Cynthia Manson (ed) (34 page)

“Oh, Mr. Payne,” she trilled. “You’re
back before you said. It’s not half-past eleven.”

Could that be true? Yes, it was.

“Did the American collector—I mean,
will you be able to sell him the manuscripts?”

“I hope so. Negotiations are
proceeding, Miss Oliphant. They may take some time, but I hope they will reach
a successful conclusion.”

The time passed uneventfully until
2: 30 in the afternoon when Miss Oliphant entered his little private office. “Mr.
Payne, there are two gentlemen to see you. They won’t say what it’s about, but
they look—well, rather funny.”

As soon as Mr. Payne saw them and
even before they produced their warrant cards, he knew that there was nothing
funny about them. He took them up to the flat and tried to talk his way out of
it, but he knew it was no use. They hadn’t yet got search warrants, the
Inspector said, but they would be taking Mr. Payne along anyway. It would save
them some trouble if he would care to show them—

Mr. Payne showed them. He gave them
the jewels and the Santa Claus disguises. Then he sighed at the weakness of
subordinates. “Somebody squealed, I suppose.”

“Oh, no. I’m afraid the truth is you
were a bit careless.”

“
I
was careless.” Mr. Payne
was genuinely scandalized.

“Yes. You were recognized.”

“Impossible!”

“Not at all. When you left Orbin’s
and got out into the street, there was a bit of a mixup so that you had to
wait. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes, but I was completely disguised.”

“Danny the shoeshine man knows you
by name, doesn’t he?”

“Yes, but he couldn’t possibly have
seen me.”

“He didn’t need to. Danny can’t see
any faces from his basement, as you know, but he did see something, and he came
to tell us about it. He saw two pairs of legs, and the bottoms of some sort of
red robes. And he saw the shoes. He recognized one pair of shoes, Mr. Payne.
Not those you’re wearing now, but that pair on the floor over there.”

Mr. Payne looked across the room at
the black shoes— shoes so perfectly appropriate to the role of shabby little
clerk that he had been playing, and at the decisive, fatally recognizable sharp
cut made by the bicycle mudguard in the black leather.

I heard this story from Auggie Wren.
Since Auggie doesn’t come off too well in it, at least not as well as he’d like
to, he’s asked me not to use his real name. Other than that, the whole business
about the lost wallet and the blind woman and the Christmas dinner is just as
he told it to me.

Auggie and I have known each other
for close to eleven years now. He works behind the counter of a cigar store on
Court Street in downtown Brooklyn, and since it’s the only store that carries
the little Dutch cigars I like to smoke, I go in there fairly often. For a long
time I didn’t give much thought to Auggie Wren. He was the strange little man
who wore a hooded blue sweatshirt and sold me cigars and magazines, the impish,
wisecracking character who always had something funny to say about the weather
or the Mets or the politicians in Washington, and that was the extent of it.

But then one day several years ago
he happened to be looking through a magazine in the store, and he stumbled
across a review of one of my books. He knew it was me because a photograph
accompanied the review, and after that things changed between us. I was no
longer just another customer to Auggie, I had become a distinguished person.
Most people couldn’t care less about books and writers, but it turned out that
Auggie considered himself an artist. Now that he had cracked the secret of who
I was, he embraced me as an ally, a confidant, a brother-in-arms. To tell the
truth, I found it rather embarrassing. Then, almost inevitably, a moment came
when he asked if I would be willing to look at his photographs. Given his
enthusiasm and good will, there didn’t seem to be any way I could turn him
down.

God knows what I was expecting. At
the very least, it wasn’t what Auggie showed me the next day. In a small,
windowless room at the back of the store, he opened a cardboard box and pulled
out twelve identical black photo albums. This was his life’s work, he said, and
it didn’t take him more than five minutes a day to do it. Every morning for the
past twelve years, he had stood at the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Clinton
Street at precisely 7 o’clock and had taken a single color photograph of
precisely the same view. The project now ran to more than four thousand
photographs. Each album represented a different year, and all the pictures were
laid out in sequence from January 1 to December 31, with the dates carefully
recorded under each one.

