never left a note — when he left in the afternoon the car was still there — or sought to hide the evidence of his guilt, the injured auto’s black paint smeared like spoor across his cream-colored Pontiac. On each occasion he made the same speech to himself. “My hand-eye coordination’s. going. Fuck him. Why should I worry about a little scratched paint?” But he knew he would neither die nor ever hurt anybody in an accident, that he would simply drive over curbs as he turned corners, skin cars parked along side streets, dent the odd fender here and there along life’s highway.