We stood close together, in the position of like-minded friends checking out a restaurant review or looking up an old acquaintance on Facebook together. Her eyes slid over the sentences.
“I don’t think it was right of you to lie to them, professor. Really. But you see what a lovely person she is. I can’t wait to meet her.”
“You don’t have anything to say about an e-mail from Bullfinch within hours of the time he was murdered?”
“No, I don’t.” She sighed. “I wish I’d known. I would have thanked him. We had such a hard time with each other. That was very sweet of him.”
“And odd,” I insisted. “He told everyone that he was going to block you for that big grant.”
“He did, I know. Maybe he changed his mind. Jim lobbied for me. I guess it worked, at the last moment.” Her eyes widened playfully. “Ohhh. You think it wasn’t Bullfinch. I mean, the time of death can’t be that exact, of course. You know that, right — even though you’re an amateur. But maybe you think someone wrote a recommendation from Bullfinch — meaning it wasn’t really from Bullfinch — after he died.”
I pocketed my phone. On television, people crumble when you show them evidence or an e-mail that could, conceivably, constitute evidence. “I do think that,” I said.
“Oh la la. It could be, but it seems unlikely. It’s much more probable and logical to conclude that having been pressed by me and Jim on this very subject, Oliver Bullfinch decided to do the right thing — at what turned out to be the last minute.” She sighed again, prettily. “That’s what I choose to remember. Or it could have been Daniel, crossing the line, like the police think. We had been very close at one time. And he killed poor Oliver in a rage. They had so many differences. Oliver was so insulting about Daniel’s work, about his intelligence, really. He may have been right. We’ll never know. That’s what’s so difficult about all this, right? We’ll never know.”
She stood a few inches away from me, aglow with her own cleverness.
“So,” I said. “Off to France. Great food and no extradition treaty?”
“None at all,” Allison replied. “But why would I care? Bon soir, Dell. D’accord, vas-y alors. That means, do what you have to do. I’ll be around for a while if you have more questions about Paris or Daniel or Iowa or the vagaries of human existence. You know, questions about shit that bothers you.”
She walked me to the front door.
“You know what movie we never saw together? Chinatown — Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown. Right? So great.”
She kissed me on both cheeks.
Part II
Down and Out in Elm City
The Secret Societies
by Roxana Robinson
Beinecke Library
The phone rang. It was Jake.
“It’s Jake,” he said, though I knew that. “Alison Ricks is dead.”
Jake is my editor. And Alison Ricks was very old. Had been.
“She’s dead?” I said. “When?”
“Yesterday,” he said. “Heart failure. At home.”
“How old was she?” I asked.
“Ninety-three,” he said.
“A great writer,” I said. I waited for him to tell me why he’d called.
“I thought you’d want to know,” he said.
“I did,” I said. “Thank you.”
“She was a great writer,” he said in a serious, slightly hectoring way, as though he wanted to bully me into agreeing, and as though I hadn’t just said the same thing.
“She was a great writer,” I said.
“You know, there’s no biography of her.” His tone had changed to airy, as though this was a curious fact he’d just learned.
I said nothing.
“So, what would you think about writing it?”
“Me?” I asked. “I’m not a biographer.”
“Still,” he said.
I’m mainly a travel writer. A hack, actually. I write pretty much anything for money, though when I get around to it I’m going to write a novel. Twenty years ago I published a memoir about growing up in Maine, which got some nice reviews but didn’t get me the Pulitzer. Then I published a collection of travel essays which ditto. I still have the novel in mind, but in the meantime I write to pay the rent and Jake makes suggestions. Why don’t you do a cookbook? Why not write a book about your dog? What about a garden book? Why don’t you write a book about Joan of Arc?
Jake’s full of suggestions, all of them terrible. I’d shoot myself before I’d write a book about food, I know nothing about Joan of Arc, and there are already too many tearjerkers about dogs. I write for a travel magazine funded by a big company, and they send me all over the world and pay me a lot. And I write book reviews and author interviews, and I do the odd ghostwriting or technical gig for a fat check, all while I’m waiting for the big time to come along and clap me on the shoulder and say, Sarah Tennant, this is your moment.
“I’ve never written anything like that,” I told Jake.
“Sarah Tennant,” Jake said, “this is your moment. You’d be great. You love her work. You’d have a lot to say about it.”
I do love her work.
Ricks became famous in the sixties, when she first started publishing in the New Yorker, and for the next twenty years she stayed famous, and then she disappeared. Her stories were witty and elegant, written in shimmering gold. The early ones were set in Italy, and were a sublime entanglement of art and history and beauty and sex. They were all beautiful, and some were funny, some devastating. The one about the mother and child standing on the cliff, in the evening — you could never forget it.
Alison Ricks fans were now legion, though for years she’d published nothing. I knew as much as anyone about her, though there was a lot no one knew. There was no biography because she’d never agreed to one. For the last thirty years she’d refused to give interviews. Now the books were being reissued and taught in college. And she had won some big awards, just for being brilliant. Lifetime achievement, that kind of thing.
I own all her books. Distant Plain, The Winter Beast, Come toward Sunrise, Raking the Field, The Stone Caveat. Some were set in London, some in Italy, and some in New York. She’d grown up in Connecticut and a few were set there.
I tried to visit her once in London. I’d gone to her house on a whim, knowing I’d be able to sell the interview if I could get it. She lived in a tall house on a dark street in Islington. I went there one afternoon with a note saying I’d come by the next day if it were possible that Miss Ricks was available for a few minutes of conversation. And how much I loved the work.
I rang the bell and waited. For a long time nothing happened. I rang again, and this time the door opened, just a narrow sliver. The housekeeper stood inside, peering out. She was small and old, very erect, with white hair pulled back in a bun. She had strange dark eyes, nearly black, that seemed to have no pupils.
“Hello,” I said, “my name is Sarah Tennant. I have a note for Miss Ricks. Would you be kind enough to give it to her?”
The woman nodded, looking at me with those black eyes. She took the note and shut the door.
When I came back the next day she opened the door again, but only the same sliver. As soon as she saw me she shook her head.
I smiled hopefully. “I came yesterday,” I said, but she was already closing the door.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “it’s not possible.” She had leaned in toward the door to shut it, so her head was very close to me. I could see her thin silvery hair, held close to her head with a fine hairnet, and an odd nick in her earlobe. As she shut the door she lowered her gaze, refusing mine.