Turning a corner, pulling the collar of his coat closer to his neck, he encountered a palace of dreams—the Majestic Theater on Washington Street. A massive statement of stone, like a temple from a forgotten age, its marquee spoke to Jim: THINGS TO COME. He’d seen the film when it premiered in Los Angeles, but encountering it here in this cold New England town made his pulse jump. Yes, he thought with a smile, there are certainly things to come—good things, wondrous and full of magic. He surged past the box office empowered by his endless optimism.
But things changed when he spotted the thin man.
At the far corner, a willowy figure struggled to step up onto the curb, then collapsed like a wind-beaten scarecrow. It happened so quickly, James reacted without thinking. He rushed along the sidewalk to where the man lay motionless, his pipe-stem legs folded beneath him at alarming angles.
“Are you all right?” said James, leaning down to touch the man’s bony shoulder.
“I… don’t know if that’s a valid question.” The man looked up with a dour expression. He could have been thirty or sixty—there was no way to tell under the shadowing brim of his fedora.
“Let me help you up.” Jim extended his hand, grabbed the man’s, and gently pulled, surprised at the lack of resistance. So light and frail he seemed, as if his bones were bird-hollow.
Slowly, the man rose, pausing to gather up a package he’d dropped.
“I’ll get that,” said Jim as he scooped up the brown-paper parcel secured with tape and string. One corner had torn open to reveal a sheaf of stationery full of tight penmanship.
Slowly, the man gained his feet, absently brushed his trousers. Jim noticed that although the man was wearing a shirt and tie, his topcoat appeared thin and worn—and beyond that, he felt an essential sadness about this man.
Sadness… as if just by touching him, Jim felt he knew this brittle man.
Finally standing on his own, the man reached out for the torn package. “Thank you. Thank you very much. I am suffering from the grippe, I fear, and it has left me weak.”
Jim managed a weak smile. “I’m not surprised—if it’s always this cold around here…”
The man looked down at him, his face narrow as a hatchet. “Obviously, you’re not from New England.”
“Nope… Los Angeles, California! It’s a boomtown, my father says.”
The man seemed not to be listening as he inspected the damage to his package. “I’ve got to mend this before I can mail it,” he muttered. He took a step down the sidewalk and paused as his ankle gave way.
Catching him by the elbow, Jim buoyed him up. “Hey, mister, I think I’d better help you.”
“Nonsense, I’m fine. The postal office is nearby. I’ll be fine.”
Jim shrugged. “Okay by me, but how about if I just walk along with you a little while.”
“Don’t you have a previous destination?” The man spoke in precise clipped tones, as if always aware of each word he chose. He had a formal bearing, as if he’d time-traveled from an earlier age.
“Not really. I’ve been trying to find a store. Maestro’s Magical Shop of Wonders—you heard of it?”
The man paused his slow and deliberate gait. “You’re a magician?”
“Well, sorta. I mean, I want to be a real one someday!”
The man nodded. “Well, I have some sorrowful news for you, young man. There is no magical shop—”
“What?” Jim felt something ping in his heart. No shop? That just wasn’t possible! “What do you mean?”
The man sighed. “I have friends who are aficionados of illusion and theatrics. Maestro’s is a mail-order concern.”
“I don’t understand.” Jim couldn’t conceal the ache in his voice.
“No shop, just a warehouse where immigrants pack and ship the orders they get.”
“But the ads say—”
The man waved him off as they walked slowly toward the next intersection. “The ads, they are part of the illusion, so to speak. Do you think a famous performer such as Maestro would actually have the time, or the inclination, to be a shopkeeper?”
Jim noticed he’d intoned that last word as if he could have just as well have said leper.
“Nah, I guess you’re right.” Although he still supported the thin man with a deft touch at his elbow, Jim felt something sag within himself. He felt embarrassed when he replayed his oft-thought fantasy of actually meeting the great Maestro. Jeez, he felt like an idiot. But he also felt something far worse—a sense of terrible loss, of a dream dashed upon the rocks of a careless world. As Jim paced his companion, he fought the temptation to surrender to such defeat.
“We turn here,” said the man, indicating a left at the corner. “It’s not much farther.”
As they entered a street lined with giant oaks and shuttered Victorian homes, Jim was reminded of Green Town—his midwestern birthplace. He felt a flutter of memory that he would one day recognize as nostalgia, then tried to forget about the magic shop that never was.
Walking another block in silence, Jim listened to the man’s labored breath, punctuated by a series of greasy coughs. He carried his package against his chest as if it were a shield or a talisman, which fired Jim’s curiosity all the more. He had to know what secrets lay beneath the crinkled brown wrapper, and so he simply asked.
“It’s a partial manuscript,” said the man. “Part of a novel I’ve been badgered into starting.”
A smile widened on Jim’s full face. “Really? Are you a… writer?”
The man shrugged. “Of a sort. Although some such as that mountebank Tarkington would never think so…”
Jim had no idea what he was talking about, but he pushed on. “What do you write?”
For the first time since their encounter, the man enacted the suggestion of smile, a slight grin. “Articles on astronomy. Letters mostly. Lots of letters to lots of friends. But… I’ve done more than a handful of stories and novelettes for the shudder pulps.”
Jim almost grabbed him by his broomstick arm. “Stories? You write fiction? That’s what I want to do!”
“I thought you wanted to be a magician…”
“Well, that too! But I love Buck Rogers and H. G. Wells and Poe, and I can’t forget Burroughs…”
“You have… an energy,” said the man, pausing to look at Jim as though noticing him for the first time, “that I find familiar. What’s your name, boy?”
“James Holloway, but I like just plain Jim just fine.” He extended his hand as his mother had taught him to do.
“And I am Phillips Howard. I feel as though we may have been somehow fated to meet, just-plain-Jim.”
Their handshake was brief, but long enough for Jim to sense the weakness in Phillips’s grip. It was not that limp, dead fish that some people offered but an attempt at strength forever lost. Again, Jim felt overwhelmed by an essential sadness that seemed to radiate from this desiccated man who looked far older than his years.
After departing the post office, Jim suggested they go to the nearest coffee shop, and Phillips couldn’t hide his obvious surprise.
“Upon that, I have several questions. How are you to afford the extravagance? And are you not a bit young to be using caffeine?”
Jim smiled as they returned to the sidewalk. “Well, I’ve got the money I’d saved for Maestro’s, and I figured it was about time I started drinking coffee.”
Phillips regarded him for a moment, then nodded his head. “Very well then. There’s a café down this way. It is run by some Italians, but the coffee is good on a cold day like this.”
As they walked in silence, Jim wondered about a man who considered cups of coffee an outrageous expense. This stiff, spindly man—where did he live? How did he live? Jim couldn’t imagine him going home to a cheery family in one of the clapboard houses that lined these cozy streets. Was he really a writer, or was he just an older version of Jim? A dreamer of lives not yet, and maybe never, lived.