Selena Harper had lived just outside town.
“There’s a helluva waterfall a few miles that
way,” Amy said. “Supposed to be half again
higher than Niagara.” But we weren’t on a
sight-seeing trip and she turned me off on one of those
narrow blacktops running west. I saw a marker that said se
80th: we hung a left, then another, and doubled back into
se 82nd. There was a mailbox at the end, but the lettering
had long ago worn away and had never been replaced.
“Mamma never believed in doing any unnecessary
work,” Amy said. “Everybody in both towns knew
her, so why bother putting a name on the box?” The
mailbox was empty.
A dirt road wound back into the trees. The woods were
thick and undisturbed here; the road was rutted and muddy
from last week’s rain. I didn’t see a house
anywhere, but soon it appeared as we bumped our way through
the brush. A clearing opened and a ramshackle building
shimmered in the distance like a mirage. There had once
been a fence, but it had long ago crumbled, falling section
by section until now only a few rotting posts and an
occasional tangle of wire marked where it had been.
“Welcome to my castle,” Amy said. “The
only real home I’ve ever known.”
I pulled into a dirt yard, slick with mud and ringed by
weeds. The house was indeed in a sorry state. “I just
don’t know what to do with it,” Amy said:
“it’s become a white elephant. I’ve been
told the land’s worth something, but not as much as
Mamma owed. I doubt if I’ll break even when I sell
it, if I can sell it. I’m having a real problem with
that, you know. How do you cut your losses on a piece of
your heart?”
She got out of the car and stood looking at it.
“The last big thing she went into debt for was a
roof. Right up to the end, she wanted to protect all that
stuff in the attic, make sure it didn’t get ruined by
a leak. So about five years ago she borrowed the money and
had a guy come out and fix it. She’s been paying the
interest on the loan ever since, but hasn’t made a
dent in the principal. So what we have here, ladies and
gentlemen, is a ten-dollar tablecloth for a two-dollar
table. Let’s go inside.”
We picked our way up to the porch, where she found two
notes taped to the door. On one was scrawled the word
BITCH;
on the other, which had been there longer,
Amy you whore you better stop this shit
. She tore them down and crumpled them in her fist:
“Well, I see my ex has been here. Now my day is
complete.”
I heard the jingle of keys. She opened a door, which
creaked on rusty hinges, and I followed her into the most
jumbled, crowded, disorganized room I had ever seen.
“Don’t say you weren’t warned,” Amy
said over her shoulder. “My mother was
constitutionally unable to throw out anything. This is just
the beginning.” She turned and leaned against a
doorjamb, watching me as I beheld it. The first problem was
the magazines—years of such extinct publications as
Coronet, Collier’s, Look, Radio Mirror
…they were piled in every corner, on the chairs, at
both ends of the sofa. As a book dealer I had made house
calls on people who had survived their family pack rats,
but I’d never seen anything quite like this.
“The funny thing is, she really did write for some
of these magazines,” Amy said. “She really was
a good writer, she just had trouble deciding what to write,
and then making the time to do it. She got five hundred
dollars once from one of these jobs. I think that’s
when she began to talk to Gray son about doing his life in
a book. She had worked for him, you know, she was the first
person he hired when his shop began doing so well back in
the fifties. She answered his phone, wrote his letters,
kept his business records. And at work she was neat as a
pin…or so she said. She never left work without
putting everything where it belonged, then she’d get
home and throw her own stuff on the nearest
pile.”
She led me through the hall to the kitchen. The
cupboards too were clogged with papers, magazines,
clippings.
“Happy New Year,” she said.
She pointed to a stair that led down into darkness:
“Cellar. More of the same down there.
Whatever’s there is pretty well ruined by the
moisture…the whole place has got a mildewy smell. I
never go down there without getting depressed and wanting
to douse the whole thing with gasoline and burn it to the
ground.”
The kitchen opened on the other side into a back
bedroom. There was another short hall, with steps to the
upper floor.
