Perhaps she was able to think so because she had never read his books or anyone else’s. She’d been an elderly widow when she came to work for them and looked now exactly as she had then, a wizened dumpling of a woman with an unquenchable passion for cleanliness. For years one of her sons drove her to the Markarian house four mornings a week and picked her up in the afternoons. When Anita divorced him, Mrs. Kleinschmidt had taken it harder than Hugh. “To leave a man such as you,” she muttered. “To do this.”
He suggested she move into a room in the house. “I was chust thinking these things,” she said. “In the car house there could be a room fixed up. The large room in the upstairs. This would be goot. The other, not so goot. These people, they chust look for such things. Then the tongues will wag. So why should the tongues wag?”
There were servants’ quarters on the second floor of the old carriage house and it had been simple enough to have carpenters fix up a bedroom and bathroom. She had insisted on bringing her own furniture from her son’s house and had seemed very comfortable there ever since. He had no idea what her living quarters looked like, having never been invited to visit them.
Although the thought of tongues wagging over himself and the little old woman had done nothing but amuse him, her idea was a good one for another reason. Another person in the house would have bothered him. This way he had as much privacy as he could have wished — the carriage house was not even in sight of the main house, screened by a thicket of white pine. And he had Mrs. Kleinschmidt nearby so that she could handle all of his housekeeping and shopping. He paid her a good salary and always wondered what she did with it. It did not seem to him that her personal expenditures could have amounted to as much as ten dollars a week.
He sat down at his desk, uncovered his typewriter. The machine was an IBM electric, the model with the little ball that moved magically along the page and somehow managed to print the proper letters as long as he touched the proper keys. At first it had seemed likely to drive him crazy. He hadn’t been able to get used to a machine without a moving carriage. He had had it three years now and its idiosyncrasies had long since come to seem perfectly natural.
It was a far cry from the broken-down Royal portable on which One If by Land had been systematically pounded out. But then this room, paneled in oak and lined with bookshelves, was at least as far a cry from the room on West Thirteenth Street.
Because it was the first of the month, there were things he had to do before he could begin the novel. He wrote out a check for one hundred and fifty dollars and addressed an envelope to his daughter Karen, at Northwestern University. His child-support obligations had legally ceased on Karen’s eighteenth birthday, but he had insisted on paying her college tuition and room and board costs. He had not said anything about incidental expenses; if Anita wanted to send the girl pocket money, he was not inclined to discourage her. But he himself sent a check directly to her every month. This morning in particular he would have liked to tuck the check in the envelope and let it go at that. But he had never done so before and would not do so now. Karen did not always acknowledge the checks, and when she did it was with a brief and uninspired letter. He was unbothered by this. He himself had no taste for correspondence and wrote to no one regularly other than her. He enjoyed her company, indeed he delighted in it, but he did not seek letters as a substitute for it.
He rolled a sheet of letterhead into the typewriter and tried to think of something to tell her. He would again suggest that she might enjoy spending at least part of the summer in New Hope. But he would have to keep it a suggestion and avoid giving it anything resembling the force of a command. There were a few things that had happened recently around town she might find amusing. It was hard knowing just what kind of tack to take with her. He never saw her more often than twice a year, and she was at an age where personality changes and growth in a six-month period could be extraordinary.
From the day she was born he had loved her total and uncritical love, and it seemed to him that loved him in much the same way. It was the totality of his love for her that paradoxically helped make the separation bearable. He was confident of her: No matter how far away she was or how infrequently he was with her, she would always be his daughter.
He began typing, hesitantly at first, then getting into the letter as he got into a piece of fiction. He covered almost all of the page, took it from the typewriter, read it and signed it.
His other first-of-the-month tasks took little time and less attention. He cleared them up and readied himself for work. He stacked a ream of fresh white bond paper at the right-hand side of the typewriter. He had not kept a carbon copy when he wrote One If By Land because it had never occurred to him that you were supposed to. Three books ago he had stopped keeping carbons. It was a nuisance, and he now felt that he could afford a couple of hundred dollars to have the finished manuscript reproduce in quadruplicate by xerography.
He put the first sheet in the typewriter. In the left-hand corner he typed his name and the name and address of his agent. Below it he typed the date followed by a dash; after it he would ultimately put the date on which the book was completed. As he typed the date, the same bit of doggerel again went through his head. Hey, hey, the first of May—
He skipped halfway down the page for the title. He grinned suddenly and typed:
He took the page out of the typewriter, looked at it, and laughed wholeheartedly. Still laughing, he crumpled the piece of paper and dropped it in the wastebasket. The wastebasket was richly covered in leather; it had been a Christmas gift several seasons ago, purchased by his agent from Dunhill’s for $79.95.
On West Thirteenth Street he had torn unsuccessful pages from the typewriter, wadded them viciously into a ball and hurled them across the room. Sometimes that corner of the room had looked like the scene of a snow-storm. Now he had a seventy-nine-dollar wastebasket for failed pages, and now far fewer of them had to be discarded and redone.
Outdoor Fucking starts today. Why were the best jokes invariably ones which could not possibly be funny to anyone else? But he already had a title. It had come to him several books ago but had never quite suited anything he had written until now.
He again prepared a title page. His name, his agent’s name and address, the date. In the middle of the page he typed:
He read it through and was happy with it. He placed the title page to the left of the typewriter and prepared a second page, this one containing the epigraph quotation. It was the first stanza of a poem by Josephine Miles and he did not have to look it up in order to reproduce it. Later, when he got around to it, he could check the punctuation.