Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings Read online

  “Now,” Phyllis said softly, “now we can call your cat Grimalkin. Now we have a name, Grimalkin, and no cat, so we can give the name to your cat.”

  —

  Christopher slept that night in a stone room at the top of the house, a room reached by the dark staircase leading from the hall. Mr. Oakes carried a candle to the room for him, and Christopher’s cat, now named Grimalkin, left the warm stove to follow. The room was small and neat, and the bed was a stone bench, which Christopher, investigating after his host had gone, discovered to his amazement was mattressed with leaves, and had for blankets heavy furs that looked like bearskins.

  “This is quite a forest,” Christopher said to the cat, rubbing a corner of the bearskin between his hands. “And quite a family.”

  Against the window of Christopher’s room, as against all the windows in the house, was the wall of trees, crushing themselves hard against the glass. “I wonder if that’s why they made this house out of stone?” Christopher asked the cat. “So the trees wouldn’t push it down?”

  All night long the sound of the trees came into Christopher’s dreams, and he turned gratefully in his sleep to the cat purring beside him in the great fur coverings.

  —

  In the morning, Christopher came down into the kitchen, where Phyllis and Aunt Cissy, in their green robes, were moving about the stove. His cat, who had followed him down the stairs, moved immediately ahead of him in the kitchen to sit under the stove and watch Aunt Cissy expectantly. When Phyllis had set the stone table and Aunt Cissy had laid out the food, they both moved over to the doorway as they had the night before, waiting for Mr. Oakes to come in.

  When he came, he nodded to Christopher and they sat, as before, Aunt Cissy serving them all. Mr. Oakes did not speak this morning, and when the meal was over he rose, gesturing to Christopher to follow him. They went out into the hall, with its silent closed doors, and Mr. Oakes paused.

  “You have seen only part of the house, of course,” he said. “Our handmaidens keep to the kitchen unless called to this hall.”

  “Where do they sleep?” Christopher asked. “In the kitchen?” He was immediately embarrassed by his own question, and smiled awkwardly at Mr. Oakes to say that he did not deserve an answer, but Mr. Oakes shook his head in amusement and put his hand on Christopher’s shoulder.

  “On the kitchen floor,” he said. And then he turned his head away, but Christopher could see that he was laughing. “Circe,” he said, “sleeps nearer to the door from the hall.”

  Christopher felt his face growing red and, glad for the darkness of the hall, said quickly, “It’s a very old house, isn’t it?”

  “Very old,” Mr. Oakes said, as though surprised by the question. “A house was found to be vital, of course.”

  “Of course,” Christopher said, agreeably.

  “In here,” Mr. Oakes said, opening one of the two great doors on either side of the entrance. “In here are the records kept.”

  Christopher followed him in, and Mr. Oakes went to a candle that stood in its own wax on a stone table and lit it with the flint that lay beside it. He then raised the candle high, and Christopher saw that the walls were covered with stones, piled up to make loose, irregular shelves. On some of the shelves great, leather-covered books stood, and on other shelves lay stone tablets, and rolls of parchment.

  “They are of great value,” Mr. Oakes said sadly. “I have never known how to use them, of course.” He walked slowly over and touched one huge volume, then turned to show Christopher his fingers covered with dust. “It is my sorrow,” he said, “that I cannot use these things of great value.”

  Christopher, frightened by the books, drew back into the doorway. “At one time,” Mr. Oakes said, shaking his head, “there were many more. Many, many more. I have heard that at one time this room was made large enough to hold the records. I have never known how they came to be destroyed.”

  Still carrying the candle, he led Christopher out of the room and shut the big door behind them. Across the hall another door faced them. As Mr. Oakes led the way in with the candle, Christopher saw that it was another bedroom, larger than the one in which he had slept.

  “This, of course,” Mr. Oakes said, “is where I have been sleeping, to guard the records.”

  He held the candle high again and Christopher saw a stone bench like his own, with heavy furs lying on it, and above the bed a long and glittering knife resting upon two pegs driven between the stones of the wall.

  “The keeper of the records,” Mr. Oakes said, and sighed briefly before he smiled at Christopher in the candlelight. “We are like two friends,” he added. “One showing the other his house.”

  “But—” Christopher began, and Mr. Oakes laughed.

  “Let me show you my roses,” he said.

  Christopher followed him helplessly back into the hall, where Mr. Oakes blew out the candle and left it on a shelf by the door, and then out the front door to the tiny cleared patch before the house, which was surrounded by the stone wall that ran to the road. Although for a small distance before them the world was clear of trees, it was not very much lighter or more pleasant, with the forest only barely held back by the stone wall, edging as close to it as possible, pushing, as Christopher had felt since the day before, crowding up and embracing the little stone house in horrid possession.