“What you want’s up there. You won’t
even need a flashlight on a sunny day like this.
There’s a big window in the attic that faces east,
and the sun’ll light you up like the Fourth of July.
Do you need me for anything?”
“Let me go on up and see what I find.”
“I’ll putz around down here. Stomp on the
floor if you want me.”
Sunlight beamed down the stair like a beacon. The air
was heavy and filled with floating dust. I went up past the
second floor, up a narrower stair to the top. Light from
the east flooded the room, giving you the notion of being a
sample on a slide under a microscope. It wasn’t an
unpleasant feeling—after the days of rain, you were
willing to be a bug if it bought you a little
sunshine—and I stood there for a moment with my head
poking up into the attic before going the last few steps.
The attic felt crowded, like the rest of the house, but the
room was small and an immediate difference was apparent up
here. There was order…there was purpose…there
was care. The boxes were all of one size, fitted together
in one large block. They were neatly stacked on pallets in
the center of the room, far away from the walls. Each had
been wrapped in polyethylene and sealed with clear tape;
then the whole bundle was covered by a sheet of the same
plastic, making it as nearly waterproof as possible.
It was one of those moments that only a bookman can
appreciate, that instant of discovery when you know without
opening that first box that you’ve just walked into
something wonderful. Your mouth dries up and your heart
beats faster, and the fact that none of it belongs to you
or ever will is strangely irrelevant. I walked around the
stuff, taking its measure. It was a perfect cube—four
high, four deep, four across: sixty-four cartons of Grayson
lore.
I stripped back the plastic cover and leaned down for a
closer look. I could read the words she had written on the
cardboard with a heavy black marker.
Richard/Letters, Poems, Miscellany
Sketches for Christmas Carol/Correspondence with
Benton
Tape Recordings/Darryl Grayson and Selena Harper
Worksheets /Logs of Days
Correspondence/1950-55
Ideas for Phase Two
I took down the box marked
Richard’s Letters
and broke open the seal. It was packed tight with original
notes, all of it handwritten on legal pads. Selena Harper
had probably done his typing and kept the originals, maybe
without the author’s permission or knowledge. I put
the box off to one side and opened the one marked
Correspondence
. It was full of carbon copies, letters Grayson had written
and typed himself during the formative years of the Grayson
Press. Here was the man’s life and
philosophy…you could plunge in almost anywhere and be
caught up in whatever had engaged his mind at the time. He
wrote impressions of history to old friends in Georgia; he
had long discussions on art with a teacher he’d had
in high school and wrote rambling letters on almost any
topic to people he’d never met. He was a faithful and
generous writer. If you wrote to him praising one of his
books, he would answer you, even if he’d never heard
of you till that moment. He had a Southerner’s sense
of chivalry and honor: women would get more consideration
than men, warm, chatty greetings to ladies who loved his
work. He had a lengthy correspondence of more than five
years with a woman in Knoxville: it was a romance of the
mind, as they had apparently never met. I picked up a
handful of pages, several hundred, and came upon a
correspondence with Bruce Rogers that ran through much of
1953. It was hard-core typography, incredible stuff.
Grayson had saved all of Rogers’s originals along
with copies of his own replies. At one time they had sent
drawings through the mail, the old master illustrating his
points to the prodigy in that language that only they and
others like them could read. This will be published
someday, I thought—some university press will bring
it out in two volumes,
The Letters of Darryl Grayson
, with scholarly footnotes and an index, and some
expert—maybe Huggins—would write a long
introduction setting Grayson in his proper significance.
Grayson was an average speller, and the editor would
probably apologize for that and leave it alone. In the
final analysis, writing and spelling don’t have much
to do with each other.
Behind this box was another,
Correspondence/ 1956-58
, and behind that was another covering the next year.
