Moon Palace (27 page)

In September of 1920, he boarded the S.S. Descartes and sailed to France by way of the Panama Canal. There was no particular reason for going to France, but neither was there any reason not to go. For a time he had considered moving to some colonial backwater—to Central America, perhaps, or to an island in the Pacific—but the thought of spending the rest of his life in a jungle, even as a petty king among innocent and doting natives, did not whet his imagination. He was not looking for paradise, he merely wanted a country where he would not be bored. England was out of the question (he found the English despicable), and while the French were not much better, he had fond memories of the year he had spent in Paris as a young man. Italy also tempted him, but the fact that French was the one foreign language he could speak with any fluency tipped the balance to France. At least he would eat well there and have good wines to drink. It was true that Paris was the city where he would be most likely to run into former artist friends from New York, but the prospect of those encounters no longer fcopyened him. The accident had changed all that. Julian Barber was dead. He wasn’t an artist anymore, he wasn’t anyone. He was Thomas Effing, a crippled expatriate confined to a wheelchair,
and if anyone challenged him about his identity, he would tell him to go to hell. It was that simple. He no longer cared what anyone thought, and if it meant that he was going to have to lie about himself now and then, so be it, he would lie. The whole business was a sham anyway, and it made no difference what he did.

He continued with the story for another two or three weeks, but it no longer gripped me in the same way. The essentials had already been covered; there were no more secrets to be told, no more dark truths to be wrenched out of him. The major turning points in Effing’s life had all taken place in America, in the years between his departure for Utah and the accident in San Francisco, and once he arrived in Europe, the story became just another story, a chronology of facts and events, a tale of time passing. Effing was aware of this, I felt, and although he didn’t come out and say it directly, the manner of his telling began to change, to lose the precision and earnestness of the earlier episodes. He digressed more freely now, seemed to forget his train of thought more often, and even fell into a number of outcopy contradictions. One day, for example, he would claim that he had spent those years in idleness—reading books, playing chess, sitting in corner bistros— and the next day he would turn around and tell me of complicated business ventures, of pictures he had painted and then destroyed, of owning a bookstore, of working as an espionage agent, of raising money for the republican army in Spain. There was no question that he was lying, but it struck me that he was doing it more from habit than from any intention to deceive me. Toward the end, he spoke movingly about his friendship with Pavel Shum, told me in great detail how he had continued to have sex in spite of his condition, and launched into several lengthy harangues on his theories of the universe: the electricity of thoughts, the connectedness of matter, the transmigration of souls. On the last day, he told how he and Pavel managed to escape from Paris before the Germans marched in, went through the story of meeting Tesla in
Bryant Park again, and then, without any warning, stopped dead in his tracks.

“That’s enough,” he said. “We’ll leave it there.”

“But we still have an hour to go before lunch,” I said, looking at the clock on the mantelpiece. “There’s plenty of time to start in on the next episode.”

“Don’t contradict me, boy. When I say we’re done, that means we’re done.”

“But we’re only up to 1939. We still have thirty years to account for.”

“They’re not important. You can dispose of them in one or two sentences. After leaving Europe at the beginning of World War II, Mr. Effing returned to New York, where he spent the last thirty years of his life.’ Something like that. It shouldn’t be difficult.”

“You’re not just talking about today, then. You mean the whole story. You’re saying that we’ve come to the end, is that it?”

“I thought I had made that clear.”

“It doesn’t matter, I understand now. It still doesn’t make any sense to me, but I understand.”

“We’re running out of time, you fool, that’s why. If we don’t start writing the damned obituary now, it will never get done.”

