The Ghost Writer (16 page)

She wiped her hands on her apron and took the letter. It was quite a morning she was having, a new life altogether. And why? Because Amy was on her way.

“’Dear Mr. Lonoff,’” she read. “‘I suggest that you with your talent write a story with the following plot. A non-Jew comes from the West to New York City and meets Jews for the first time. Being a good-natured person he does them favors. When he gives up part of his lunch hour at work to help them, they act like pigs in getting as much of his time as possible. When he helps his co-workers by getting them ball-point pens whole sale, the same happens. They try to get him to buy some for strangers by saying, “A man I know wants to buy a dozen pens,” and saying later, “I didn’t tell you to, I didn’t ask you to buy them for him, I only told you I wanted two dozen and you can’t tell me I told you to buy him two dozen.” Consequently he develops a dislike for Jews. Later he finds out that non-Jews who don’t try to impose are trying to put him out of a job while the Jews take his side when the boss wants to fire him. When he gets sick, the Jews donate blood for him. At the end he has a conversation with a person in which he learns how the history of the Jews led to their habit of opportunism. Yours truly, Ray W. Oliver. P.S. I am also a writer of short stories. I am willing to collaborate with you on a story using that plot.’”

“Me too,” said Amy.

“The consequences of his infatuation,” I said. A line out of “The Middle Years,” but not even Lonoff seemed to remember it. “From Henry James,” I added, flushing. “‘The rest is the madness of art.”

“Aha,” said Lonoff. Ass! Idiot! I had been caught—while showing off my erudition! Aha. He knew everything.

But rather than asking me to get up and go because of the way I had behaved in his study, he opened a second letter and removed the small index card inside. He read it and handed it to Hope.

“Oh, these,” she said. ‘They make me so angry.”

“Has style, however,” said Lonoff. “I like the absence of the salutation. Just puts out the line and hangs up the wash. Read it, Hopie.”

“I hate these so.”

“Go on. For Nathan’s edification.”

Then he
didn’t
know. Or knew and forgave me.

“ ‘I have just finished your brilliant story, “Indiana,”’” Hope read. “‘What do you know about the Middle West, you little Jewish shit? Your Jew omniscience is about as agreeable to the average person as is your kike sense of “art.” Sally M., Fort Wayne.’”

Lonoff, meanwhile, had been carefully slicing open a blue overseas air letter.

“New Delhi,” he announced.

“You’ve been made a Brahman,” said Amy.

Hope smiled at the girl who would be gone now in less than an hour. “He won’t accept.”

“Well,” replied Amy, “maybe he’s in luck and they made him an Untouchable.”

“Or less,” said Lonoff, and handed the letter to Hope.

“You can’t have everything,” Amy told him.

Hope read, this time without being prompted. “‘Dear Sir, I am a twenty-two-year-old youth from India. I introduce myself as there is no other way to make your acquaintance. Perhaps you may not relish the idea of being acquainted with a stranger who is bent on exploiting you.’” Here, suddenly, her confidence seemed shaken, and she looked up at Lonoff, confused as to what to do next.

He told her. “Go on.”

“—‘bent on exploiting you. I beg your assistance fully aware of the barriers like caste, creed, etc., that divide us. As I am just a beggar in different garb I will put forward my request rather impetuously. My desire is to settle down in America. Will you please take me out of my country by some means? If my educational qualification disqualifies me from entering America as a student, and if all other means fail, will you just adopt me as the last resort? I am quite ashamed to write such a request for I am so old and 1 have parents who depend upon me to provide for them during their old age. I shall do any kind of work and I will try my best to be of some use to you. Sir, by now you would have formed in your mind the unimpressive figure of a short, dark, ambitious Indian guy whose character is sprinkled with a generous amount of jealousy. If you have thought in the above manner you are in for a surprise. For the above description suits me to the core. I want to escape from the harsh realities and live with some peace and pursue part-time education. Sir, please let me know whether it is possible for you to assist your humble servant—’”

Hope brought the letter to her chest—she saw that Amy had pushed back her chair and was standing. “I’m sorry,” Hope said to her.

“Why?” asked Amy, forcing a smile.

