Since that awful night with Quarmbey and Hinks, her father had been reasonably nice around the house, even to her mother, and one Sunday after reading the ongoing dispute over Quarmbey’s review and Fadge’s response in the letters page of The Times, he apologized, in his way, for his comments about Margot’s writing.
“Of course I know you wouldn’t really write a novel about syphilis sufferers in Birmingham,” he said.
“Actually, Dad, it’s not such a bad idea.”
Such extreme alarm overtook his face that Margot immediately admitted that she was kidding. “No, actually, I’ve started a novel set on the coast of Maine. There are only three characters: an elderly man, a boy, and a seagull.” She watched her father carefully to see if he was remorseful enough over his cruel remarks to let this opportunity for sarcasm pass.
“Margot, there’s something I haven’t wanted to mention but which you will eventually need to know.” He folded his paper and removed his reading glasses.
“What is it, Dad?”
“I’m beginning to forget things.”
“You’ve always been forgetful.”
“No, Margot, I haven’t.”
“Well, eventually one’s brain is so full of facts that a few of them have to go.” Margot lifted the corners of her mouth, tried to lighten her words. “But you should go see a doctor, just to reassure yourself.”
“Do you think I could have saved more money over the years? I mean, in one way I might have been able to, but it’s hard when you’re self-employed. I’ve had to buy our health insurance, save for my retirement, pay for your college.”
Margot flinched at his suggestion that he had paid for her education. She’d won and kept a full academic scholarship in her undergraduate years and had had a research assistantship while getting her Master’s. Throughout, she’d paid most of her living expenses — all but a few hundred dollars here and there when her father remembered — by working, likely at the expense of her learning. Because of this, there were holes in her education — books she should have read but had not.
“We haven’t much but this house,” her father continued his lament, “and it would kill your mother to leave it.”
“Dad, I honestly don’t think it would. She often talks about moving into a place that requires less work. She says she’s planted enough flowers and cooked enough meals for the rest of her life. She’d like to move to the southwest, the harmonic convergence place or somewhere like that.”
“I assure you that that would kill me. Besides, your mother just says that. Despite all her crystals and what-not crap, she couldn’t stand to live more than an hour from New York. Just tell her she’ll wrinkle up in the dry desert air, and I guarantee she’ll never mention New Mexico or Arizona again. Anyway, my point is that I don’t know what will happen to us if I’m no longer able to make a living with my pen. And that’s why I want you to think long and hard about the journal we discussed.”
“Oh, Dad, it’s just that there are so many of them.” Margot heard new maturity in her voice — she was talking not as adolescent to parent but as adult to adult, writer to writer. Fatigue tinged her even tone.
“Not one of them worth its salt, though, not one of them with the right editorial vision.”
Margot stood behind her father, wrapped her arms around his thickening neck, and kissed his cheek, smelling his most recent cigar and the one before that. “I promise I’ll think about it.” Again her voice sounded older to her, older and a little tired.
“That’s all I ask, and I appreciate it. I know that I’ve made you something of a martyr, but I want you to know that much of my literary life has been drudgery, scribbling words to make ends meet. It’s not something I can keep doing, and it’s not a life I want for you. A writer should only have to write when he feels like it, when he actually has something to say. And I’m ready to really edit. If it goes well, we can add a small press, so we can publish our friends.”
Since her father had passed up the chance to make a crack about her work, she refrained from saying, “But I thought people publishing their friends was part of the problem.”
Over the days that followed, her father continued to be solicitous, and even kind. Margot was not so stupid or naïve as to believe he was a changed man, but she did think his recent knocks had softened him, and certainly she enjoyed their more harmonious domestic life. If she could launch the journal he wanted and if it could succeed, then perhaps the tranquility would continue. And so she did as she had promised: she considered the proposal. Setting aside the Maine novel, which was causing her trouble because she could not figure out how to account for the presence of a solitary orphan boy on the rocky island, she researched the world of literary journals and magazines. From website to website, she saw the usual writing-program suspects everywhere represented. And she read the appalling web-published efforts in flash fiction side by side with the desperate appeals for donations. The cross-breeding of editors, writers, journals, and links sickened her in the same way as would staring at the progeny resulting from long inbreeding.
She emailed Jackson about her quandary, which elicited the speediest response she’d ever received from him: “Save your money. Just write your next book. Let them publish you and not the other way around. And come see me soon. I’m surrounded by idiots. I’m lonely for you. I’m becoming someone I don’t even like.”
They weren’t right for each other on paper, no matter what her mother’s charts proclaimed, but she knew Jackson was fond of her. Margot pictured herself at his side, imagining both of them with money in the bank and books on the shelves. Yet each time she tried to still the image, to hold it in her mind and see it clearly, it went grainy and faded out.
She approached her mother, who advised her to go ahead and extend the invitation for Jackson to visit. “I’m playing my cards with your father, and he’s unlikely to ever be in this good a mood again. He certainly won’t be after he reads his reviews.”
It was a good idea, Margot decided, to see Jackson in another setting, to determine if their affection was transferable or belonged only to the city. She had never seen him anywhere else.
Chapter thirty-two
Henry Baffler had saved his manuscript from the fire, but he had lost everything else beyond the clothes he was wearing and his cash-empty wallet. In the confusion, he had even lost track of the beer and bread that had occasioned his excursion. Faced with seeking a shelter cot, he phoned Eddie Renfros.
Henry had worried that Eddie had invited him to stay without first asking his wife, and Amanda’s greeting had been a little cool, even as she’d fluffed guest pillows into clean cases. Yet she seemed genuinely enthusiastic when they saw the story on several television news shows: “Local writer risks life for novel”, and “Would-be novelist risks all for book”.
“I’m not a would-be novelist,” Henry objected, but he laughed at the footage of him pulling his manuscript from its corduroy swaddling as the firefighter’s smile smeared into disapproval.
Even The Times covered the event, including with the story a photo of Henry, flat on his back on the inflatable trampoline, manuscript lifted triumphantly toward the camera. The three writers laughed themselves hysterical.