Grayson liked to write. He seemed to have written at least
one letter a day, sometimes more. I thumbed through the
year 1957 and saw many letters headed
Dear Laura
. It was his old friend Laura Warner, who had not, it
seemed, been lost in the blitz after all. She had moved to
New Orleans after the war and was following his career from
afar. In one letter she teasingly called him
My Pyotr
, to which he angrily replied that, Goddammit, he was not
Tchaikovsky and she was not his goddamn patron saint, and
she laughed in her next letter and called him
my darling boy
and said one of the characteristics of genius was temper.
Huggins would die to get into this, I thought. So would
Trish. How different their books would’ve been.
The box labeled
Tape Recordings
was just what it said—a dozen reels of
fragile-looking recording tape, sandwiched between sheaths
of notes.
Selena Harper and Darryl Grayson: October 4, 5, 6,
1958
. The master’s voice, if it could be retrieved, was
apparently preserved right here. The oldest recordings
seemed to be from mid-1953, brown on white, oxide on a
paper backing, and the oxide was beginning to flake. I kept
digging. It didn’t take long to figure out what
Ideas for Phase Two
was. The material dated from 1968 and 1969—notes,
letters, and lists of possible projects, along with rough
sketches of new alphabets. There was a list of artists
whose work Grayson had admired, who might have been invited
to collaborate on future projects. I remembered something
Huggins had said, that Grayson had seen his career enclosed
by those two
Ravens
, like definitive parenthetical statements, but Huggins had
only been half-right. Grayson in no way considered his
career finished. He was still a young man with much great
work to do: a successful
Raven
would simply write an end to his youth and launch him into
his major phase.
I found a box of letter sketches, hundreds of freehand
drawings on thin paper. He couldn’t be sitting still,
I thought—if he had dead time on his hands,
he’d draw letters. Some were signed, some were not.
All were originals.
There was too much. I began to skim.
I tore down the block and scattered the center cartons
around the room. In the exact middle was the box with the
photographs. There were pictures of Grayson’s
childhood home, of the high school, of the
parents…but again, nothing of the brothers
themselves. There were copies of the newspaper that Grayson
had worked on in school and pictures of old girlfriends. In
a separate folder was the North Bend
stuff—Grayson’s shop under construction, his
house, the finished shop, the ancient-looking Columbian
press with its cast-iron ornamentation—eagle, sea
serpent, snakes—alive in the hard light that poured
in through the window. Then there was a run of people
shots. Rigby and Crystal: she convulsed over some
long-forgotten joke, he slightly uncomfortable in coat and
tie, politely amused. Moon in his element, hiking in the
high country. Moon again, standing at the edge of a
mountain cabin with the alpine scenery stretching out
behind him. And there she was, the woman who looked like
Eleanor Rigby, posed in the woods with a man I had never
seen. She had her arm around him and both of them were
laughing into the camera, exuding sexuality. In the
background was another woman, obviously unhappy. If looks
could kill, the woman in the background would kill them
both. There were no names, just that faint inscription in
Selena’s hand, giving the location and date, always
May 1969. But there was something about the two women that
drew them together and kept them that way in your mind.
Then there was the snapshot, shoved deep in the file
between papers and obviously taken by a much less
sophisticated camera. The Eleanor-woman, fat with child,
standing on the mountain at Moon’s cabin:
Grayson’s handwriting on the back (I could recognize
it now at a glance) giving a date, Sept. 28, 1968, and a
short caption,
Queen of the world
. She had that same seductive smile, a wanton, sexual
animal even in the last days of pregnancy. She pointed at
the picture-taker with her left hand, at her swollen tummy
with the other. I could almost hear her teasing voice in
the room:
Oh, you nasty man, you naughty boy, you
.
Eleanor’s voice.
I heard Amy bumping up the stairs. “Hey,”
she called. “You gonna die up here?…It’s
almost two o’clock.”
She came through the trap and sat on one of the boxes.
“Now maybe you’ve got some idea what I’m
up against.” She got up, paced, and sighed.
“What am I gonna do with all this stuff?”
I broke it to her softly. “You’re gonna get
rich with it.”