As I flipped through the albums and
began to study Auggie’s work, I didn’t know what to think. My first impression
was that it was the oddest, most bewildering thing I had ever seen. All the
pictures were the same. The whole project was a numbing onslaught of
repetition, the same street and the same buildings over and over again, an
unrelenting delirium of redundant images. I couldn’t think of anything to say
to Auggie, so I continued turning pages, nodding my head in feigned
appreciation. Auggie himself seemed unperturbed, watching me with a broad smile
on his face, but after I’d been at it for several minutes, he suddenly
interrupted me and said, “You’re going too fast. You’ll never get it if you don’t
slow down.”

He was right, of course. If you don’t
take the time to look, you’ll never manage to see anything. I picked up another
album and forced myself to go more deliberately. I paid closer attention to
details, took note of shifts in the weather, watched for the changing angles of
light as the seasons advanced. Eventually, I was able to detect subtle
differences in the traffic flow, to anticipate the rhythm of the different days
(the commotion of workday mornings, the relative stillness of weekends, the
contrast between Saturdays and Sundays). And then, little by little, I began to
recognize the faces of the people in the background, the passersby on their way
to work, the same people in the same spot every morning, living an instant of
their lives in the field of Auggie’s camera.

Once I got to know them, I began to
study their postures, the way they carried themselves from one morning to the
next, trying to discover their moods from these surface indications, as if I
could imagine stories for them, as if I could penetrate the invisible dramas
locked inside their bodies. I picked up another album. I was no longer bored,
no longer puzzled as I had been at first. Auggie was photographing time, I
realized, both natural time and human time, and he was doing it by planting
himself in one tiny corner of the world and willing it to be his own by
standing guard in the space he had chosen for himself. As he watched me pore
over his work, Auggie continued to smile with pleasure. Then, almost as if he
had been reading my thoughts, he began to recite a line from Shakespeare. “Tomorrow
and tomorrow and tomorrow,” he muttered under his breath, “time creeps on its
petty pace.” I understood then that he knew exactly what he was doing.

That was more than two thousand
pictures ago. Since that day, Auggie and I have discussed his work many times,
but it was only last week that I learned how he acquired his camera and started
taking pictures in the first place. That was the subject of the story he told
me, and I’m still struggling to make sense of it.

Earlier that same week, a man from
The New
York Times
called me and asked if I would be willing to write a
short story that would appear in the paper on Christmas morning. My first
impulse was to say no, but the man was very charming and persistent, and by the
end of the conversation I told him I would give it a try. The moment I hung up
the phone, however, I fell into a deep panic. What did I know about Christmas?
I asked myself. What did I know about writing short stories on commission?

I spent the next several days in
despair, warring with the ghosts of Dickens, O. Henry, and other masters of the
Yuletide spirit. The very phrase “Christmas story” had unpleasant associations
for me, evoking dreadful outpourings of hypocritical mush and treacle. Even at
their best, Christmas stories were no more than wish-fulfillment dreams, fairy
tales for adults, and I’d be damned if I’d ever allowed myself to write
something like that. And yet, how could anyone propose to write an
unsentimental Christmas story? It was a contradiction in terms, an
impossibility, an out-and-out conundrum. One might just as well try to imagine
a racehorse without legs, or a sparrow without wings.

I got nowhere. On Thursday I went
out for a long walk, hoping the air would clear my head. Just past noon, I
stopped in at the cigar store to replenish my supply, and there was Auggie,
standing behind the counter as always. He asked me how I was. Without really
meaning to, I found myself unburdening my troubles to him. “A Christmas story?”
he said after I had finished. “Is that all? If you buy me lunch, my friend, I’ll
tell you the best Christmas story you ever heard. And I guarantee that every
word of it is true.”

