But that didn’t satisfy him. “So impersonal,” he said. “I’m sure Dad would want at least a phone call, the human voice,” (we tend to get argumentative if we live Up There for very long). “I thought perhaps you, Bob, as Head of the Clan—”
“Clan!” He seemed to picture us in kilts following the pipes over the gorse back into the Highlands but if there is a Scotch name among all our different ones I can’t remember it. “There’s no ‘Clan,’ Eastman, and nobody has elected me head of it.” He said it wasn’t a matter of being elected, that primogeniture took care of it and I said that Uncle Brownell had a lot more primogeniture than I had I was glad to say.
“‘Uncle Brownell?’ I don’t think I remember him.”
“Down at The Homestead.”
“Oh, there’s a homestead, Bob?” eagerly, as if that would balance out the want of the Clan.
I explained it wasn’t really a homestead, people just called it that. “Uncle Brownell and the Bank operate the old house on Bay Street as Trustees under a will, too complicated to go into now, Eastman.”
“Well, maybe he will phone out the invitations, Bob. Not the Bank anyway, please, if you don’t mind; they’d put a tape on it. Somebody in the Family. Maybe Aunt Mathilda will help him, she always used to like telephones.”
I told him Aunt Mathilda had been gone—a Southernism I don’t believe he understood after all his time Up There, taking it in a geographical sense and asking “Where?,” when all it means is you’ve cashed in your chips. I wasn’t sure she had because we tend to last a long time, but Eastman was talking about forty years ago and I hadn’t heard her name in twenty. He said, “Well, if she’s moved away, one of the other aunts, it wouldn’t matter a great deal as long as nobody’s invitation is overlooked. Everyone should be invited to the church, Bob, a morning service, eleven-fifteenish I should say—”
“Church, Eastman!” It was hard to believe. We usually assemble for a few minutes (five or ten) at the grave—on the way back to the bottle, (it’s not quite fair to say that, some of us won’t let that kind of bottle in the house; but most of us will).
“Oh yes. I’m sure Dad would want a church service. Episcopal, of course.”
I couldn’t explain to him briefly how the Episcopal part of it added another complication. We have family in every church in town, have “diversified,” as the stock-market people like to say, so that even if some of us miss out and get badly burned the chances are that some of us are going to get through; (not many of us in the blue-chip Episcopal—Cousin Doshia had switched over from Presbyterian as her daughters grew up, steadied by the firmer ritual and by the general improvement in the solvency of the young men the girls would be kneeling with, starting runners in their silken knees with), but I couldn’t see our Nazarene, Methodist, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentecostal, Assembly of God Lighthouse, Seventh-Day Adventist, Lutheran, Open-Door Baptist family shambling up an Episcopal aisle, the Episcopal aisle, naturally, Doshia’s—Saint Michael’s, rather, the Saint in stained glass, sword raised, foot on a prostrate Satan-dragon as much as to say he could lose patience with the rest of us, too.
I felt quite overwhelmed by it all, one heavy detail after another landing on me at this already inundated April moment, and I told Eastman to let me feel around and see what I could come up with, to give me a number where I could reach him later in the day as soon as I could put something together.
I wrote down the number he gave me and was backing off from the phone to help break the connection when he sent down the wires as immobilizing a shock as if he had somehow stepped up the voltage on the lines: “Of course we’d like to stay with you, Bob, if that’s all right, just me and my wife and her sister Gene”—me nearly dropping the phone, changing ears as if to get another opinion and getting only something like “no kids, we left them in Seattle with their grandmother.”
