I looked across the street at the old hotel, trying to put myself in the past. The St. Alwyn had been built at the beginning of the century, when the south side had thrived, and it still had traces of its original elegance. At the entrance on Widow Street, around the corner, broad marble steps led up to a huge dark wooden door with brass fittings. The name of the hotel was carved into a stone arch over the front door. From where I stood, I could see only the side of the hotel. Over the years it had darkened to a dirty gray. Nine rows of windows, most of them covered on the inside by brown shades, punctuated the stone. The St. Alwyn looked defeated, worn out by time. It had not looked very different forty years ago.
4
Our old house stood four doors up the block, a foursquare rectangular wooden building with two concrete steps up to the front door, windows on both sides of the door, two windows in line with these on the second floor, and a small patchy front lawn. It looked like a child's drawing. During my childhood, the top floor had been painted brown and the bottom one yellow. Later, my father had painted the entire house a sad, terrible shade of green, but the new owners had restored it to the original colors.
The old house hardly affected me. It was like a shell I had grown out of and left behind. I'd been more moved at Pine Knoll Cemetery—just driving into Pigtown on Livermore Avenue had affected me more deeply. I tried to let the deep currents, the currents that connect you to the rest of life, run through me, but I felt like a stone. What I remembered about the old house had to do with an old Underwood upright on a pine desk in a bedroom where blue roses climbed up the wallpaper, with onionskin paper and typewriter ribbons, and with telling stories to charm the darkness: a memory of frustration and concentration, and of time disappearing into a bright elastic eternity.
Then there was one more place I had to see, and I walked back down South Sixth, crossed Livermore, and turned south.
From two blocks away I saw the marquee sagging toward the sidewalk, and my heart moved in my chest. The Beldame Oriental had not survived the last three decades as well as the Royal. Sliding glass panels crusty with stains had once protected the letters that spelled out the titles of the films. Nothing remained of the ornate detail I thought I remembered.
Two narrow glass doors opened off the sidewalk. Behind them, before a set of black lacquered doors, the glass cubicle of the ticket booth was only dimly visible through the smudgy glass. Jagged pieces of cement and smoke-colored grit littered the black-and-white tile floor between the two sets of doors. The paltriness, the meanness of this distance—the stingy littleness of the entire theater—gave me a shock so deep that at the moment I was scarcely aware of it.
I stepped back and looked down the street for the real Beldame Oriental. Then I went up to the two narrow glass doors and tried either to push myself inside the old theater or simply to see better—I didn't know which. My reflection moved forward to meet me, and we touched.
An enormous block of feeling loosed itself from its secret moorings and moved up into my chest. My throat tightened and my breathing stopped. My eyes sparkled. I drew in a ragged breath, for a moment uncertain if I were going to stay on my feet. I could not even tell if it were joy or anguish. It was just naked feeling, straight from the heart of my childhood. It even tasted like childhood. I pushed myself away from the old theater and wobbled over the sidewalk to lean on a parking meter.
Warmth on my head and shoulders brought me a little way back to myself, and I blew my nose into my handkerchief and straightened up. I stuffed the handkerchief back into my pocket. I moved away from the parking meter and pressed my hands over my eyes.
Across the street, a little old man in a baggy double-breasted suit and a white T-shirt was staring at me. He turned to look at some friends inside a diner and made a circular motion at his temple with his forefinger.
I uttered some noise halfway between a sigh and a groan. It was no wonder that I had been afraid to come back to Millhaven, if things like this were going to happen to me. All that saved me from another spell was the sudden memory of what I'd read in the gnostic gospel while I waited for John to come back from the hospitaclass="underline" If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you; if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
I was trying to bring it forth—had been trying to bring it forth since I stood in front of the graves in Pine Knoll cemetery —but what in the world was it?
5
I nearly went straight back to the Pontiac and returned to John Ransom's house. At the back of my mind was the idea of booking a seat back to New York on the evening flight. I was no longer so sure I cared about what had happened more than forty years ago in, near, or because of the St. Alwyn Hotel. I had already written that book.
Either in spite of or because of the experience I'd just had, I suddenly felt hungry. Whatever I was going to do would have to wait until I ate some sort of breakfast. The neon scimitar in the restaurant window had not been turned on yet, but an open sign hung from the inside doorknob. I went into the hotel for a morning paper at the desk.
What I saw when I came into the lobby must have been almost exactly what Glenroy Breakstone and his piano player, the murdered James Treadwell, had known forty years ago; and what my father had seen, walking across the lobby to his elevator. Worn leather furniture and squat brass spittoons stood on an enormous, threadbare oriental rug. One low-wattage bulb burned behind a green glass shade next to a couch.
A small stack of the morning's Ledger lay on the desk. I picked one up and slid thirty-five cents toward the clerk. He was sitting down behind the desk with his chin in his hand, concentrating on the newspaper folded over his knees. He heard the sound of the coins and looked up at me. The whites of his eyes flared. "Oh! Sorry!" He glanced at the three copies that remained on the desk. "Got to get up early to get a paper today," he said, and reached for the coins. I looked at my watch. It was nine-thirty: the St. Alwyn got up late.
I carried the paper into Sinbad's Cavern. A few silent men ate their breakfasts at the bar, and two couples had taken the tables at the front of the room. A waitress in a dark blue dress that looked too sophisticated for early morning was standing at the end of the bar, talking with the young woman in a white shirt and black bow tie working behind it. The place was quiet as a library. I sat down in an empty booth and waved at the waitress until she grabbed a menu off the bar and hurried over. She was wearing high heels, and she looked a little flushed, but it might have been her makeup.
She put the menu before me. "I'm sorry, but it's so hard to concentrate today. I'll get you some coffee and be right back."
I opened the menu. The waitress went to a serving stand on the near side of the bar and came back with a glass pot of coffee. She filled my cup. "Nobody around here can believe it," she said. "Nobody."
"I'll believe anything today," I said.
She stared at me. She was about twenty-two, and all the makeup made her look like a startled clown. Then her face hardened, and she took her pad from a side pocket of the sleek blue suit. "Are you ready to order, sir?"
"One poached egg and whole wheat toast, please." She wrote it down wordlessly and walked back through the empty tables and brushed through the aluminum door to the kitchen.
I looked at the blond girl in the bow tie at the end of the bar and at the couples seated at the far tables. All of them had sections of the morning newspaper opened before them. Even the men eating on stools at the bar were reading the Ledger. The waitress emerged from the kitchen, stabbed me with a glance, and whispered something to the girl behind the bar.