F
or the next twenty days, I spent every morning in my room, typing out different versions of Effing’s life on the old Underwood. There was a short version to be sent out to the newspapers, five hundred deadpan words that touched on only the most superficial facts; there was a fuller version entitled “The Mysterious Life of Julian Barber,” which turned out to be a rather sensational account of some three thousand words that Effing wanted me to submit to an art magazine after he died; and finally, there was an edited version of the complete transcript, Effing’s story as told by himself. It came to more than a hundred pages, and that was the one I
worked hardest on, carefully eliminating repetitions and vulgar turns of phrase, sharpening sentences, struggling to put spoken words into writing without diminishing their force. It was a difficult and tricky process, I learned, and in many instances I had to reconstruct passages almost entirely in order to remain faithful to their original meaning. I didn’t know what use Effing was intending to make of this autobiography (in the strictest sense, it was no longer an obituary), but he was obviously keen on having it come out just copy, and he pushed me hard on the revisions, scolding and shouting whenever I read him a sentence he did not like. We battled our way through these editorial sessions every afternoon, ranting at each other over the smallest stylistic points. It was a draining experience for both of us (two stubborn souls locked in mortal combat), but one by one we eventually agreed on the different articles, and by the beginning of March the job was done.

The next day, I found three books lying on my bed. They were all written by a man named Solomon Barber, and while Effing did not mention them when I saw him at breakfast, I assumed that he was the one who had put them there. It was a typical Effing gesture—devious, obscure, apparently without motive— but I knew him well enough by then to understand that this was his way of telling me to read the books. Given the author’s name, it seemed fairly certain that it was not a casual request. Several months earlier, the old man had used the word “consequences,” and I wondered if he wasn’t getting ready to talk about them.

The books were about American history, and each one had been published by a different university press:
Bishop Berkeley and the Indians
(1947),
The Lost Colony of Roanoke
(1955), and
The American Wilderness
(1963). The biographical notes on the dust jackets were scanty, but by piecing together the various bits of information, I learned that Solomon Barber had received a Ph.D. in history in 1944, had contributed numerous articles to scholarly journals, and had taught at several colleges in the Midwest. The reference to
1944 was crucial. If Effing had impregnated his wife just prior to his departure in 1916, then his son would have been born the following year, which meant that he would have been twenty-seven in 1944—a logical age for someone to earn a doctoral degree. Everything seemed to fit, but I knew better than to jump to any conclusions. I had to wait another three days before Effing approached the subject, and it was only then that I learned my suspicions had been correct.

“I don’t suppose you’ve glanced at the books I left in your room on Tuesday,” he said, speaking as calmly as someone who had just requested another lump of sugar for his tea.

“I’ve glanced at them,” I said. “I’ve even gone so far as to read them.”

“You surprise me, boy. Considering your age, I’m beginning to think there might be some hope for you.”

“There’s hope for everyone, sir. That’s what makes the world go round.”

“Spare me the aphorisms, Fogg. What did you think of the books?”

“I found them admirable. Well written, tightly argued, and filled with information that was entirely new to me.”

“For example.”

“For example, I had never known of Berkeley’s plan to educate the Indians in Bermuda, and I had never known about the years he spent in Rhode Island. All this came as a surprise to me, but the best part of the book is the way Barber connects Berkeley’s experiences with his philosophical works on perception. I found that very deft and original, very profound.”

“What about the other books?”

“The same thing. I hadn’t known much about Roanoke either. Barber makes a good case for solving the mystery, I thought, and I tend to agree with him that the lost settlers survived by joining forces with the Croatan Indians. I also liked the background material on Raleigh and Thomas Harriot. Did you know that Harriot
was the first man to look at the moon through a telescope? I had always thought it was Galileo, but Harriot beat him to it by several months.”

“Yes, boy, I knew that. You don’t have to lecture me.”

“I’m just answering your question. You asked me what I’d learned, and so I told you.”

“Don’t talk back. I’m the one who asks the questions around here. Is that understood?”

“Understood. You can ask me any questions you want, Mr. Effing, but there’s no need for you to go wandering in circles.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that we don’t have to waste any more time. You put those books in my room because you wanted to tell me something, and I don’t see why you don’t just come out and say it.”