My house was in no shape for visitors, certainly not for visitors from the North. Roaches, waterbugs, crickets, two temperamental cats, more cat-hairs than pennies in the Federal deficit, dust on tabletops, cobwebs underneath—Cathy and I happily divorced, having now forgiven such petty digs as her swiping at me with “old girlaholic” (largely, I think, because I once said that the feel of a garterclip through a skirt was as stirring as the National Anthem), and my fighting back with “the two happiest days in a man’s life are the day he marries the woman and the day he is able to get rid of her,” she walking out with our five-year-old (who was becoming more real every minute like a negative in the developer) and “Never mind, Robert, you’ll get a book out of it,” so preoccupied with scoring the last word she forgot (forgot?) to hand back the yellow-gold earrings I bought her in Istanbul, small disks with incised miniatures of three girls bending to put away their clothes, very handsome (and possibly contributing to her “girlaholic” slap); off to Little Rock with an airlines pilot. There was no question as to my housekeeper’s needing CG (Caucasian Guidance—call me racist if you will) but her willingness and pleasant disposition balanced that out as far as I was concerned; I think she was a little hurt that my wife hadn’t offered to take her along, had in effect divorced both of us, but she didn’t dwell on it—neither here nor there in producing a viable answer to Eastman’s hair-raising proposal.
I thought of using the cats; some people are allergic to cats, usually women—curiously enough (with integration and ERA and the general leveling out of social pot holes and bumps and, you would expect, allergies), but I ended up with a flash of Eastman as the “Person from Porlock” who knocked at Coleridge’s door, and I said, “Excuse me, Eastman, there’s somebody at the door, let me call you back as soon as I have something.”
Coleridge might well have grumbled, “Where in hell was I!” Certainly I did, sitting there with the oily rag and the skate, blinking across the typewriter and the last few pages of Once There was a Fisherman with no more idea of what I meant to do with them than Mr. C. of his amputated great poem, both our mornings as if put through the shredder. I won’t stop now to go into this book business beyond saying that my literary productions over the years fell into the Black Hole among publishers’ criteria, neither good enough nor bad enough, and we had set up a publishing company of our own to escape the Hole (“The Black Hole Press” originally, though we changed that to “Cotton Lane Press,” “black” having become such a touchy word), the “we” comprising myself and several impractical but hard-working well-wishers, none of them family, who cut off with TV. My disturbance was centered on the Bohlens, Eastman’s as well as “Dad’s,” and I walked about the office until something, “Dad” and cemetery I suppose, made me think of Doshia, three times widowed and as good as new, better for the experience, wearing the slightly brittle charisma of Surviving Spouse like a campaign ribbon. I remembered I had often mumbled to whoever was at my elbow, standing for a few minutes inside the wall enclosing our Telfair Plot and watching Doshia so composed and helpful to those more intimately involved, “Doshia is very good about funerals, isn’t she?”
I found her number in the phone book when I had called here and there and run down her latest name: “Doshia, this is Bob,” (forgetting).
“WHO?”
“Bob Otis, Doshia. You remember.”
“Oh, Robert!”
“I’ve got a problem here, Doshia, we have, the family, all of us,” Doshia laughing, “It must be a big problem,”—she has a nice laugh, (as for husbands, take ’em or leave ’em).
I briefed her on the situation, but no briefing ever has quite the elegance of the initial impact; she didn’t seem to see the problem that I saw—but then she didn’t have the skates and the manuscript and the printer and all that to worry about. “Church funeral, Robert? That’s all right. Some people still do that. It’s all in the Prayer Book, the Rector knows just where to find it, such a nice young man.” I said, “What about our Nazarenes and Seventh-Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses and One-Way Baptists? They wouldn’t know a rector from a motorcycle cop.”
