Moon Palace (38 page)

Barber was about to ask her another question, but just then the grandfather clock in the hall began to chime. Aunt Clara cocked her head alertly to one side and listened to the bells, counting out the hours on her fingers. By the time the bells stopped ringing, she had made it up to twelve, and this brought an eager, almost imploring look to her face. “It seems to be noon,” she announced. “It wouldn’t be polite to keep Hattie waiting.”

“Lunchtime already?”

“I’m afraid so,” she said, standing up from her chair. “Time to fortify ourselves with a little food.”

“You go ahead, Aunt Clara. I’ll be along in a minute.”

As he watched Aunt Clara walk out of the room, Barber realized that the conversation was suddenly over. Worse than that, he understood that it would never begin again. He had played out his hand at one sitting, and there were no more houses to bribe her with, no more tricks to lure her into talking.

He swept up the cards from the table, shuffled the deck, and then dealt out a hand of solitaire. Solly Tear, he said to himself, punning on his name. He decided to play until he won—and wound up sitting there for more than an hour. Lunch was over by then, but that didn’t seem very important. For once in his life he wasn’t hungry.

W
e were sitting in the hotel coffee shop having breakfast when Barber recounted this scene to me. It was Sunday morning, and time had nearly run out on us. We drank a last cup of coffee together, and then, as we rode the elevator upstairs to fetch Barber’s
luggage, he gave me the end of the story. His Aunt Clara had died in 1943, he said. Hattie Newcombe was duly given title to the Cliff House, and for the rest of the decade she lived there in crumbling splendor, reigning over a host of children and grandchildren who inhabited the rooms of the mansion. After she died in 1951, her son-in-law Fred Robinson sold the property to the Cavalcante Development Company, and the old house was promptly torn down. Within eighteen months the estate had been divided into twenty half-acre lots, and on every lot there was a brand-new split-level house, each one identical to the nineteen others.

“If you had known that would happen,” I asked, “would you still have given it away?”

“Absolutely,” he said, putting a match to his dead cigar and puffing smoke into the air. “I’ve never had any second thoughts about it. We don’t often get the chance to do such extravagant things, and I’m glad I didn’t waste the opportunity. When it comes copy down to it, giving that house to Hattie Newcombe was probably the smartest thing I’ve ever done.”

We were standing outside in front of the hotel by then, waiting for the doorman to flag down a taxi. When the time came for us to say good-bye, Barber was inexplicably on the verge of tears. I assumed it was a delayed response to the situation, that the weekend had finally been too much for him—but of course I had no idea what he was going through, could not even begin to imagine the first thing about it. He was saying good-bye to his son, whereas I was merely seeing off a new friend, a man I had met just two days before. The taxi stood there in front of him, its meter ticking out a frantic little rhythm as the doorman loaded his bag into the trunk. Barber made a gesture as if to embrace me in farewell, but then, thinking better of it at the last moment, he awkwardly grabbed hold of my two shoulders and squeezed them tightly.

“You’re the first person I’ve ever told those stories to,” he said. “Thank you for being such a good listener. I feel … how shall I put it … I feel there’s a bond between us now.”

“It’s been a memorable weekend,” I said.

“Yes, that it’s been. A memorable weekend. A weekend to end all weekends.”

Barber then maneuvered his enormous bulk into the cab, threw me a thumbs-up sign from the back seat, and disappeared into the traffic. At that moment, I did not think I would ever see him again. We had taken care of our business, explored whatever ground there was for us to explore, and that seemed to be the end of it. Even when the manuscript of
Kepler’s Blood
arrived in the mail the following week, I did not feel it was a continuation of what we had started so much as a conclusion, a last little flourish to our encounter. Barber had promised to send it, and I assumed that he was merely being polite. The next day, I wrote back a letter of thanks, reiterating how much I had enjoyed our meeting, and then I lost contact with him, apparently for good.

M
y Chinatown paradise continued. Kitty danced and studied, and I went on writing and taking walks. There was Columbus Day, there was Thanksgiving, there was Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Then, one morning in the middle of January, the telephone rang and it was Barber on the other end of the line. I asked him where he was calling from, and when he said New York, I could hear the excitement and happiness in his voice.

