Then I thought of Uncle Sidney Cowper, who would let me choose which of us, my mother or I, would be snug harbor to his needs. It was at this time in my life that I dreamed of his notebook and found it in the woodpile and thought to incur his obligation by returning it. I learned something about transactions, and it has stood me in good stead all my life: Know the rules; do not trade with hope, but rather, if possible, with advantage harvested and, like the fruits in glass my mother stored every summer, put by for a need. To wit: I should have read his entries and labored to decipher their use by me to keep him off us. Instead, I ambled and prattled and offered and smiled. He thanked me, but the violence with which he pulled the leather notebook from my outstretched hand instructed me that I had just let go of something useful. A resource is to be cherished: William Bartholomew on M. And watch it now come to fruit.
I went to college at fifteen, thanks to Uncle Sidney Cowper, and was glad to go at that age in order to escape him. I was alert and lonely and wretched, and I found difficulty in enjoying my few triumphs — the company of Melanie Levi, the daughter of a baker in New Haven who taught me French, both language and deed; my ability to tell my instructors what they wished to hear — because I thought, whether in the icy solitude of my small room or in the company of my pimpled, braying classmates, of Uncle Sidney Cowper atop my mother. And the more I learned from Melanie, the more my cauchemars grew detailed and more prurient, more fascinating and therefore more frightening. Soon, I frightened myself, for the vision of him tupping her was the least of my awful constructions. I did not know whom I blamed the more, my predatory uncle or myself, who chose to leave my mother in his hands.
It is the door, I told myself.
I had wakened to the sound of my panting, to the sound of my voice going Oh and Oh. It is someone at the door, I told myself, as if to calm a child.
I kept the discarded cracked haft of a street worker’s shovel as a life preserver, which I leaned against the wall beside the door. Squinting against the day’s light that filtered into my room, I seized the oak shaft and unlocked my door.
He made an inarticulated noise, a cry of fright and pity. I felt my hand go up to cover what I could of my face, for his sake and mine. I backed away, cursing like a wrangler of horses for my having gone to the door in such a daze of nightmare and fatigue that I forgot to don my mask. I kept the haft in my hand as I grasped for the mask.
“Wait,” I warned him. “Wait at the door.”
Then, covered, I turned to him again and found him in the doorway, his own hand at his face as if to imitate me of seconds before. “Billy,” he said in a familiar voice. “Billy, I’m so sorry.”
His hair was a wiry dark halo. I said, “Sam Mordecai. Now it’s all right. You can look now.”
He slowly dropped his arm, too long for the brown serge sleeve of his suit coat, and he slowly opened his eyes. “No,” he said, closing them again, “no, it isn’t all right.” He took a breath and opened his eyes. “How it must have hurt beneath those bandages. How terrible, Billy.”
“I dreamed about you,” I said. “And here you are. I read your coverage of the suicide. In Boston?”
He nodded.
“And your memoir of the War?”
“I’m learning patience,” he said.
I beckoned him in and pulled a chair to. He obediently sat. “You’ll pardon the nightshirt,” I said, “but I rise late and go late to my bed. You’ll wait while I dress? And tell me, as I do, how you found me.”
He had lost a good deal of weight and his face seemed longer, boyish still but also more muscled and more worked upon; as I knew, he had seen a great deal in the War. His dark, liquid eyes were not still.
“I found you by wandering about and saying your name and pointing to my face,” he said, licking his lips and crossing and recrossing his arms. His energy was aboil. I thought him too uncontemplative, too keenly physical, to be a writer, and I thought it a piece of good luck because I wished him well. “I remembered your vow to become wealthy, so I asked questions of men in banks and at the gaming rooms on Broadway and at the Exchange. At each, you were known. No one knew where you lived, however.” He took from his breast pocket a slender notebook in black leather, and he fanned through pages to find his notes. “Assuming, then, that you wished to be lost, I thought to discern what woods you would take to, in lying low. It was always your way. You always went for the thickets, the brambles at the bottom or the topmost parts of the leafiest trees. You were always, I realized, in hiding. Never did I think of you behind a mask, but even that makes sense.”
“Sam, you needn’t trouble yourself to make sense of me. I prefer, in fact, not to be made sense of.” I was struck by a consideration: “Sam, you haven’t hunted me down to put me in your book?”
“Of course not,” he said. I thought that he lied. He was on the trail of something, and I was included in his hunt. His jaw muscles worked, and he compelled his arms to stillness, his legs to be crossed one over the other, further wrinkling his crumpled brown suit. “But I am composing the memoir of which I spoke to you. It has taken a different turning, although it makes use of my experience at war. I read a book of poetry, poems about the War by someone outside its immediate experience.”
“Battle-Pieces,” I said. “He writes so many poems. I have to confess to you that I find his meter too irregular for my crude taste.”
“Yes, you with your New Haven degree.”
“I have learned that having it pays nothing.”
“What pays, then?”
“Profit.”
“This fellow reaps no profit. I know little of poetry. But, at the end of his book, he writes a commentary, I suppose you might call it. Prose, Billy. He’s a straight-talking man on the Negro question. And about not … hating.”
“The South?”
“Yes.”
“After years of laboring to kill them.”
“And them to kill us. He is a complex man.”
“Sam, he’s a Republican, and that’s their line, and that’s their Administration giving him his badge and his paycheck and his pension.” His face fell, and something about his dedication to the man I would employ brought my anger up. “So you found a whisper about the death of his son and you wrote a column lamenting it. You even wrote about his participation in that game played with a small ball—”
“Base ball, they call it. Yes. You read my column?” His face went boyish as he smiled his pleasure. “You see?”
“What’s that, Sam?”
“How necessary it is for a writer to be read? You see how foolish and full of moonbeams I grow when you say you’ve seen my words?”
“And you’re hunting him to see about a writer no one reads. The death provoked your interest in the life, in other words. Words again.”
“All words, Billy. All of it’s words.”
“Words may convey dollars,” I said.
“Ask the man without a son,” he argued.
“He has another son left to him. Stanwix.” Sam found a pencil and wrote down notes. “As I understand it, something about his older brother’s death has made him go deaf.”
“You see? And he cannot hear words, this son of a writer. It is, indeed, a story. It is a large story. How the United States will silence the voice of intellect, crush philosophical speculation, and stamp out the embers of our national literature. Have you read Charles Dickens on America?”