Hope’s hands began to tremble.

I glanced toward Lonoff, but he was saying nothing.

With just a tinge of exasperation, Amy said, “I don’t understand why you should be sorry.”

Hope undertook to fold the letter from India, though not with any method I could discern. Her eyes went to the geraniums when she said, “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

“But I’m not embarrassed,” said Amy, innocently.

“I didn’t
say
you were,” Hope conceded. “I said I didn’t mean to.”

Amy didn’t follow—that was the act. She waited for Hope to explain herself further.

“Forget it, please,” said Hope.

“It’s forgotten,” Lonoff said softly.

“I’m going now,” Amy said to him. “Must you,” asked Lonoff, “without finishing the coffee?”

“You’re half an hour behind schedule already,” Amy said.

“What with all this promiscuous socializing over your egg, it could take you the rest of the morning to recover.”

“Yes,” I said, jumping up, “and I have to be off, too.”

“There’s no bus this early,” Lonoff informed me. “The first bus north arrives at eleven-twenty.”

“Still, if she could drop me in town, I’ll just walk around—if that’s not out of your way,” I added, and looked as shyly as I had the day before at the girl I had veiled in so many imaginings, and whom
still
I couldn’t see plain.

“Suit yourself,” said Lonoff. He rose and came around the table to kiss Amy on her cheek. “Stay in touch,” he told her. “And thanks for the help.”

“I think I at least got each of the books separated out. At least that’s in order.”

“Fine. The rest I have to see to myself. And think about. I’m not sure it’s for me, my friend.”

“Please,” she said, “I beseech you, don’t destroy anything.” A charade it may have been, but still I understood her to be entreating him about the worksheets of his old stories that she had been sorting for the Harvard manuscript collection. But to Hope the girl’s request clearly had a less innocent intention. Before either of them could speak another double entendre in her presence, Hope was out of the room.

We heard her mount the stairs, and then the bedroom door slammed shut overhead.

“Excuse me one moment,” said Lonoff, and buttoning his jacket, he followed after his wife.

Silently Amy and I took our things from the hall closet and got dressed for the snow. Then we stood there trying to decide what to do next. I had all I could do not to say, “Did you ever A have the feeling that you wanted to go, still have the feeling that \» you wanted to stay?”

What I came up with was not much better. “Last night at dinner he told me about the letter that you sent him from England.”

She took this in and went back to waiting. On her head was the white wool cap with the long tassel that ended in a fluffy white ball. Of course! He had given it to her, her first winter here in the Berkshires; and now she could not part with it, no more than she could part with him, her second Pirn.

“When was that?” 1 asked. “When were you living in England?”

“Oh, my.” She closed her eyes and pressed one hand to her forehead. I saw then how very tired she was. Neither of us had slept the night before, she thinking of who she might become living in Florence with Lonoff, and I thinking of who she might have been. When the sleeve of her coat fell back, I of course saw that there was no scar on her forearm. No scar, no book; no Pirn. No, the loving father who must be relinquished for the sake of his child’s art was not hers; he was mine. “I was short, dark, ambitious—and sixteen. Eleven years ago,” she said.

Making her Anne Frank’s age exactly, had she survived.

“Where had you been before England?”

“That’s a long story.”

“You’d been through the war?”

“I missed the war.”

“How so?”

She smiled politely. I was getting on her nerves. “Luck.”

“I suppose that’s how 1 missed it too,” I replied.

“And what did you have instead?” she asked me.

“My childhood. What did you have instead?”

Dryly she said, “Somebody else’s. I think perhaps we should go, Mr. Zuckerman. I have to be off. It’s a long drive.”

“I’d rather not leave without saying goodbye.”

“I’d rather not, either, but we better.”

“I’m sure he wanted us to wait.”

“Oh, did he?” she said strangely, and I followed her into the living room, where we sat in the easy chairs beside the fireplace. She had taken Lonoff’s chair and I took my place in the other. Angrily she removed the hat.

“He’s been awfully generous to me,” I explained. “It’s been quite a visit. For me,” I added.

“He’s a generous man.”

“He helped you to come to America.”

“Yes.”

“From England.”

