Who knows where a chain of events begins? Some would say that the tragedy of Lee Huxley was set in motion long before he was born, when Richard Burton came to America and met Charlie Warren. Me, I can’t quite make that reach, I’m not that kind of cosmic thinker. To me it began when Lee and Archer made their unholy pact. Everything unfolded from that.
Wherever it began, it ended in Lee’s garage.
There is a postscript. Reagan nominated Anthony M. Kennedy from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and Kennedy joined the Court in February 1988.
In the weeks after Lee’s death most of the related events worked themselves out. I got a call from Vinnie Marranzino. He didn’t even say hello, just, “Hey, Cliff, everything’s fine. Let me know if you have any more trouble in that neck of the woods.”
I tried to thank him but he brushed it off. “You don’t thank an old pal, Cliff. We should get together sometime. Break some bread for old times’ sake.”
But he knows we won’t.
Workmen arrived to begin clearing the site of Koko’s house in Ellicott City. Mysteriously the house began to rise from the ashes, and her friend Janet gave her reports on its progress almost every day. The money from the insurance payout may be hers to keep, give back, or throw in the Potomac River: I don’t know what the rules say about that. No bills have yet been submitted to anyone, and I’m betting they won’t be. “Maybe I’ll give some of it to a library, if they let me keep it,” Koko said. “They can have a Charles Warren Room, even if they don’t have his books or know who he was.”
She stayed with me for a month.
I didn’t know where Erin went.
I did drive out to Vegas and found Ralston dealing cards in a casino. I had covered Denise’s funeral and there wasn’t much money to give him, but I fudged it a little on his side of the ledger. “There’s ten grand in the bank, any time you want it, but you’ve gotta come back to Denver to get it. I won’t send it, and I’ll need your word that you won’t piss it away in a gambling house, or on booze.”
“You don’t want much, do you’i”
“Only what Denise would want, Mike.”
I told him what had happened, the whole sad story of Judge Lee Huxley. He hasn’t come yet, but he’s young and he still has time to find himself.
Life does go on. I went back to work, schlepping books on East Coif ax Avenue.
I thought of Lee almost constantly on those warm days and nights. Sometimes I thought of the deathbed promise I had given Josephine Gallant and I knew it would always leave me with a hollow, unfulfilled feeling.
On a night in early autumn I sat in my store watching the lights go on along the street. If there’s a winner in this whole sorry business, I thought, it’s probably me. I had two of Burton’s greatest works in flawless inscribed first editions, books that few other bookmen can imagine owning or handling, but I didn’t seem to care much. Too much of the joy had gone out of having them; maybe I’d sell them after all. I would give them away in a heartbeat if none of this had happened, and I knew Lee would have done that at any of half a dozen places along the way. I still believed in him: at heart he was a decent man, done in not so much by his own hand as by the sins of his grandfather. Once in his life he went against his own good instincts and he paid a terrible price.
I looked out at the street. Tonight was going to be a long one, full of ghosts.
I knew I had to shape up. I had not run in weeks and I had begun drinking much too much. I was avoiding people, I wasn’t eating well, and my outlook was poor. I saw myself in a distant future, a crazy old man like the bookscout in Charlotte, burrowed into my own nutty world, snapping at people, gouging for every dime. Was this a fantasy or prophesy? I didn’t know but it cast a deeper pall on the night.
Outside, the night people came out and walked along the street. Time to call it a day. Then the phone rang, and something about the day made me answer it.
“Hi.”
I knew her voice at once and I told her how sorry I was.
“I know you are,” she said gently. “I’m sorry too.”
“So what are you doing these days?”
“Trying to finish my book. It’s not very good but I guess I’ll finish it anyway.”
“You’re probably not the best judge of that.”
“I’m the only judge.”
There was a long pause at the word judge.
“Even if that’s true,” I finally said, “you’re not exactly finishing it under ideal circumstances.”
“I’m tired of fooling myself. I’m not even going to send it out.”
“Give it time, Erin. Just give it time.”
“Sure.”
Then she said, “A wise man once told me, some of us are not meant to be writers.”
“Even a wise man can’t know everything.”
“Same old Janeway. You’ve got an answer for everything.”
“Here’s another one. Maybe you were meant to be a bookseller.”
“I’ve thought of that.”
“You can always write when the muse comes back.”
“If it does.”
This felt depressingly like the end of the conversation. But after some dead phone time, she said, “Do you happen to know what day this is?”
Of course I knew, that’s why I’d answered the phone. I’d been thinking about it all day long. It was the fortieth day.
I listened to the phone noise for a moment. Then she said, “Stay there, I’m coming over.”
Readers wishing to learn more about Richard Burton are referred to three excellent biographies. Fawn Brodie’s The Devil Drives (Norton, 1967) was the first major “life” to separate Burton from his blackguard reputation, and remains a highly readable account. Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, by Edward Rice (Scribner, 1990), admirably captures the details and mysteries of Burton’s life. A Rage to Live (London: Little, Brown, 1998) by Mary S. Lovell is a massive, well-researched dual biography of Richard and Isabel.
A biographical novel by William Harrison, Burton and Speke, was filmed as Mountains of the Moon, 1990, and is recommended viewing.
Norman Penzer’s Annotated Bibliography of Sir Richard Francis Burton (London: 1923) is still the best source of information on Burton’s vast literary output.