“Oh, Robert!” dismissing it, and going on that she had never heard of an Eastman Bohlen or his father, didn’t know of any Bohlens in town nowadays but thought old Cousin Terry Dycus’s third wife was a Bohlen. “Married her when he was seventy-seven, could hardly get up the aisle—”
I cut her short (you have to do that with Doshia) to say whether or not there were Bohlens in town already there were going to be in a few days, probably tomorrow, and I couldn’t take them on, cat-hairs, roaches, a leak in the garage roof. “Northern people don’t understand roaches, Doshia; they’re not snakes,” (the word “snakes” whipping me back to a plush new concert hall built unaccountably in the far backlands of Brazil; a fierce-looking big dog was always lying in the entrance and I said to the manager, “That’s a fine dog you have there but he scares people going to the concerts, couldn’t you shut him up some place?” The manager said, “No, he’s there to keep out the snakes.”—Northern people feel snaky about roaches). I told Doshia the Bohlens ought to go to a hotel. “The Jonathan Copp is an excellent hotel”—Uncle Otis’s hotel. “Eastman pictures me as Head of the Clan in the old family mansion, magnolias, black people running round with beaten biscuits.”
“Maybe they could stay at The Homestead, Robert. Have you talked to Uncle Brownell?”
I told her The Homestead was a sardine can, she knew that.—Papa Charles (Telfair) had left the property in trust to be occupied, all expenses paid (emphasis mine), by any member of the family who “at the sole discretion of my beloved great-grandnephew Brownell Baker” wished to reside therein; naturally there were no empty beds. “And he’s got the problem of Lucinda too.”
“Luanda’s no problem, Robert. Except for all those indecent words she learned to use Up There.”
I said, No problem if you had nothing to hide. “If you have, and who hasn’t, Lucy’s a problem. Book-writers are that way.” Lucinda writes sellout books and sellout plays, all of them about us, what pigs we are—which the people Up There know all about but, like children and nursery rhymes, never tire of rehearing—and I was going on to point out some of the things that we as an old and far-reaching family didn’t need to have spread around (the Madam Ace matter, for one, and the Jewell Street girls who supply most of the operating expenses of The Homestead) but Doshia interrupted me with, “What are you hiding, Robert?” going on before my failing to answer was conspicuous, “Bivins doesn’t belong there at all. Smelling up the place with all those nickel cigars. Of course you know what everybody says about Bivins.”
We were getting off the track but I said, Oh, Bivins was a bastard all right but he was Papa Charles’s bastard and had a better right to be there than Lucinda Fannin, for instance. We don’t ordinarily use a word like bastard over the phone and I would guess Doshia pulled the instrument away from her ear to let my vulgarity cool off a bit because when she spoke again she had dropped Bivins and was back right on the subject: “They can stay with me, Robert. ‘Hotel!’ I’m surprised at you. People would say we didn’t have enough clean sheets.” I said, Some of us didn’t, but she went right on, as if already counting out the pillowcases, “They can have little Elvira’s old room. And the sister can sleep across the hall from me where poor Acworth slept,” (a personal detail I hadn’t known about but could readily believe). “Tell What’s-his-name when you talk to him.”
This sounded like the solution I was obscurely hoping for and I told her she was a hero, I was having a hero’s medal struck off for her, “From the lifesaved to the lifesaver.” She said, “Oh, Robert, you make too much of things,” but I think she was pleased; pleased enough to let me persuade her to call him, “It’s your house, your rescue,” (your funeral, I almost said) and gave her his number. I didn’t want to talk to him again; he had already broken my thinking line, the manuscript wasn’t in shape and I had promised to hand it over the next day, Friday, to the Printer’s Representative in Rockbridge—at the Starlite Rollerway (unbelievable but true).
An old man’s folly, the Press—old writer’s folly, follies running low—committed with the help of a grandfather’s bequest that a merciful Providence had guided my ignorance in enhancing. The temptation to commit it grew in me in much the same way that a small obstruction in a creek will halt floating leaves, then twigs, then branches until you have a natural dam and pool with a character of its own; so that when I think of the Press nowadays it often brings back the pool we boys and girls used to wade in in country summers when girls’ wet legs did such inexplicable spidery things to my insides, (incipient girlaholic my ex would probably say now, would certainly say if she had been on hand the afternoon the girls in their cotton dresses climbed up the ladder into the barn loft and jumped down at us gentlemen lolling bugeyed in the hay—Heigh-ho!).