She picked up the magazine that I’d leafed through the evening before while Lonoff spoke on the phone.

I said, “Pardon me, for insisting…”

She smiled vaguely at me and began turning pages.

“It’s just—that you bear some resemblance to Anne Frank.”

A shiver went down my body when she replied, “I’ve been told that before.”

“You
have
?”

“But,” she said, bringing her intelligent eyes directly up to mine, “I’m afraid I’m not she.” Silence. “You’ve read her book, however.”

“Not really,” she said. “I looked at it.”

“Oh, but it’s quite a book.”

“Is it?”

“Oh, yes. She was a marvelous young writer. She was something for thirteen. It’s like watching an accelerated film of a fetus sprouting a face, watching her mastering things. You must read it. Suddenly she’s discovering reflection, suddenly there’s portraiture, character sketches, suddenly there’s a long intricate eventful happening so beautifully recounted it seems to have gone through a dozen drafts. And no poisonous notion of being
interesting
or
serious
. She just is.” My whole body was damp from the effort of compressing my thoughts and presenting them to her before Lonoff returned to inhibit me. ‘The ardor in her, the spirit in her—always on the move, always starting things, being boring as unbearable to her as being bored—a terrific writer, really. And an enormously appealing child. I was thinking”—the thought had only just occurred to me, of course, in the rapture of praising Anne Frank to one who might even be her—”she’s like some impassioned little sister of Kafka’s, his lost little daughter—a kinship is even there in the face. I think. Kafka’s garrets and closets, the hidden attics where they hand down the indictments, the camouflaged doors—everything he dreamed in Prague was, to her, real Amsterdam life. What he invented, she suffered. Do you remember the first sentence of
The Trial
? We were talking about it last night, Mr. Lonoff and myself. It could be the epigraph for her book. ‘Someone must have falsely traduced Anne F., because one morning without having done anything wrong, she was placed under arrest.’”

However, despite
my
ardor, Amy’s mind was elsewhere. But then so was mine, really—back in New Jersey, where the lucky childhood had been spent. To be wed somehow to you, I thought, my unassailable advocate, my invulnerable ally, my shield against their charges of defection and betrayal and reckless, heinous informing! Oh, marry me, Anne Frank, exonerate me before my outraged elders of this idiotic indictment! Heedless of Jewish feeling? Indifferent to Jewish survival? Brutish about their wellbeing? Who dares to accuse of such unthinking crimes the husband of Anne Frank!

But, alas, I could not lift her out of her sacred book and make her a character in this life. Instead, I was confronted by Amy Bellette (whoever she might be), turning the pages of Lonoff’s magazine, and, while she savored his every underlining, waiting to see if at the last minute he would not change his life, and hers with it. The rest was so much fiction, the unchallengeable answer to their questionnaire that I proposed to offer the Wapters. And far from being unchallengeable, far from acquitting me of their charges and restoring to me my cherished blamelessness, a fiction that of course would seem to them a desecration even more vile than the one they had read.

Hope was coming down the stairs, dressed for the outdoors in a hooded green loden coat and wearing snow boots pulled over her wool trousers. She held firmly to the banister with one hand—to prevent herself from falling—and in the other carried a small overnight bag.

Lonoff spoke to her from the top of the stairs. “This won’t do,” he said softly. This is pure—”

“Let’s all have what we want, please.” She spoke without looking back at him; in her emotional state she had all she could do to negotiate the stairs.

‘This is hardly what you want.”

She stopped—“It is what I have wanted for years”—then proceeded once more with leaving home.

“Come back up here. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“You’re just frightened,” she said, from between her teeth, “of losing your boredom.”

“I can’t hear you, Hope.”

Safely now at the bottom landing, the little woman turned and looked up the stairs. “You’re just worried about how you will get all your writing done and all your reading done and all your brooding done without the boredom of me. Well, let someone else be boring for you from now on! Let someone else be no trouble!”

“Please come back up here.” Rather than doing as he asked, she picked up her bag and came into the living room. I alone stood to receive her.

“Take off your coat,” she said to Amy. “Now
you’re
going to have thirty-five years of it!” And with that she began to shake with sobs.