Goodnight Nobody.
For a moment the chill seemed about to return, but it was only a shiver of despair at the thought of two people, both dead now — three people, counting his father with his quonset-hut news bulletins — who had left so little behind to mark their existence, who had disappeared into death like stones thrown into a river, the ripples gone within moments.
Everybody starts out as somebody. Then it slips away.
He wanted another beer, now. He really wanted another beer.
As he piled the papers back into the box, something he had missed the first time tumbled out of the large brown envelope of holiday recipies into which it had fallen. It was another small greeting-card envelope, but strangely heavy. His mother's name and address were written on it in old-fashioned, somewhat cramped handwriting.
What slid out of the envelope was not a card but a folded letter. The surprising weight came from a bankbook and a small key taped to the bottom of the last page of the letter with yellowed cellophane tape. Theo's eye flicked to the ornate signature, which took him a moment to puzzle out.
Your obedient servant,
Eamonn Dowd
He was pretty certain that Eamonn Dowd was one of Grandma Dowd's brothers, although he couldn't remember much of what she'd said about any of them, since she'd left them all behind when she'd moved out to California.
It was a longish letter, at least by comparison to the others his mother had saved. The postmark gave its date as January of 1971, only a couple of years after Theo's own birth. He considered another beer, then changed his mind and made himself a cup of instant coffee as he worked his way through the somewhat spiky handwriting.
My dear niece,
You will doubtless have trouble remembering me, since we have not met since you were a very young girl, but now that your mother is gone you are the only family that I have left — the only true family, that is. Your mother, my sister Margaret, was the only one of that quarrelsome, blighted brood into which I was born for whom I felt fondness. If I saw little of her over the years, and even less of you, it is because my travels did not permit it, rather than any lack of good feeling.
Having known so little of me, you will doubtless find it strange when I say I owe you and the rest of your family a debt of shame that cannot be reduced or put right. I will not explain it — I could not do so in a letter, in any case — but I will say that it weighs heavily on me now, when I am about to set out on a journey from which there will be no returning. As a small gesture of good will and regret at having been such a poor uncle, I give to you and your husband and infant son what little I have left in the way of worldly property.
Sadly, there is no family manor or chest of jeweled heirlooms. There is instead a small bank account and a few personal papers and other odds and ends. The money is yours — it is not much, but it will perhaps one day help pay for an education for your son, or tide you over some of the lean times through which most lives pass.
Again, I am sorry, even though it means nothing to you now, and most likely never will. Among my effects you will find a book. Should you be so surfeited with leisure time that you decide to read it, please do not take it as the ravings of a disordered mind. It was an attempt at fiction of sorts, although not a successful one, I fear — a type of modern fairy tale that I hoped might find some small readership. But I could think of no effective ending. Now all endings seem one to me.
I wish you and your young family healthy and happy lives.
Theo narrowed his eyes, shook his head, then read the letter again. It did not seem to fit into the rest of his mother's keepsakes any better than it had the first time. In the midst of stultifying normality, it made an odd little space for itself — like something out of an O. Henry story.
The small key had to be for a safe-deposit box: that much seemed clear. The bankbook, its ruled lines full of careful little handwritten notations, was from something called Traveler's Bank, with an address on Duende Street here in San Francisco. He'd never heard of the street, but the smudgy, carbon-paper directions to the place suggested it must be somewhere in the area of Russian Hill. The account had totaled something near five thousand dollars — not a small amount thirty years ago, but not quite the life-changing bequest from a rich uncle that people dreamed about. It had all been withdrawn a week or so after the date on the letter, and the emptied account seemed not to have been touched since. It was funny that his mother had never mentioned it, but not really out of character.
Theo now remembered that he had heard his grandmother talk about her brother Eamonn at least once or twice: she had described him as "the handsome one in the family," but also said that he "never did put down roots," or words to that effect. But she had seemed fond of him, as his letter suggested. He also recalled her saying something like, "If only he'd put all that cleverness to work," about some close relative of hers, which he guessed now might be this Eamonn, "he'd have been a millionaire. But all that reading and such is no substitute for a bit of elbow grease."
Theo stared at the bankbook. What had happened to the man? Had he been sick when he wrote this? That "a journey from which there will be no returning" didn't sound very good. And what had he done to the family that he felt he had to apologize to Theo's mother, someone he seemed scarcely to have known?
The bank account was long empty, but where were the other papers the letter had mentioned? Theo knew he had more pertinent matters waiting for him, but this letter from his great-uncle was the first thing he had come across in ordering his mother's estate that wasn't simply depressing. After that weird turn he'd just taken, he very much wanted to be doing something, anything, that might take him outside into the fresh air.
And why is this key still here, anyway? It has to be a safe-deposit box. But even if it's at this whatever-it-is bank, this Traveler's place, it won't do me any good unless I know the box number. I suppose I could do it the legal way, show them it's part of my mom's estate and ask them to tell me the number, but that means I have to wait until it all goes through probate or some damn thing, doesn't it?
Irritated and weary at the thought, he picked at the edge of the stiff, ocher-tinted strip of tape that secured the key to the letter. The ancient cellophane parted from the paper on one side and the key swung out like a hinge, giving him a glimpse of ink. Behind it, so small that it had been hidden by the key itself, was the number "612" written in his great-uncle Eamonn's cramped, careful hand.
He found it on a strange little cross street halfway up a steep hill; it was one of those San Francisco Victorian houses so narrow that it was easy to walk past it without noticing the Traveler's Bank sign beside the doorbell. His first thought was that it was pretty strange to have a bank in a house, his second that someone must have kept the name but turned it into something else — one of those bijou restaurants people don't find unless a friend tells them about it, or a graphic arts studio. It was too small to be a modern bank, and on a street like this the walk-in business must be nonexistent.
There was a glass panel in the front door, but the lights seemed to be out inside and he could see nothing of what lay beyond. There was a speaker grille with a small button next to the bank's name, so he pushed it.