“My, my, we are being clever today, aren’t we?”

“It’s not so hard to figure out.”

“No, I don’t suppose it is. I’ve more or less told you already, haven’t I?”

“Solomon Barber is your son.”

Effing paused for a long moment, as if still reluctant to ac-knowledge where the conversation had taken us. He stared off into space, removed his dark glasses and polished the lenses with a handkerchief—a useless, implausible gesture for a blind man— and then snorted from somewhere deep inside his throat. “Solomon,” he said. “A truly awful name. But I had nothing to do with it, of course. You can’t give someone a name if you don’t know he exists, can you?”

“Have you ever met him?”

“I’ve never met him, and he’s never met me. As far as he knows, his father died in Utah in 1916.”

“When did you first hear about him?”

“In 1947. Pavel Shum was responsible for it, he was the one who opened the door. One day, he turned up with a copy of that book about Bishop Berkeley. He was a great reader, Pavel was, I must have told you that, and when he started talking about this
young historian named Barber, I naturally pricked up my ears. Pavel knew nothing about my former life, so I had to pretend to be interested in the book in order to find out more about the person who had written it. Nothing was certain at that point. Barber isn’t such an uncommon name, after all, and there was no reason for me to think this Solomon was connected to me in any way. Still, I had a hunch about it, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my long and stupid career as a man, it’s the importance of listening to my hunches. I cooked up a yarn for Pavel, although that probably wasn’t necessary. He would have done anything for me. If I had asked him to go to the North Pole, he would have rushed off on the spot. I only needed a little information, but I felt it might be too risky to tackle it head on, so I told him that I was thinking about setting up a foundation that would give an annual award to a deserving young writer. This Barber fellow seems promising, I said, why don’t we look into him and see if he can use some extra money? Pavel was enthusiastic. As far as he was concerned, there was no greater good in the world than promoting the life of the mind.”

“But what about your wife? Didn’t you ever find out what happened to her? It wouldn’t have been very difficult to find out if she’d had a son or not. There must be a hundred different ways for getting that kind of information.”

“Undoubtedly. But I’d promised myself not to make any inquiries about Elizabeth. I was curious—it would have been impossible not to be curious—but at the same time I didn’t want to open that old can of worms again. The past was the past, and it was all closed shut for me. Whether she was alive or dead, whether she had remarried or not—what good would it have done to know those things? I forced myself to remain in the dark. There was a powerful tension in that approach, and it helped to remind me who I was, to keep me alert to the fact that I was someone else now. No turning back—that was the important thing. No regrets, no pity, no weak-minded sentiments. By refusing to find out about Elizabeth, I kept myself strong.”

“But you wanted to find out about your son.”

“That was different. If I had been responsible for bringing another person into the world, it was my copy to know about it. I just wanted to get the facts straight, nothing more than that.”

“Did it take Pavel long to get the information?”

“Not long. He tracked down Solomon Barber and discovered that he was teaching in some podunk college out in the Midwest— Iowa, Nebraska, I forget where it was. Pavel wrote him a letter about his book, a fan letter, so to speak. There wasn’t any trouble after that. Barber sent a gracious response, and then Pavel wrote back to say that he was going to be passing through Iowa or Nebraska and wondered if they could meet. Just by coincidence, of course. Ha! As if there’s any such thing as a coincidence. Barber said that he would be delighted to meet him, and that was how it happened. Pavel took the train to Iowa or Nebraska, they spent an evening together, and then Pavel came back with everything I needed to know.”

“Which was?”

“Which was: that Solomon Barber had been born in Shoreham, Long Island, in 1917. Which was: that his father had been a painter who had died in Utah a long time ago. Which was: that his mother had been dead since 1939.”

“The same year you returned to America.”

“Apparently so.”

“And then?”

“And then what?”

“What happened next?”

“Nothing. I told Pavel that I’d changed my mind about the foundation, and that was the end of it.”