During the two days that followed, I could not have played my record if I had wanted to. Uncle Bill was laid out in the parlor where the phonograph was, and for me, a child, to have entered that room would have been unthinkable. But during this period of mourning, a strange fantasy took possession of my mind. I came to believe—I am not enough of a psychologist to tell you why—that if I were to play my record, the sound would be that of my uncle’s voice, pleading again for me to bring Dr. Croft, and accusing me. This became the chief nightmare of my childhood.
To shorten a long story, I never played it. I never dared. To conceal its existence I hid it atop a high cupboard in the cellar, and there it stayed, at first the subject of midnight terrors, later almost forgotten.
Until now. My father passed away at sixty, but my mother has outlasted all these long decades, until the time when she followed him at last a few months ago and I, her son, standing beside her coffin, might myself have been called an old man.
And now I have reoccupied our home. To be quite honest, my fortunes have not prospered, and though this house is free and clear, little besides the house itself has come to me from my mother. Last night, as I ate alone in the old dining room where I have had so many meals, I thought of Uncle Bill and the record again, but I could not, for a time, recall just where I had hidden it, and in fact feared that I had thrown it away. Tonight I remembered, and though my doctor tells me that I should not climb stairs, I found my way down to the old cellar and discovered my record beneath half an inch of dust. There were a few chest pains lying in wait for me on the steps, but I reached the kitchen once more without a mishap, washed the poor old platter and my hands, and set it on my modern high fidelity. I suppose I need hardly say the voice is not Uncle Bill’s. It is instead (of all people!) Rudy Vallee’s. I have started the recording again and can hear it from where I write: “My time is your time . . . My time is your time.” So much for superstition.
There is very little I can say about this story without sounding maudlin. Uncle Bill is based on a substitute teacher I had now and then in high school. The seed of the story came from my father’s funeral. As I sat in the funeral parlor seeing Dad’s corpse in its coffin and only half-hearing his eulogies, it came to me that I was next in line. The small children who sat with me now, a little ashamed because their father wept, would sit through another funeral when they were older. Then they would weep, perhaps. Or at least, some of them might.
Hour of Trust
You read, let us say, that this or that Corps has tried . . . but before we go any further, the serial number of the Corps, its order of battle are not without their significance. If it is not the first time that the operation has been attempted, and if for the same operation we find a different Corps being brought up, it is perhaps a sign that the previous Corps have been wiped out or have suffered heavy casualties in the said operation; that they are no longer in a fit state to carry it through successfully. Next, we must ask ourselves what was this Corps which is now out of action; if it was composed of shock troops, held in reserve for big attacks, a fresh Corps of inferior quality will have little chance of succeeding where the first has failed. Furthermore, if we are not at the start of a campaign, this fresh Corps may itself be a composite formation of odds and ends withdrawn from other Corps, which throws a light on the strength of the forces the belligerent still has at his disposal and the proximity of the moment when his forces shall be definitely inferior to the enemy’s, which gives to the operation on which this Corps is about to engage a different meaning, because, if it is no longer in a condition to make good its losses, its successes even will only help mathematically to bring it nearer to its ultimate destruction. . . .
The north and south walls were pale blue, of painted plaster over stone. A wide door in the north wall, of dark wood and old, dark, discolored brasswork, gave into the hotel corridor, floored (like the big room itself) in dull red tile. Flanking this door were elaborate wrought-iron candelabra; their candles would be lit later that night by Clio Morris, on signal from Lowell Lewis, when Force Cougar was pinned down near the 75–94 interchange in Dearborn and he felt things needed cheering up. Clio (that stenographic muse of history) was good for lighting such things: she was tall, and wore high heels and short skirts, and the soft coiffures she favored lent her face a brown and gold aureole when the flames were behind it.
To the right of the candelabrum on the right side of the doorway stood a heavy “library” table with a blue vase full of fresh cinerarias, the blue vase and blue flowers against the blue wall producing a ghostly effect—the shadows of vase and blossoms more visible and distinct than the things themselves. Above this blue ghost was a very large and brightly colored photograph in a massive frame. It depicted a barren hill crowned with the ruins of a large stone building, of which only (what once had been) the foundation of a tower retained any semblance of its original form. At the bottom of the frame a small brass plaque had been let into the wood, and this was engraved with the words Viana do Castelo, presumably to guide any tourist who might wish to visit the site.
Next to the candelabrum on the left of the door stood one of the twenty-three large leather-covered chairs which dotted the floor of the room—empty despite the invitation of a small table positioned near its right arm at a height convenient to hold a drink—above this chair was a second photograph of exactly the same size and shape as the first, framed in the same way. It depicted a barren hill topped with the tumbled ashlars of another (but equally demolished) stone building. The atmosphere of this photograph was so similar to that of the first that it was only after a careful process of ratiocination that the viewer (if he troubled) convinced himself that it was not a picture of the same ruin from a different angle, though in fact the two held no detail in common but the bright Portuguese sky. The plaque at the base of this second frame read: Miró.
The south wall held three doors, each of them smaller than the large door in the north wall that gave access to the remainder of the hotel, and each leading to a bedroom–sitting room with a bath. The leftmost (east) bedroom looked down into the patio garden of the hotel, and the central bedroom out (south) toward a wing of this patio, with a wall and a street beyond. All the bedrooms were comfortably furnished with carpets and chairs and (in each case) a large double bed, but this central bedroom had, in addition, a vidlink terminal which Lewis’s executive assistant, Peters, would use several times that night. It was a wardrobe-sized gray machine with a screen, a printer, a speaker, keys for coding the addresses of others, and various switches; it had been built by United Services Corporation, the company which employed Peters, as well as Lowell Lewis and Miss Morris and Donovan. (Five foot eight, 230 pounds, thinning blond hair, European sales manager for United Services, a good salesman and a hard worker, he felt he didn’t really have to worry if U.S. went down—hell, he’d lived in Europe for the past eight years, his wife was Belgian, and he spoke Flemish, German, and Swedish like he owned them, and he had connections all over, and half a dozen European firms would be tickled pink to lay their hands on him. He was right too.)
The west wall was entirely of glass and showed the Atlantic Ocean. Because the sun was low now, Peters (a middle-sized young man with a camouflaged face—Peters was one of those people who look a little Jewish but probably aren’t, and he played a good game of lacrosse) had drawn gray velvet drapes across this ocean, but later Clio Morris would open these drapes in order to see the stars.