Chapter 37 #2
The week passed. Isadora came for three days and left for San Diego on Thursday.
When the five of us arrived in the dining room for Friday dinner, I made a show of looking under my chair until Loretta asked if I had dropped something.
“No. I thought I saw one of Rafael’s toys, the thing that’s like a squirrel or maybe it’s a rat.
But nothing’s there. It was just a shadow. ”
As we settled in our chairs, Gertie said, “If you’re looking for a pile of rats, don’t bother looking in my room. I have no need for a pile of rats.”
Loretta said, “Why on earth would Addie be looking for a pile of rats?”
“Do we have a rat problem?” Franklin asked. “We’ve had mice in the garage but never rats, and certainly not in the house.”
Our salads were already plated before us, and as Gertie picked up her fork, she said, “There weren’t any rats left in Hamelin after the Pied Piper lured them into the river. He’s my hero.”
“But when he didn’t get paid,” said Harry, “he hypnotized all the children with music and drowned them in the same river. That’s not a hero in my book.”
“Well,” said Gertie, “if you had a contract to spin rats into gold and the task disgusted you, maybe you’d cut him some slack.”
I said, “Perhaps there aren’t any rats in Hamelin now, but there are plenty in California. Finding a pile of them is easy. Finding a magical spinning wheel might be harder.”
Speaking so quick after me that her parents had no chance to express whatever confusion they were experiencing, which was the point of the game, Gertie said, “A person who expects to come into a fabulous rat gold fortune will be disappointed when she discovers the very thing she thought impossible is waiting to be found under her bed pillow.”
“Franklin,” Loretta said, “the children have evidently spent the day in the wine cellar.”
Franklin said, “The girls are talking in code concerning something they don’t want us to know about. Anyway, I hope that’s what they’re doing. Psychiatrists charge a fortune.”
“I don’t know about any code,” Harry said.
“That’s okay, son. Eventually you’ll learn half of everything women say to each other is in code, to prevent us from realizing they rule the world.”
“From now on,” Loretta said, “the only talking in code allowed will be between your father and me. And there will be no talking at all about rats when we’re at the table.”
“You’re taking all the fun out of dinner,” Harry said.
“Chef Lattuada wouldn’t want to hear that,” Loretta said. “And he’s the only one with the power to make it happen, just to teach you a lesson.”
After dinner, I went directly to my suite. In my bedroom, under my pillow, a manila envelope contained a sheaf of typing paper. On the envelope, in Gertie’s neat printing, were ten words: Only the truth will help me. Waiting to be eviscerated.
The novella was titled Backward Down the Staircase. Seventy-six pages of double-spaced text. The first page carried no byline, as if she didn’t want to admit to having written the piece until someone confirmed that it wasn’t an embarrassment.
One of the drawers in my vanity was the size of the paper on which the story was written.
I pulled it out and carried it into the living room and put the pages in it so that they wouldn’t slide around while I was reading.
I sat in my armchair with a decorative pillow on my lap and the drawer on the pillow.
As I finished each page, I intended to put it on the small table beside the chair.
I didn’t have a pen because I had no intention of reading critically or making notations on this first pass.
I hesitated to begin. I was eager to read the story, to know whether she had been blessed with talent.
However, of the thousands of books I’d read, what I’d thought of them had mattered to no one but me.
Never before had the author been waiting a few rooms away, eager to know my opinion.
Never before had the author been someone whom I loved more than I loved myself.
I had promised her an honest response, and Gertie knew me well enough and was perceptive enough to detect the slightest inflation or evasion of my true evaluation of her work.
I sat there with her heart in my lap, her heart as she had exposed it on seventy-six pages, and I almost became paralyzed as I considered the wounds I could inflict even with the tenderest of rejections.
Any of the arts—and writing fiction is one—can be approached casually, as a hobby or a test of one’s creativity, and in such a case, the result might occasionally be an enjoyable work of good craftsmanship but rarely a work of art.
