And as you sometimes wake up in the morning with the “way out” there in the very ring of your alarm clock, the way out this time seemed to be handed to me in the ring of the phone quite early Thursday at the Press—sometimes it doesn’t ring for weeks and I call up and make an appointment with the dentist just to keep the lines open: “Bob, this is Becky.”

She was calling from Rockbridge, not in the office, downstairs at a pay phone. “Shouldn’t be telling you this, Bob, but here I go. We’re winding up a job, have another one waiting that could take six weeks, maybe longer. You hear what I’m saying?”

“He might run me in ahead of the other one?”

“I didn’t say so, Bob.”

I told her I would bring her the manuscript tomorrow afternoon. “What time do you leave?”

She said tomorrow she was leaving a little early, if she wasn’t there to put it on her desk. “If everybody’s gone drop it through the slot. Mark it Attention Becky’.” I said (my plan, plot, in mind) that things got misplaced, I’d feel better to hand it to her, and she said, “Well, all right, bring it to The Starlite.”

“To where, please?”

“The Starlite Rollerway, Bob. I’ve got a skate-date with Number Two.—And oh! Bring your skates, Bob.”

Skates—mind making a twenty-year leap to skates that might be in my attic, or might not, straps brittle in any case, steel rollers rusted. I said I’d have to see about that, it might be simpler to leave the manuscript at the office. She said, Oh, I must come, and I said, I didn’t like to crash in. “Oh Bob, it’s only Number Two and he has to go home early to work on his Master’s.”

This sounded promising—if I wouldn’t have skinned up knees and elbows by then or broken something, and we left it that I would get the manuscript to her one way or another (depending on how big a fool I was), adding to myself that it was good of her to include old “Bob,” to post him on the printing schedule, old on-his-last-book Robert.

My ears were still tingling from Doshia’s call (she’s a little deaf and assumes everybody else is) when the phone rang again so quickly I thought she had forgotten something. But it wasn’t Doshia: “Hello, Bob. Eastman here.”

“Eastman!”—swallowing two or three times as when your plane hits a pocket (used to, maybe they don’t hit pockets any more, I’m not up on planes, don’t fly well). He said he had been talking to some cousin or other, didn’t catch her name.

I said, Doshia, maybe? and he said, “I guess so. Wants us all to stay with her. I said okay, but, Bob, I can’t stay in a house with three women.”

“Three women to wait on you, Eastman! You’ll love it,” dating myself back in the days of women as willing helpers, “Helpmates” indeed; never such contentment among them since. He said he ended by telling her “the girls” would stay with her. “I said I’d be staying with you. It’s much better that way. That’s all right with you, isn’t it? We’ve got a lot to catch up on.”

I said I had to be out of town on business for a few days, and he said, shocked, “But you’ll be back for the service, of course.”

I said, Oh yes, I certainly expected to be but I might not be there when he arrived to let him in. “You’re coming tomorrow, I suppose?”

He said, Tomorrow, he thought; possibly the next day, there were still some details to be “finalized.” He said if I would be away I could just leave the keys next door (these Yankees! or whatever he was now). I said the place was a wreck, painters coming in; “There’s a leak in the roof over the guest room,”—I had had it fixed but there had been. “You’ll like it at Doshia’s. Big house, four or five bedrooms—”

“You mean it’s not convenient to stay with you?” hurt feelings beginning to vibrate down the eight hundred miles like words.

“Oh good Lord no, Eastman, not at all. I’m just thinking of you. You’d be so much more comfortable at Doshia’s.”

“I don’t know Doshia, never saw her in my life.” I said he’d love Doshia, “salt of the earth,” meaning it in the old sense before everybody got high blood, but he ignored it, maybe didn’t hear it through his wounded feelings, going on to say, “Very well, Robert, I’ll make other arrangements. It does seem to me, if you don’t mind my saying so, in a situation of this kind, after all these years—”

I broke in, “Now hold on, Eastman. It’s not any trouble. It would be a pleasure to have you. I’ll leave the key under the mat,” giving up, surrendering, rolling over. After all these generations of Taillefer-Taliaferro-Tolliver-Telfair without a harsh word between us (or any other kind) I couldn’t be the one to create this genealogical rift that could split us into fragments like a family time-bomb. “Under the mat at the front door,” practically begging.

