I laughed a lot in the wake of Boston. I was amazed at how far my Burton story had been flung. It surpassed even Janeway’s Rule of Overkill, which goes like this: getting the media’s interest can be so much more difficult than keeping it. Reporters and editors are such pessimistic bastards—everyone wants a few inches of their space or a minute of their time, and they put up walls that are all but impregnable. Editors will send a grumbling reporter many miles to cover a man with a butterfly collection and ignore some shameful injustice that’s been growing in their own backyards forever. Out-of-town experts thrill them, but anyone who openly tries to lure them will get brushed off faster than a leper at a nudist colony. The key to the gate is your own indifference. Be shy enough and the media will swarm. At that point anything can happen.
I was indifferent, I was almost coy, and overnight I became the most prominent Richard Burton specialist in America. I didn’t claim to be the best or the brightest: I probably wasn’t the wisest, whitest, darkest, wittiest, and listen, this part’s hard to believe, I may not have even been the prettiest. The events that put me on the map were arbitrary and embarrassingly unjustified. A single piece in The Boston Globe, passionately written by a rabid Burton fan on his day off, led to my appearance on NPR, and to far greater exposure when a Boston wire-service bureau chief ordered a light rewrite and put that Globe piece in newspapers around the country. I didn’t kid myself—they were all using me as a modern hook for the story that really interested them, because Burton’s story had been history, not news, for more than a century. But this is how I got my fifteen minutes of fame: I was carried there on the broad shoulders of a man who died sixty years before I was born.
At home I had twenty calls on my answering machine, including one from Miranda. Because of the Denver angle, both local papers had carried my AP story from Boston. Lee had seen it, and of course he wanted to see the books. Miranda invited me for “supper” that night, making the distinction that this was not “dinner,” it was family, and there would just be the three of us. It was a weeknight; we’d make it a short evening for the good of us all. Lee was in the middle of a complicated trial and I had lots of work to do. Even Miranda had an early date the next morning, at a neighborhood old-folks’ home where she worked as a volunteer.
We ate on their patio, laughing over my close call with Archer the last time I had seen them. “I was holding my breath,” Miranda said: “For a minute I thought you were going to take him apart before God and all of us.” She glanced at Lee and said, “Not that Cliff wouldn’t have been justified, sweetheart. I know the man’s your oldest friend, and it’s certainly not my habit to apologize for my guests. But that one’s a real bastard and I just don’t like him.”
Lee smiled in that easy way he had. “Hal’s had a hard life. That’s what you need to understand about him before you judge him too harshly.”
“Why is it me who’s got to understand him?. I like people I
already understand.“
“Give him just a little break, Miranda. His family was against his writing career from the start and he had to struggle all through his life. His early books—all the ones that people are now calling modern classics—were rejected by everybody for years. He has suffered the tortures of the damned—the truly gifted man whose talent was ignored for decades, actually. If he’s bitter it’s because of the bestseller mentality and what he sees as the dumbing-down of our literature.”
“I know that but it’s such an old, tedious story. He’s hardly the first writer to feel unappreciated. How many talented people never do get recognized? You don’t see them whining about it, or causing a fuss when all someone wants to do is admire them. There’s just no excuse for boorish behavior. He should cut off his ear and enjoy some real pain.”
I asked for a truce. “I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by it. Really, I barely noticed it.”
Abruptly, thankfully, Lee changed the subject. “Let’s look at your books,” he said, and we went back into the house. He studied the three volumes in awe, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “My God,” he said. “Where on earth did these come from?” Ultimately, I didn’t know: the auction house wasn’t required to disclose consignors’ names. Miranda wondered who Charles Warren had been, how someone who had received such a warm inscription could remain so unknown to Burton’s biographers. Finally Lee brought up his own volumes to compare. There was no comparison. Lee’s were near fine, more than good enough for most collectors of hundred-year-old books. Mine were a full cut above that: unblemished, stratospheric, factory-fresh. Placing the two sets side by side gave new meaning to the words rare books.
“I’d say you did well, even at thirty thousand,” he said. “In fact, if you want to sell them and make some instant money…”
“I’m going to hang on to these, Lee. They’re going into my retirement fund.”
That night I had a message from Erin on my machine. “I am going crazy on some planet called Rock Springs. Now I know what happens when all hope dies—rock springs eternal. My desperation simply cannot be described! It’s so bad that I’m actually calling you in some misguided hope for relief. Of course you’re not there, but I guess that is my relief.”
I left an answer on her home phone—“I warned you about Wyoming, kid”—and in the morning, when I turned mine on, she had already replied: “I beg your pardon, you certainly did not say I was being sent to Mars. It looks like we’ll wrap it up here in a couple of weeks, but that sounds like eternity on this end of it. I will need some very serious pampering when I get home.”
I thought about her a lot that day. We were having some fairly intimate bullshit for two people who had yet to touch, feel, probe, or say more than a few direct words to each other. At bedtime I launched a new attack on her hated answering machine. “Look, let’s make a date. You. Me. Not this gilhickey you make me talk to. Us, in the…you know…flesh. Didn’t mean that the way it sounded, it just popped out. Didn’t mean that either. I promise to be civilized. I swear. White sport coat. Pink carnation. Night of the thirtieth. Come by my bookstore if you get in early enough. Call me if you can’t make it.”
She didn’t call. But soon the crank calls began.
For days after Boston I had crackpots calling at all hours: people who claimed to have real Burton books and didn’t, fools who wanted me to fly to Miami or Portland or Timbuktu on my nickel to check them out, wild people with trembling voices who needed a drink or a fix and had battered copies of Brodie’s biography or cheap Burton reprints that could still be found in cheesy modern bindings on chain-store sales tables. One man, certain that he was Burton’s direct descendant, had talked to Burton for years in his dreams and had written a twelve-hundred-page manuscript, dictated by Burton himself, with maps of a fabulous African kingdom that remained undiscovered to this very day. A woman called collect from Florida with a copy of Richard Burton’s autobiography, in dust jacket, signed by Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and some woman named Virginia Woolf. All she wanted for it was $1,500, but I had to take it now, sight unseen, or she’d get on the phone and after that it was going to the highest bidder. There were calls from Chicago and Phoenix and Grand Rapids, Michigan. An old woman in Baltimore said my book had been stolen from her family. She talked in a whisper, afraid “they” would overhear her, and when she insisted that the man in the inscription had been her grandfather and that he had been there when Richard Burton had helped start the American Civil War, I moved on as quickly as I could without being rude. One thing I knew for sure—there’d be another hot item in the next mail, and another with the next ringing of the telephone.