The intensity with which Gertie devoted herself to writing suggested that she would, in the short term, settle for being judged at best a good craftsman, but only if it could fairly be said that the pale possibility of art haunted the otherwise common chambers of her novella and that with unrelenting effort she could surely conjure it into flesh in her future writings.
My hesitation to begin reading lasted perhaps half an hour, until I reminded myself that Gertie, although in one sense a child of privilege, was also one of my kind—designed by God but produced by his chosen manufacturer, Mother Nature, and coughed out incomplete during a partial breakdown of her machinery.
Gertie was not a delicate crystal vase that could be shattered by a singer’s sustained high note.
Experience had tempered her, as it had me.
And so I read her novella with nervous expectation.
I read the seventy-six pages again with relief and growing delight.
The third time, I forced myself to read in a solemn search for subtle flaws that I had overlooked.
At one thirty in the morning, I reorganized the pages and hurried down the hall to her room, intending to wake her.
The door stood ajar and light shone beyond.
She was sitting in bed, propped up by a mass of pillows, with a double-layer box of bonbons in her lap.
She said, “I’ve finished more than half these chocolates waiting for you.
I thought by the time you finally came I’d be as fat as Oliver Hardy.
Why are you carrying a drawer? Did you throw up in it?
Couldn’t you get to the toilet in time? Was it the plot or the prose that nauseated you? Was it both?”
Rounding the bed, I said, “Oh, shut up, you silly genius. I’m coming up there.
Don’t stuff yourself with more chocolates.
I need my share to drown my jealousy in sugar.
” I clambered onto the bed with the vanity drawer containing the manuscript.
She’d anticipated my visit and had piled more pillows beside hers.
Between her and me were two boxes of Kleenex.
“We’re not going to need those. Let’s get right to it.
Kid, your craftsmanship is superb. I would never have imagined you knew more than rudimentary English, enough to converse with Rafael and contribute childish observations when the rest of us are engaged in sophisticated banter, but you have proven me wrong. ”
“You sure know how to lift a girl’s spirits.”
“I was mocking your misplaced self-doubt.”
“Yeah, it was hard to mistake your intention. Is it really any good, Addie? Any good at all? Don’t coddle me.”
“Your craftsmanship is really excellent. Twice you thought the subjunctive mood was required when it wasn’t, and once you misused a semicolon.”
“The hell you say!”
“You’re succinct. The prose flows, flows so smoothly.”
“Diarrhea flows. Vomit flows.”
“Fortunately, you didn’t write anything like that in this fine novella. Check yourself in the future when the impulse arises. Your style is quite another thing from your proper use of English.”
“How badly does it stink?”
“Oh, it stinks like a rose. Your phrasing, pacing, similes, metaphors, all the rest of it. It’s unique. It’s yours. It’s you. It’s not a fully mature style yet—”
“The hell you say!”
“Not fully mature, but for a girl of eighteen—”
“Eighteen plus.”
“—it’s amazing. I’m serious, Gertie. I’m not jazzing you. Would you like me to go through it with you, page by page, to note the strongest and weakest parts?”
“I assume that discussing the strongest parts will take until Monday.”
“At least until late Sunday afternoon,” I said, “as long as you don’t waste too much time preening over every compliment.”
She handed me the box of bonbons. “Better fortify yourself.”
Half an hour later, as I finished what I had to say about page seventeen and took it out of the drawer and set it aside, Gertie put her hand on mine and squeezed gently. “Do I understand what you’re trying to tell me?”
“Honey, that’s too sweet a setup for a funny put-down. I won’t stoop to it. What do you think I’m trying to tell you?”
“I’m almost afraid to say it.”
“Let’s find Rafael. Maybe you can write it on a slip of paper and he can read it to me.”
Her sweet face, so smooth with youth, grew smoother still as her eyes widened, as if the prospect that occurred to her was so restorative that it erased what few marks the years had left on her.
“Addie, are you trying to tell me . . . Do you mean . . . Is it really possible that you think this novella is publishable?”