He said, “Never mind, Robert, we’ll go to a hotel,” and hung up.

As soon as I could convince myself the responsibility for all this tangle was Eastman’s not mine, a matter of a few seconds, I called Doshia and brought her up to date. “He’s threatened ‘hotel,’ Doshia. That’s fine with me but it will create a lot of talk—”

“Calm yourself, Bob. I’ll phone him again and straighten it out, such a nice-sounding young man. Naturally he’s a little on edge, making all the ‘arrangements,’ and this and that. I called Mr. Grimes and he is phoning his contact in Chicago; he will let me know as soon as he finds out anything, we are old friends, Mr. Sam and I, most kind and helpful to me in my own trials, his wife Mamie and I went to the old Houghton School together that burned down later in the Great Fire, such a pity. Teachers? They don’t make teachers like that any more—”

I said, “Excuse me, Doshia, I see Mr. Porlock at the door,” which allowed me to get round to proofreading the manuscript for twenty or thirty minutes.

I was correcting my own typo from “coat” to “coast” (pleased at the wad I was saving myself in Author’s Corrections) when the phone rang again: “You’ve hurt his feelings, Bob. He’s not coming at all.” I said, “God’s taking care of us, Doshia!” She asked what I had said and I said, “My God, I didn’t mean to hurt his feelings, I only meant—”

“He said he may have the body cremated, you know the way they do up there, so many people, running out of ground. I said, ‘Oh Eastman, you can’t do that to your poor old dad, Papa Charles has left all of us the Telfair Plot for just this sort of emergency.’ He said he was thinking of it. ‘Looking into it, looking into it,’ really quite distant, Bob. ‘I’ll take care of everything,’ he said, ‘Don’t bother.’ I said, ‘But it’s no bother, Eastman.’”

“Of course not, Doshia.”

“I couldn’t quite say it would be a pleasure to bury his dad. He practically hung up on me, Bob. ‘Must go now, very busy,’ or something. Quite upsetting. Then I thought of Ocilla.”

“Who?”

“Robert, don’t act like you don’t know your own people! She’s calling Eastman now. Inviting him to stay with them, just her and Edward in the house nowadays. He could stay with them and the girls could stay with me. I’ll let you know as soon as she tells me what he says. The Rector couldn’t have been nicer. In the chapel or the church or at the graveside, as we decided.” She said, Of course I had talked to Uncle Brownell? (faint Southern question mark at the end, knowing I hadn’t and meaning Get the hell on with it), and when I said I had been so overrun with getting out our Fall List at the Press—one title—I hadn’t had time to go to the bathroom she ignored the poor scatological fun and said to please call him right away. “There was something in the paper about Bivins and a car accident.”

I said I hoped it was nothing trivial, but she said she hadn’t seen the paper, Ocilla was telling her.

I said, “Why stir up Uncle Brownell, Doshia, you’ve got everything taken care of. The Girls with you if they should come, Eastman with Ocilla if he—”

She cut me off to say patiently that Uncle Brownell kept the key.

“Key, Doshia?”

The cemetery key, Bob. The key to the Telfair Plot. We’ll have to have that.”

I told her the gate was never locked that I knew of, and she said, “The walk-in gate stays open, Robert, but he keeps the drive-in gate locked, has to—children driving in to park and all that snurly business, even throwing those rubber things out on the gravestones.” I was going crazy, with all these interpolations messing up my day like penciled inserts on a well-typed manuscript, too crazy to say, Why the hell do you need a drive-in gate when all you’ll have are Eastman’s ashes, Dad’s ashes, if you even have those? I said, “All right, I’ll call him and borrow the key,” tacking on that I would leave it with Mr. Grimes, that I might be a little delayed in getting back for the service (might be!)—none of which I think she bothered to hear, her mind absorbed in the details for staging what might have been a Halloween party for young and old and how to get them all attended to in the time we had left.

Well, as anybody can tell you, it never rains but it pours. To give you the idea of the “pour” I’ll have to go back for a minute to Bivins Brogdon.