  “Here are my roses,” Mr. Oakes said, his voice warm. He looked calculatingly beyond at the forest as he spoke, his eyes measuring the distance between the trees and his roses. “I planted them myself,” he said. “I was the first one to clear away even this much of the forest. Because I wished to plant roses in the midst of this wilderness. Even so,” he added, “I had to send Circe for roses from the midst of this beast around us, to set them here in my little clear spot.” He leaned affectionately over the roses, which grew gloriously against the stone of the house, on a vine that rose triumphantly almost to the height of the door. Over him, over the roses, over the house, the trees leaned eagerly.

  “They need to be tied up against stakes every spring,” Mr. Oakes said. He stepped back a pace and measured with his hand above his head. “A stake—a small tree stripped of its branches will do, and Circe will get it and sharpen it—and the rose vine tied to it as it leans against the house.”

  Christopher nodded. “Someday the roses will cover the house, I imagine,” he said.

  “Do you think so?” Mr. Oakes turned eagerly to him. “My roses?”

  “It looks like it,” Christopher said awkwardly, his fingers touching the first stake, bright against the stones of the house.

  Mr. Oakes shook his head, smiling. “Remember who planted them,” he said.

  —

  They went inside again and through the hall into the kitchen, where Aunt Cissy and Phyllis stood against the wall as they entered. Again they sat at the stone table and Aunt Cissy served them, and again Mr. Oakes said nothing while they ate and Phyllis and Aunt Cissy looked down at their plates.

  After the meal was over, Mr. Oakes bowed to Christopher before leaving the room, and while Phyllis and Aunt Cissy cleared the table of plates and cloth, Christopher sat on the bench with his cat on his knee. The women seemed to be unusually occupied. Aunt Cissy, at the stove, set down iron pots enough for a dozen meals, and Phyllis, sent to fetch a special utensil from an alcove in the corner of the kitchen, came back to report that it had been mislaid “since the last time” and could not be found, so that Aunt Cissy had to put down her cooking spoon and go herself to search.

  Phyllis set a great pastry shell on the stone table, and she and Aunt Cissy filled it slowly and lovingly with spoonfuls from one or another pot on the stove, stopping to taste and estimate, questioning each other with their eyes.

  “What are you making?” Christopher asked finally.

  “A feast,” Phyllis said, glancing at him quickly and then away.

  Christopher’s cat watched, purring, until Aunt Cissy disappeared into the kitchen alcove again and came back
carrying the trussed carcass of what seemed to Christopher to be a wild pig. She and Phyllis set this on the spit before the great fireplace, and Phyllis sat beside it to turn the spit. Then Christopher’s cat leaped down and ran over to the fireplace to sit beside Phyllis and taste the drops of fat that fell on the great hearth as the spit was turned.

  “Who is coming to your feast?” Christopher asked, amused.

  Phyllis looked around at him, and Aunt Cissy half turned from the stove. There was a silence in the kitchen, a silence of no movement and almost no breath, and then, before anyone could speak, the door opened and Mr. Oakes came in. He was carrying the knife from his bedroom, and with a shrug of resignation he held it out for Christopher to see. When Mr. Oakes had seated himself at the table, Aunt Cissy disappeared again into the alcove and brought back a grindstone, which she set before Mr. Oakes. Deliberately, with the slow caution of a pleasant action lovingly done, Mr. Oakes set about sharpening the knife. He held the bright blade against the moving stone, turning the edge little by little with infinite delicacy.

  “You say you’ve come far?” he said over the sound of the knife, and for a minute his eyes left the grindstone to rest on Christopher.

  “Quite a ways,” Christopher said, watching the grindstone. “I don’t know how far, exactly.”

  “And you were a scholar?”

  “Yes,” Christopher said. “A student.”

  Mr. Oakes looked up from the knife again, to the estimate marked on the wall.

  “Christopher,” he said softly, as though estimating the name.

  When the knife was razor sharp, Mr. Oakes held it up to the light from the fire, studying the blade. Then he looked at Christopher and shook his head humorously. “As sharp as any weapon can be,” he said.

  Aunt Cissy spoke, unsolicited, for the first time. “Sun’s down,” she said.

  Mr. Oakes nodded. He looked at Phyllis for a minute, and at Aunt Cissy. Then, with his sharpened knife in his hand, he walked over and put his free arm around Christopher’s shoulder. “Will you remember about the roses?” he asked. “They must be tied up in the spring if they mean to grow at all.”