We walked down the block to Jack’s,
a cramped and boisterous delicatessen with good pastrami sandwiches and
photographs of old Dodgers teams hanging on the walls. We found a table at the
back, ordered our food, and then Auggie launched into his story.

“It was the summer of ’72,” he said.
“A kid came in one morning and started stealing things from the store. He must
have been about nineteen or twenty, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more
pathetic shoplifter in my life. He’s standing by the rack of paperbacks along
the far wall and stuffing books into the pockets of his raincoat. It was
crowded around the counter just then, so I didn’t notice him at first. But once
I noticed what he was up to, I started to shout. He took off like a jackrabbit,
and by the time I managed to get out from behind the counter, he was already
tearing down Atlantic Avenue. I chased after him for about half a block, and
then I gave up. He’d dropped something along the way, and since I didn’t feel
like running anymore, I bent down to see what it was.

“It turned out to be his wallet.
There wasn’t any money inside, but his driver’s license was there along with
three or four snapshots. I suppose I could have called the cops and had him
arrested. I had his name and address from the license, but I felt kind of sorry
for him. He was just a measly little punk, and once I looked at those pictures
in his wallet, I couldn’t bring myself to feel very angry at him. Robert
Goodwin. That was his name. In one of the pictures, I remember, he was standing
with his arm around his mother or grandmother. In another one, he was sitting there
at age nine or ten dressed in a baseball uniform with a big smile on his face.
I just didn’t have the heart. He was probably on dope now, I figured. A poor
kid from Brooklyn without much going for him, and who cared about a couple of
trashy paperbacks anyway?

“So I held on to the wallet. Every
once in a while I’d get a little urge to send it back to him, but I kept
delaying and never did anything about it. Then Christmas rolls around and I’m
stuck with nothing to do. The boss usually invites me over to his house to
spend the day, but that year he and his family were down in Florida visiting
relatives. So I’m sitting in my apartment that morning, feeling a little sorry
for myself, and then I see Robert Goodwin’s wallet lying on a shelf in the
kitchen. I figure what the hell, why not do something nice for once, and I put
on my coat and go out to return the wallet in person.

“The address was over in Boerum
Hill, somewhere in the projects. It was freezing out that day, and I remember
getting lost a few times trying to find the building. Everything looks the same
in that place, and you keep going over the same ground thinking you’re
somewhere else. Anyway, I finally get to the apartment I’m looking for and ring
the bell. Nothing happens. I assume no one’s there, but I try again just to
make sure. I wait a little longer and just when I’m about to give up, I hear
someone shuffling to the door. An old woman’s voice asks who’s there, and I say
I’m looking for Robert Goodwin. ‘Is that you, Robert?’ the old woman says, and
then she undoes about fifteen locks and opens the door.

“She has to be at least eighty,
maybe ninety, years old, and the first thing I notice about her is that she’s
blind. ‘I knew you’d come, Robert,’ she says. ‘I knew you wouldn’t forget your Granny
Ethel on Christmas.’ And then she opens her arms as if she’s about to hug me.

“I didn’t have much time to think,
you understand. I had to say something real fast, and before I knew what was
happening, I could hear the words coming out of my mouth. ‘That’s right, Granny
Ethel,’ I said. ‘I came back to see you on Christmas.’ Don’t ask me why I did
it. I don’t have any idea. Maybe I didn’t want to disappoint her or something,
I don’t know. It just came out that way, and then this old woman was suddenly hugging
me there in front of the door, and I was hugging her back.

“I didn’t exactly say that I was her
grandson. Not in so many words, at least, but that was the implication. I wasn’t
trying to trick her, though. It was like a game we’d both decided to play—without
having to discuss the rules. I mean, that woman
knew
I wasn’t her
grandson Robert. She was old and dotty, but she wasn’t so far gone that she
couldn’t tell the difference between a stranger and her own flesh and blood.
But it made her happy to pretend, and since I had nothing better to do anyway,
I was happy to go along with her.