“In spite of this rotten economy, not all magazines have gone out of business. Quite a few come out every month, and many of them publish short stories, novelettes, and novellas. I would guess more than a few would pay to have this.”
Gertie regarded me as though I had just fallen out of the sky, crashed through the roof, landed in bed, and announced that I was Peter Pan. She let go of my hand, fell back against her mountain of pillows, stared up at the ceiling, and said, “Whoosh.”
“I want to read everything else you’ve written these past two years. This novella can’t be a fluke. Maybe it’s the best thing you’ve done, but I suspect not.”
She said, “Even if everything . . .”
I waited and then said, “If that was a complete thought, I need a translation.”
“Even if everything I’ve written and rewritten and finally feel is finished . . . even if it were all publishable, would I?”
“Would you what?”
“Publish it.”
“Why not?”
She turned her head from the ceiling to me. “Did the story at any point crush you? Did it half shake your heart to pieces?”
“No. But it moved me. It greatly entertained me and moved me close to tears more than once. That’s something any writer would be pleased to have achieved with a reader.”
“But if I start publishing before I can knock the reader on his or her ass, just flatten them emotionally, won’t I be labeled as a particular kind of writer before I’ve become the kind of writer I most want to be?”
“Look, sweetie, I know you’re really into violently assaulting readers, breaking their hearts so hard they need a cardiologist and they ruin the book they’re reading by sobbing into it so much that the pages are a soggy mess.
But maybe you should just back off that psychotic impulse a little and settle for leaving them traumatized for life. ”
“You are a terribly sarcastic person, Adiel Fairchild.”
“And you love it. I’m just saying everyone starts somewhere.”
She sat up from the pillows and crossed her legs yoga style. “Have you forgotten I’m a rich little snot?”
“As I recall, for the purpose of your trust fund and being a beneficiary of your parents’ will, you preferred to be called a ‘rich little booger.’”
“You really do remember everything, don’t you?”
“It’s not entirely a blessing.”
She plucked a piece of candy from the box, popped it into her mouth, and sat chewing.
After she swallowed, she said, “My point is, if I really do have talent and you’re not just lying to me for some sinister reason, why should I be in a hurry?
With the confidence you’ve given me, with the unconscionable privilege of being a rich little booger, why shouldn’t I take my time to write the kind of thing I most want to write? And at novel length.”
“That’s your choice, of course. It’s not a bad plan. But I still want to read everything you’ve finished so far.”
“I want you to. And be honest. I’ll put together the whole pile of crap right now and help you carry it to your room.” She scrambled out of bed. “Are you sure, for the purpose of the trust fund and will, I didn’t want to be called a ‘rich little phlegm wad’?”
“You’re recalling Izzy’s request. And it was a ‘rich little hocked up glob of phlegm.’”
“Wow. Colorful. Maybe she’s the real writer in the family.”
Her body of finished work to date consisted of six novelettes and nine novellas, each in a manila envelope, totaling 364,000 words.
I carried the vanity drawer and the box with what remained of the bonbons and Gertie carried the stack of manuscripts to my suite.
We hugged and kissed each other. She said I shouldn’t read all fifteen stories in what remained of the night, not in my badly ensugared condition, speed-reading in a diabetic frenzy.
I promised to go straight to bed and sober up.
However, when she was gone, I read one of the novellas.
It knocked me on my ass and flattened me emotionally.
Really. Gertie possessed a gift that the world sorely needed.
In my own small way, against all odds, although I was just a freak wholly dependent on the kindness of others, I had become the smallest part of something important.
I was the supportive sister of someone with the potential to bring joy and hope to great numbers of readers.
And then there were Izzy and Harry, whose lives I might have impacted as they had mine, all of us together perhaps making good luck for people we knew and others who would always be strangers to us.
In those early hours of that Saturday, I had never been happier.
And in that moment, I had forgotten the most important advice Harmony had given me. I had stopped being alert.