Cotton Lane had been “Cotton Alley,” an old access road to the side doors of our warehouses where cotton farmers could bring in their bales and abandon them to the mercy of the New York Cotton Exchange (and Chicago); I had a retreat off the Alley for writing and worrying, painting sometimes. When the City changed “Alley” to “Lane” it somehow changed its personality as names will do, gave it a sunnier vista, suggested indeed country summers rather than city Octobers with mules and two-wheel cotton drays. But didn’t change the negatives of the great publishing houses as to my bumper crop of manuscripts; Mr. Padgett brought self-addressed return parcels to Cotton Lane as regularly as he had to Cotton Alley, each one reducing my resolve to disagree with them. Such unanimity was hard to brush aside.
Until (like seeing the first floating leaves getting hung up on the obstruction of the creek) I happened to open a book of mine a great house had published many years before—the sales figures ending our relationship. I hardly remembered the book beyond its title, the contents as hidden under time-dust as odds-and-ends out of the attic; my attitude was “What’s this?” as if fumbling with a faded box that might hold chipped cups and broken candlesticks.
In the first lines my eyes fell on, somebody was talking on the phone to somebody named “Leonard”: “‘And after you see Ike, call me. Or better, come up and have cold supper with me. It’s lonesome playing bachelor.’”—“Leonard?” “Ike?” It was like arriving late at a Class Reunion, the 40th, the 50th; I didn’t know any of the people I had once known so well, had never seen any of them before. And then, a few pages on, all of them coming up little by little like a rubbing I once saw being made of names and dates on a gravestone (by a pretty girl in big defiant glasses sitting sideways on the slab—much brown leg escaping).
I flipped back a hundred pages: “‘But his sister says he’s not guilty, Mr. Ike.’ ‘Miss Margaret, we can’t dispose of a murder indictment on the testimony of the defendant’s immediate family, now can we?’” I turned back to the beginning and read on, recognizing a voice here and there, a laugh, a place both familiar and strange; halfway through I took off my glasses and asked the air and trees and small-city 2 a.m. noises, “What’s the matter with that?” not vindictive, just baffled. A good book, by my standards; a better book than I had realized. Or anybody else had.
Another night I read the last book of mine a great publisher had been willing, against his better judgment, to take a chance on, but the result was the same, both in its failure then and its success—with me—now. Whichever result was more justified, the manuscript that Mr. Padgett had last brought in was, I argued, cut off the same piece of goods; the only chance of possibly changing its doom was to ignore the likelihood “they” might be right and—why not a “Cotton Lane Press?”
Stirring up an immediate, Oh no, never! Vanity! Just vanity!—But the Preacher said all was vanity. Why try to escape it? Vanity to suppose you could. You believe in the book; publish it. Dedicate it to your grandfather, “but for whom.” Possibly, but—one step at a time.
And I phoned the best printer I could think of, Sanders-Erwin in Rockbridge, talked to Mr. Sanders through eighty miles of indecision: Oh, he could do the job all right, binding, cloth or paper, DJ, everything; he couldn’t give me a price without seeing the copy but it would “probably run to something in the neighborhood of twenty dollars a page. Why don’t I have our Traveling Representative stop in and talk to you, Mr. Otis?”
And Mr. Otis said all right he’d be glad to talk to him; “Two Cotton Lane, third floor.”
I spent several days working out small changes in the manuscript, changes that called for others, then others. Not changing the title for a moment, Once There was a Fisherman …; a steal in a way from the Brothers Grimm, whose neatness in setting a story on its way I admired: Once upon a time … (hard to beat for a beginning), there was a fisherman and his wife … (your fellow travelers), who lived on a small island … (the “where”), and you have your trip laid out like lines on a road map. “Are you ready?” the Brothers seem to say and, watching your nod, flick the starter with a One day …, and you are off.
