He was respectfully silent.
She continued…
“‘Titus had taken a wife, had become chief, as was his destiny. He burned his dead children one by one on rafts sent out to sea (the Vikings did not invent the Viking funeral, just added the dog at the feet of the deceased). He himself was slain by fever, and the few remaining Piscataquans, dying themselves, managed to bury him, not burn him. He became part of the dust of the encampment beside Lake Piscataqua.’”
Well, everybody knows about the publishing business today, perishing like the longboats. Toby’s usual editor had escaped into another line of work; the imprint which had sponsored the editor immersed itself in a larger company and that company into one larger. That conglomerate assigned to its greenest editor the new offering by an author from, as they saw it, the generation previous, though Who Set Fire to Smyrna? was still on the backlist.
We met in the young editor’s office. “The thing’s just too fucking unlikely,” he said. (He didn’t say fucking, but the word was essentially printed on his curled lip.) “Your other stories…you could make a case for them. Not this one.”
Toby tapped her manuscript with two fingers. “Much here might have happened.”
“Viking artifacts are thick on the ground in the Piscataqua area.” He had done his homework. “There’s not so much as a Roman fishhook. Your other heroes, your children as it were, have a habit of seeking their fortunes and finding them. That still sells books. But poor Titus finds only oblivion. Please change tack. Write something different…And, Ms. Bluestein,” he added as she was walking with that cleft chin raised, “no more carbon copies, I beg you.”
We met Uncle Franz in our favorite Hungarian place. He wore a black ribbon on his lapel; he had been a widower for several months. “There are other publishers,” he said.
“Not for me. Fictohistoriographia is out of style. Everything is out of style except sex”—Uncle Franz reddened—“and money.”
“About that…”
“There’s plenty to live on.”
Silence. “When,” he said.
“Now.”
“I must alarm the store.” While Toby went to Penn Station to buy him a ticket I accompanied Uncle Franz. He busied himself for a few moments among his display cases. A small satchel was beside the door, already packed. We met Aunt Toby at the train. We passed woods, farms, glimpses of the sea.
We’d left our car near the station. Uncle Franz and his satchel took the backseat. We drove the two-lane highway, then a smaller road, then a dirt road. And finally the water beckoned us, purple-blue in the afternoon, its surrounding pines blue-green.
“As you described it,” Uncle Franz said. “An economy of palette.” His sigh quivered. “Beautiful. Beautiful no matter who discovered it first.”
When we got to the stone house, Toby threw the manuscript on the couch and Uncle Franz settled his satchel beside it. We went swimming. Despite his age, Uncle Franz was fit, and a good swimmer, though he avoided jumping off our little raft, merely slid into the embrace of the water. His swimming shorts flared like a skirt. He must have bought them just after the war, when the Joint Distribution Committee brought him to New York.
At dinner he said, “The vegetable plot needs immediate work.”
The next day the three of us harrowed, raked, created furrows, planted tomatoes and lettuce and cucumbers. We dug up artifacts — barrettes, number 6d nails.
One day Uncle Franz brought inside an object covered with mud and laid it on a newspaper on our trestle table. He washed it with water and a cloth and detergent from his satchel. A magnifying glass emerged from the satchel too.
He passed the thing around and then held it in his palm and inspected it. “It’s copper,” he guessed. Once perhaps green, it was now as pale as the wings of his hair. “A woman on one side, a ruminant on the verso. The coin dates from about 400 A.D. It originated in Rome, traveled through the empire, perhaps spent time in Britain, who can say…”
Uncle Franz had once given me a lecture on fakes. “Sometimes the fakes are tooled…authentic, but improved by the tooling. Sometimes they are fantasy coins, or modern coins made to look ancient.” But this wasn’t a fake. Lifted by his loving fingers from the New England soil, it was metal money from Rome. “It has been deformed by age but the only deliberate defacement is that hole near the animal’s horns. It was probably worn as a lucky charm.”
“You could show it to that ass of an editor,” I said to Toby.
“I will show it to Mr. Jennings.”
She did. And Mr. Jennings, not questioning provenance or authenticity or age, accepted the coin on behalf of the historical society with the grace of a vanquished lover. He provided a display case on legs, and a card which read ROMAN COIN C. 400 A.D. Somebody snapped a color photograph for the Piscataqua weekly — Mr. Jennings, Toby, me, Uncle Franz, all but one of us looking down at the coin. And then I saw what I had already known without knowing I knew it: I might have Aunt Toby’s hair and chin, but I had Uncle Franz’s cylindrical brow and chocolate eyes, those eyes that preferred to look at me rather than the coin, though I don’t think he was ashamed of either of us.
I had long considered the train-wreck death that Toby had supplied for my vague father and mother unworthy of her imagination.
Uncle Franz (I will always call him that) sold his shop and said good-bye to New York. He moved in with us. Toby gave up fictohistoriographia and turned to writing adventure books, frankly invented. So she never told of the heroism of a mother who let go of her child to save him. And she never revealed the story of a woman of forty and a man considerably older who briefly combined in order to perpetuate a Hungarian family, their secret connivance encouraged by another heroine, one who would have performed the task herself but could not.
And I, my provenance acknowledged at last, my parents together at last, went off to seek my own fortune, as Toby’s children are destined to do.
Wait and See
I.
Lyle stares at a lemon.
How does the lemon appear to Lyle? The rough skin is what he has been taught to call yellow, and he knows many modifiers of that word — pale, bright, dull; he knows also metaphoric substitutes — gold, butter, dandelion, even lemon. What he sees in the humble fruit, though, and what he knows by now other kids don’t see, is a tangle of hundreds of shades, ribbons of sunlight crushed into an egg.
And baby oil? His mother, Pansy, works baby oil into her pale satin face and neck before going to bed, and a drop inevitably spills from her fingertip: transparent, translucent, colorless, or so anybody else would say. To Lyle, however, the drop is a rosy viscous sphere. The shade of his skin — caramel or butterscotch or café au lait according to foodies, mulatto to those interested in mixed races — incorporates movement too: on his forearm writhe all the hues in Pansy’s drawer of muddled lingerie.
And the neon sign projecting from the exercise center on the second floor of a building in Godolphin Square? Neon plasma has the most intense light discharge of all the noble gases. To a normal human eye it is red-orange; it also contains a strong green line hidden unless you’ve got a spectroscope. Lyle sees the green line unaided, the flowing molecules of it. It is as if the sign, GET FIT, has given him a gift.
But then, Lyle has been given many gifts, including Pansy’s love. Bathed in that love, Lyle in turn is gentle with other kids, especially with kids uneasy under their bragging, kids really as frightened as rabbits when a hawk darkens their world. Lyle’s underweight presence steadies them, and he is sought after — but not exactly as a friend. He is more like Anansi, the helpful spider of his favorite tales — a quiet ally and trickster who prefers his own company but skitters over to join you when you need him.