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.

The manuscript was still in the typewriter on a cold March morning with puffs of wind shaking off pollen-clouds in an offhand early-spring planting; a knock on the door about eleven—I had forgotten to reverse the Press’s SORRY, WE’RE CLOSED to COME IN, WE’RE OPEN (not many needed to know)—a firm knock, not loud but confident, on the winning team, and a young woman put her bare head in the door and said, “Cotton Lane Press?” with a big-mouthed smile, pushing back a handful of oak-colored hair.

I said, Yes it was, and she said, “I have an appointment with a Mr. Otis. Will you tell him I’m here, please? Farmer,” handing me a card (well printed) that seemed to read (without my glasses), Sanders-Erwin, Printers, “Becky” Farmer, Traveling Representative.

I said I was Mr. Otis, would she please sit down, which opened her eyes as if to accompany her “Oh!”; sitting down then, briefcase on the floor leaning like a friendly cat against the slope of slanted neat leg, and going on that she was a little late. “Hard to hit it right on the button from eighty miles.”

We got along all right on a commercial level, a narrowish lively face with eye-whites like chips of eggshells (conscious of that maybe from the weathered pinks of my own), hair that she flung back from time to time; not the sort of details you’re expected to see in a business encounter but I have my frailties, as my ex has observed, and the whole meeting took on a different tone for me when she said in a by-the-way manner, searching in the briefcase, “‘Cotton Lane Press,’ I like that,” probably the instant (11:21 a.m., March 19, 1983—data for a birth certificate, handy for astrologers) that the Press came into this world—particularly auspicious for me in the light of Lucinda’s contempt for the Press, in the big time as she was, fishing with live bait while I fished with worms, (though she claimed to have given up “fishing” altogether, claimed that her analyst had cured her: “I’ll give you his name, Bob, a dear man, he lost fifteen pounds straightening me out”). Neither here nor there, the Traveling Representative handing me a book that Sanders-Erwin had manufactured, saying, “Baskerville, eleven on twelve, I like Baskerville. But we have lots of others. I’ll leave our Type Specimen Book with you,” producing it from the briefcase and flipping it open. “The Caslon True-Cut is very nice. And the Goudy too. I love that ‘W’.”

I said, “Yes,” (as if I could see them), and we discussed various professional matters, offset, letterpress, binding, typography, extra sinkage on chapter openings, and so on. “Cost? We’d have to see the complete manuscript and the specs. Of course that sets your retail price, which you’ll have to make four to five times your unit cost; but you can handle that later.” I said, “Quite so,” as if I had thought of that, which naturally I hadn’t.

It was almost twelve when I said, who usually lunch at two, “Now you’ll have lunch with me of course, there are some other things we need to cover,” she thanking me with a practiced professionalism that suggested she had met that gambit before: she had other stops to make, it would be night before she got back to Rockbridge, holding out her strong hand with a smile that seemed more than a smile because of her big mouth. She drove away, I noticed from my window, in a faded VW Beetle.

Talks with Mr. Sanders, by phone, then, one morning, face-to-face (Miss Farmer—Mrs.?—on the road that day I was annoyed to find out), Mr. Sanders a printer from pre-hightech days of hot type and calloused fingertips rattling in the type-nests; “I like the smell of ink and type and paper,” says he. “Walk in of a morning and it’s like a garden, like the garden of smells my wife planted, tea olive, medlar, banana shrub,” smiling in a way that said to me, mindful of such things, he had had a good marriage—pre-hightech.

“Specs” by mail (Trim Size, Quantity, Type Face—Goudy Old Style 11/12—etc., etc.) based on the penciled notes of my last copy editor, and one morning Miss Farmer in the door again: “Hello, Bob, I was in the neighborhood,” (“Bob,” if you please). “Brought by some color samples for the binding. We’ll have to order the cloth, take about a week. I’ll leave them with you. Look them over; your wife may have some ideas.” (I let it go.)

And then, sitting down with her gray-flannel knees together, pants that day, and letting her eyes wander about like a pair of my semi-domesticated wasps, “I’ve read one of your books, Bob.”

This was such an overwhelming thing to hear in a Southern environment where the most you can hope for is “Haven’t had a chance to read it yet,” so overwhelming I neglected to ask her which book and tried to cover my embarrassment by offering her a glass of my special-guest sherry, which she accepted indifferently, adding, “I thought I should read something if we are going to print one. It didn’t tell much about you, Bob.” The big-mouthed smile again and, “I read it, honestly, Bob, to see what sort of person a story-writer is. I’ve never seen one before. I’m not a book reader, Sci Fi mags for me.”

“And you found out?”

“Contradictions, Bob. You couldn’t be all those different people and have anything left over for yourself.”

I covered up by asking her if stranger things didn’t happen in her Sci Fi mags and she laughed and said, Yes they did. “Maybe you’ll come out clearer when I read the one over there in the typewriter, I read proof when I’m not on the road. Once There was a Fisherman. About a fisherman, Bob?”

I said, In a way it was—superstitious about things still in the typewriter, giving them too much sun. She said with a watchful smile, “‘In a way’ doesn’t tell much. ‘In a way’ says ‘yes and no,’ doesn’t it?”

I said, “In a way,” and we both laughed as if we had tripped on the same stone, she adding, “I’ll read it to see what way,” finishing her vintage sherry as offhandedly as a Coke and handing me the swatch of color samples. She said she was off to Wilkes City, turned in the doorway to say she knew a charming bookseller there, she would tell him about the Cotton Lane Press. “I’ll tell him to watch out for Fisherman too. Look, Bob, how are you going to market the book? How is anybody to hear about it? We’re just printers, you know.”

I wanted to say, That was when the cheese got binding, but I’m too old-fashioned; I mumbled something about that was what separated the men from the boys.

She said, “One man we made a history book for put a hundred in his car and set out round the State. Sold them all in ten days. According to him. If your Sales Department wants to talk to him I’ve got his phone number, someplace,” waving and running surefootedly down my dim stairs.

And leaving me thinking, not about selling and printing problems in this unexplored land I had stumbled into but about how she seemed to have no shortage of men-friends, “boyfriends”; booksellers, stationary and peripatetic, and Lord knew who else. All knowing more about her than I did, she and her friends in a world that had been discovered since my day, when you helped a woman into her coat, pulled out a chair for her at the table, left her at her door with a handshake, or not much more; in any case, left her at her door. Now, from what I read and heard—

Too old for that sort of thing, and very badly informed on the new-world obstructions I’d have to overcome. All sorts of up-to-date barriers, I didn’t doubt—transistors at their fingertips, semi-conductors, micro-circuits, laser beams, what not—but none of them, I thought, so inherently baffling that it (or its historical equivalent) hadn’t been circumvented for thousands of years. The truth is, I value barriers; for me, as the steamship posters used to say (and the airlines naturally neglect to), “Getting there is half the fun.” You need a net for tennis, sandtraps for golf. Obstacles didn’t bother me but not knowing what they were, where they were located.

Too old to search them out, I knew that, but I seemed unable to replace such an ingrained weakness with something more becoming and I planned, plotted, as soon as I had the manuscript in shape to phone Traveling Representative that I was bringing the copy and would like to go over a few spots in it with her if she could manage to meet me for dinner some Friday—throwing a few things in a suitcase just for insurance; if I couldn’t get anything moving in such a short time nobody would know they were there. If I could, well, I wouldn’t be missed for a few days, allowing Saturday for pinning down just what and where the resistances were and Sunday for overcoming them, the occupation of doing that appealing in itself—deuces wild spoiled the game. The details of the venture I would have to leave in that unimagined state you encounter in a story where for the time being there is no way out.