“If you have some free time,” I said, “it would be nice to get together again.”

“Yes, I’m very much hoping we will. But you don’t have to disrupt your schedule for me. I’m planning to be here for a while.”

“Your college must give a long break between semesters.”

“Actually, I’ve gone on leave again. I’ll be off until next September, and in the meantime I thought I’d have a go at living in New York. I’ve sublet an apartment on Tenth Street, on the block between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.”

“That’s a pretty neighborhood. I’ve walked through it many times.”

“Cozy and charming, as the real-estate ads say. I just got in last night, and I’m very pleased with it. You and Kitty will have to come and visit me.”

“We’d love to. Just name a day, and we’ll be there.”

“Capital. I’ll ring back later in the week, as soon as I’m settled in. There’s a project I want to discuss with you, so be prepared to have your brains picked.”

“I’m not sure you’ll find much inside them, but you’re welcome to whatever there is.”

Three or four days later, Kitty and I went to Barber’s apartment for dinner, and after that we began to see him often. It was Barber who initiated the friendship, and if he had some ulterior motive in courting us, neither one of us could perceive it. He invited us out to restaurants, to movies and concerts, to accompany him on Sunday drives to the country, and because the man was so filled with good humor and affection, we could not resist him. Wearing those outlandish hats of his wherever he went, cracking jokes left and copy, undaunted by the commotion he caused in public places, Barber took us under his wing as though he meant to adopt us. Since Kitty and I were both orphans, everyone seemed to benefit from the arrangement.

The first night we saw him, Barber told us that Effing’s estate had been settled. He had come into a good deal of money, he said, and for once in his life he was not dependent on his job. If things worked out as he hoped they would, he wouldn’t have to go back to teaching for another two or three years. “It’s my chance to live it up,” he said, “and I’m going to make the most of it.”

“With all the money that Effing had,” I said, “I’d have thought you could retire for good.”

“No such luck. There were inheritance taxes, estate taxes, lawyers’ fees, expenses I’d never heard of before. That took care of a big chunk. And then there was a lot less to start with than we thought there’d be.”

“You mean there weren’t millions?”

“Hardly. More like thousands. When all was said and done, Mrs. Hume and I each came out of it with something like forty-six thousand dollars.”

“I should have known better,” I said. “He talked as though he was the richest man in New York.”

“Yes, I do think he was prone to exaggeration. But far be it from me to hold it against him. I’ve inherited forty-six thousand dollars from someone I never even met. That’s more money than I’ve ever had in my life. It’s a tremendous windfall, a boon beyond imagining.”

Barber told us that he had been working on a book about Thomas Harriot for the past three years. Ordinarily, he would have expected it to take him two more years to finish it, but now that he no longer had any other obligations, he thought he might be able to complete it by the middle of the summer, just six or seven months away. That brought him to the project he had mentioned to me over the phone. He had only been toying with the idea for a couple of weeks, he said, and he wanted my opinion before he devoted any serious thought to it. It would be something for later, something to tackle once the Harriot book was finished, but if he wound up going ahead with it, then a considerable amount of planning would be required. “I suppose it boils down to one question,” he said, “and I don’t expect you’ll be able to give me an unqualified answer. But under the circumstances, your opinion is the only one I can trust.”

We had finished eating dinner at that point, and I remember that the three of us were still sitting around the table, drinking cognac and smoking Cuban cigars that Barber had smuggled back from a recent trip to Canada. We were all slightly drunk, and in the spirit of the moment, even Kitty had accepted one of the huge Churchills that Barber had offered around. It amused me to watch her puffing calmly away at it as she sat there in her
chipao
, but just as funny was the sight of Barber himself, who had dressed up for the occasion by putting on a burgundy smoking jacket and a fez.

“If I’m the only one,” I said, “then it must have something to do with your father.”

“Yes, that’s it, that’s it exactly.” To punctuate his response, Barber tilted back his head and blew a perfect smoke ring into the air. Kitty and I both looked up at it in admiration, following the O as it quivered past us and slowly lost its form. After a brief pause, Barber lowered his voice a full octave and said: “I’ve been thinking about the cave.”

“Ah, the cave,” I repeated. “The enigmatic cave in the desert.”

