Free The Bookman's Tale by Berry Fleming Page B

the Claudia years, but reassuring in the values that remained, the risen-to-the-surface creamy values—at the airport watching her mount the landing stairs to her plane with more alacrity than his game leg would have allowed him, in his mind Ora Mae’s staggering “Why don’t you marry Mr. Edward, Miss Isabel?” turning into “Why don’t you marry Miss Claudia, Mr. Edward?” and bringing back to him the web of imagined affinities, some of which might have weathered the years. And he wrote her again, after waiting ten days for pride’s sake, a factual noncommittal note, longer than the first but not saying much, a tentative holding out his hand in the way he had seen his neighbor’s children tempting their rabbit (“Rabbit E. Lee” by name).
    No answer. Weeks growing into months—months filled with the night-and-day nursing of their Fall List (three titles); flyers to compose and fling out into the void, review copies to the mighty (who would ignore them—no fear of publisher pausing at luncheon table with, “What’s the matter with you people over there, can’t you read?”); authors unhappy at dustjackets, at advertising, at the inevitable typo, at the Conspiracy of Indifference (one of them grumbling, “Samizdat!” for the way the Press was “concealing” his work); publisher-editor-stenographer-shipping-clerk filling a dribble of orders in the mail—not even an order from Texas.
    Then one morning a thin envelope with a British-looking stamp canceled in San Juan de Pinos: Four lines on stationery of Mrs. Martha Freeland (crossed out but with a phone number showing); she was spending a few weeks with a daughter who had taken a sublet in the hills outside of San Juan. “Grandchildren under foot! Can you imagine? If you can, please don’t.—Toujours, C.”
    And he had told the other half of the Press to expect him in two weeks (catching himself on the brink of “with a new wife”), gone to a travel agency and asked if there were boats to San Juan de Pinos.
    â€œBoats!”
    â€œYes, I don’t fly well.” (And want some time to think, to consider,—to maybe re-consider.)
    And the ship still with him on the hotel porch as the muscles in his shoulders seemed to rock against the moving chair-back, his mind to rock between the black taxi driver talking to someone at the foot of the steps and the blistered castaways jabbering in the rowboat—and on to the jabbering hour on shore in Bridgetown with Pyt the diver and the pickle-man from Colorado who said, “Book-writing is an all-right business if it pays off,” the three of them wandering about the docks, the vast contemptuous heat like a motionless storm (Geltstein off with a wave in a taxi), the ladies doing the shops along Victoria Street—
    â€œPardon, sir,” from “Thomas” with a tray of ice and scotch whisky; “the lady phoned to tell the gentleman not much longer. To bring him ‘something else to wait with,’” setting the tall glass on the arm of the chair and removing the empty one.
    â€œThank you, Thomas,”—none of it seeming to break into the streets of Bridgetown and Pyt shouting, “Come along, Captain!” waving an invitation to join them at the Captain on the steps of the Harbor Master’s office, cap on the back of his head, pipe in his teeth, looking as uncomfortable ashore as the boats in the bay aground at low tide.
    No answer, and they took a table at the nearest cafe—the Café Divine —to get out of the sun, a table by an open window for the air moving in from the water, Pyt looking out at the flock of off-the-vertical masts and, when his drink had come, swallowing an inch or two.
    T HE D IVER’S T ALE
    Low tide once in Marriaqua Town, in the bay and in myself. Would have jumped off the dock if there had been more water. A man came up behind me, said