Not exactly Papa Charles’s bastard though that was the way we tended to think of him. His mother Charlotte-Virginia was the bastard (bastardess?—we don’t seem quite prepared for lady bastards), the daughter of Papa Charles and a Mrs. Virginia Fenwick, widow, of Mobile, Alabama—the “Charlotte-Virginia” striking a nice commemorative note for both of them. The family had never met Mrs. Fenwick, never heard of her until the will was read, never seen her until they tried to contest the provision naming her as the largest beneficiary of all the heirs, lost the case and watched her walk out of the courtroom with $80,000 (in cash, as she demanded), dropping a few pearly tears for Papa Charles among the long, green, beautiful, gold-standard, pre-inflation bills in her right hand and a few among the silken curls of little blue-eyed Charlotte-Virginia whom she led out gummily in her left, (all this according to Judge Fluther—“Nunkie,” behind his back, as Uncle Brownell was “Bubberdarlin” behind his). Charlotte-Virginia married Mr. Brogdon somewhere out there, which made Bivins himself legitimate enough, a bastard once removed you might say. But you would never guess from his company he was once removed; as real and fully equipped a bastard as you could hope to see, hope not to. He enjoyed being a bastard, took a pride in it.

He had become a tenant at the overpopulated Homestead on what amounted to a temporary visa, appearing out of the gloom one rainy night like a political refugee and persuading Uncle Brownell to let him spend the night in the old boiler room—Rufus Reel’s room, the yardman, but Rufus had gone to his sister’s with the flu—and then refusing to move out on the grounds of being the most direct descendant of Papa Charles of anybody in the house (which was the case, as old Judge Fluther, in the front room next to Uncle Brownell, regretfully pointed out); the whole thing as tangled up as Shakespeare’s Wars of the Roses, Bivins in the part of Richard III, if that was the Richard with the bad back, I haven’t read the plays lately. When his Unemployment Insurance expired and the Welfare people kept dragging their feet he took a job as salesman in a used-car lot on Macartan Street:

WE BUY, WE SELL, WE TRADE

Home of Nothing Down

—pennants fluttering on strung wires, light-bulbs twinkling, little whirligigs softly chirping.

Which was where he had lighted his third morning Tamparino from the half-inch ember of his second and propped himself against the twinkling phony shine of a green Chevy’s front fender when he spied a possible customer wandering among the face-lifted wrecks as if he had never seen so many sparkling jewels in all his life—a coal-black man in a khaki jacket over a white undershirt—British, somehow, “Outpost of Empire”—a gay tropical straw hat with a multicolored ribbon square on his head. It developed as they talked (Bivins not one to snatch up his hook at the first bobble of the cork) that his name was Leon Tolliver.

“Ash Island, BWI. And may I present Mrs. Tolliver.”

“‘BWI’?” says Bivins, ignoring well-fed Mrs. Tolliver, BWI not among Bivins’s acronyms, which tended to stop with FBI and IRS.

“British West Indies,” Mr. Tolliver explained, going on to confide in a friendly way that Ash Island was the modern name of the old French Isle del Vaches as adapted by Her Gracious Majesty’s Parliament which had no intention of taking on something with a low-grade name like Cows Island, “the French having frugally ducked out with most of the animals anyway.” Mr. Tolliver and his wife were on their way home but had stopped off to spend a few weeks at the Hotel Fair on Bay Street, which according to accounts of it in books by a Miss Lucinda Fannin and in a Broadway hit they had seen by the same writer provided generous accommodations—completely free for nothing, in fact—to members of the Tolliver family.

“Not ‘Tolliver,’ Tolliver. ‘Telfair,’” from Bivins in a not-to-interrupt-you tone.

Mr. Tolliver said, “Telfair, Tolliver, Taliaferro, Taillefer, what’s the dif?” bringing on several quick puffs from Bivins’s Tamparino.

It appeared that Mr. and Mrs. Tolliver had just called at Bay Street and Mr. Tolliver had said to an old white-haired man at the top of the first-floor stairs, “Pardon, sir, but I can’t seem to locate the desk clerk.”