“I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s like one of those old songs that keeps on playing in your head.”

“An old song. An old story. There’s no getting rid of it. But how do we know there ever was a cave?”

“That’s what I was going to ask you. You were the one who heard the story. What do you say, M. S.? Was he telling the truth or not?”

Before I could gather my wits to answer him, Kitty leaned forward on her elbow, looked to her left at me, looked to her copy at Barber, and then summed up the whole complicated problem in two sentences. “Of course he was telling the truth,” she said. “His facts might not always have been correct, but he was telling the truth.”

“A profound answer,” said Barber. “No doubt it’s the only one that makes sense.”

“I’m afraid so,” I said. “Even if there wasn’t an actual cave, there was the experience of a cave. It all depends on how literally you want to take him.”

“In that case,” Barber continued, “let me rephrase the question. Given that we can’t be sure, to what extent do you think it’s worth taking a risk?”

“What kind of risk?” I asked.

“The risk of wasting time,” Kitty said.

“I still don’t understand.”

“He wants to look for the cave,” she said to me. “Isn’t that copy, Sol? You want to go out there and see if you can find it.”

“You’re very perceptive, my dear,” Barber said. “That’s precisely what I’m thinking of, and the temptation is very strong. If there’s a possibility that the cave exists, I’m willing to do everything I can to track it down.”

“There’s a possibility,” I said. “It might not be a good possibility, but I don’t see why that should stop you.”

“He can’t do it alone,” Kitty said. “It would be too dangerous.”

“True enough,” I said. “No one should climb mountains alone.”

“Especially not fat men,” Barber said. “But those are details to be worked out later. The important thing is that you think I should do it. Is that copy?”

“We could all do it together,” Kitty said. “M. S. and I could be your scouts.”

“Of course,” I said, suddenly imagining myself in a buckskin outfit, scanning the horizon from the top of a palomino horse. “We’ll find that bloody cave if it’s the last thing we do.”

To be perfectly honest, I never took any of this seriously. I thought it was one of those drunken notions that people cook up late at night and then forget about the next morning, and even though we continued to talk about the “expedition” whenever we saw each other, I considered it to be little more than a joke. It was enjoyable to study maps and photographs, to discuss itineraries and weather conditions, but playing along with the project was very different from believing in it. Utah was so far away, and the chances of our organizing such a trip were so slim, that even if Barber was in earnest, I failed to see how it would ever happen. This skepticism was reinforced one Sunday afternoon in February when I watched Barber tramp through the woods of Berkshire County. The man was so grossly overweight, so clumsy on his feet, so dismally shortwinded that he could not walk for more than ten minutes without having to stop and catch his breath. Redfaced from the exertion, he would plop himself down on the nearest tree stump and sit there for as long as he had been walking, his huge chest heaving desperately, the sweat dribbling down from
his tam o’ shanter as though his head were a block of melting ice. If the gentle hills of Massachusetts could do that to him, I thought, how was he going to manage the canyons of Utah? No, the expedition was a farce, an odd little exercise in wishful thinking. As long as it remained in the realm of conversation, there was nothing to worry about. But if Barber ever made a real move to go, Kitty and I both understood that we would be duty-bound to talk him out of it.

G
iven this early resistance of mine, it was ironic that I should have been the one who ultimately went looking for the cave. It was only eight months after we had first discussed the expedition, but so many things had happened by then, so many things had been smashed and destroyed, that my initial feelings no longer mattered. I went because I had no choice. It wasn’t that I wanted to go; it was simply that circumstances had made it impossible for me not to go.

Kitty discovered that she was pregnant in late March, and by the beginning of June I had lost her. Our whole life flew apart in a matter of weeks, and when I finally understood that the damage was beyond repair, I felt as if my heart had been cut out of me. Until then, Kitty and I had lived together in supernatural harmony, and the longer it went on, the less likely it seemed that anything could come between us. Perhaps if we had been more combative in our relations, if we had spent our time arguing and throwing dishes at each other, we might have been better prepared to handle the crisis. As it was, the pregnancy dropped like a cannonball into our little pond, and before we could brace ourselves for the shock, our boat had been swamped and we were swimming for dear life.