  For a minute his arm stayed warmly around Christopher’s shoulders, and then, carrying his knife, he went over to the back door and waited while Aunt Cissy came to open it for him. As the door was opened, the trees showed for a minute, dark and greedy. Then Aunt Cissy closed the door behind Mr. Oakes. For a minute she leaned her back against it, watching Christopher, then, standing away from it, she opened it again. Christopher, staring, walked slowly over to the open door, as Aunt Cissy seemed to expect he would, and heard behind him Phyllis’s voice from the hearth.

  “He’ll be down by the river,” she said softly. “Go far around and come up behind him.”

  The door shut solidly behind Christopher and he leaned against it, looking with frightened eyes at the trees that reached for him on either side. Then as he pressed his back in terror against the door, he heard the voice calling from the direction of the river, so clear and ringing through the trees that he hardly knew it as Mr. Oakes’s: “Who is he dares enter these my woods?”

  “I’ll tell you, Mr. Covici—first I’ve got to get the baby’s wash done, and then put dinner on, and I ought to write a couple letters, and then I’ll sit down and start this new novel.”

  II

  •••

  I Would Rather Write Than Do Anything Else

  Essays and Reviews

  •••

  “No one mentions the fact that I also write books, as though it were not polite to talk about it.”

  •••

  Autobiographical Musing

  I loathe writing autobiographical material because if it’s dull no one should have to read it anyway, and if it’s interesting I should be using it for a story. No one whose life is completely dominated by four children should have to recall her own childhood; mine was pleasant and swift and easygoing, and very little of it remains in conscious memory. I regard the shiny new mess kit that my son has just gotten for camp and recall, suddenly, long hot weeks and bluejays and the unmistakable smell of a canvas sleeping bag, but I would not otherwise ever remember that I, too, went to camp. So much is happening right now, and the present goes by so imperceptibly; summers are shorter than they used to be, but it is pleasant to reflect that no one, any longer, is in a position to insist that I learn to swim.

  I like to think that my mind is bent on sterner things now. Writing, for instance, used to be a delicious private thing, done in my own room with the door locked, in constant terror of the maternal knock and the summons to bed; now that I am so luckily grown up and independent, there is no one to knock on the door and save me from my excruciating labors. Although I flatly refuse to reveal the plans I had for the future when I was fifteen, I may say that they were realized in only one or two major respects. I would have regarded my present situation in many aspects as frankly incredible. There is, of course, no question in my mind but that I am better off this way.

  Since ninety percent of my life went on in my head anyway, I cannot see any point in remembering odd concrete items. I grew up near San Francisco—which means a suburb, and trees, and having to stop playing prisoner’s base when the streetlights went on in the evening, and sitting on a fence eating pomegranates with my dearest friend, whom I now remember very imperfectly. I remember going to all kinds of public grammar schools, and two different high schools, one in the West and one in the East, which brings back to me the sick inadequate feeling of standing in a hallway holding a notebook and wondering without hope if I would ever find the right room.

  I recall how the entire chemistry class halted one afternoon while everyone went to the window to show me my first snowfall, and the increasingly rare letters to my dearest friends back home, and the high-heeled shoes. I went to college, and I remember the mail coming in the mornings, and my first fur coat, and the frightful embarrassment of seeing a story of mine in the college magazine—worse, I believe, than the first day in a gym suit—and when my son asks me, after all of this, what it is like in camp, or whether people really ever get homesick, I remember my first night in the college dormitory, and a girl named Laura something, and I can only tell him no, everything is always all right, somehow.

  A Garland of Garlands

  My husband reviews books for a living, and I would like to enter a protest. I know things are pretty hard these days, with the girls hanging around snatching the eligible males right out of the high school graduating classes, but I don’t think I deserved a book reviewer. My mother raised me better, that’s all.

  I realize now, thinking back over the events of the last few years, that people marry book reviewers with the expectation that it is a temporary thing, that sooner or later the poor dear is going to find himself a better niche in life, such as selling vacuum cleaners. Book reviewing is just nothing for a healthy young woman to be married to. In the first place, a girl gets to reading. And then of course, there’s everything else—“Reviewer’s Complaint,” “The Earmarked Pen,” “The Development of the Theory of Universality in Art,” and all the rest.

  In case there are any eager young women hanging on my every word, and even in case there are not, I’d better go right ahead and bore all you people who have heard this before many times, and give out with the warnings. Let me, for instance, give you a rough idea what we are up against, we reviewer wives.

  Take “Reviewer’s Complaint,” for instance. It starts from the theory that no book over five hundred pages long is worth more than three lines from any man’s typewriter, and works from that into the theory that no book ever written is worth any number of lines at all, and eventually you find the reviewer turning the pages of the new bestseller rapidly, memorizing the names and the characters and the chapter headings, and then turning to see what Thompson in the Times had to say about it, and if there’s anything worth disagreeing with him about. If there’s nothing worth disagreeing with Thompson about, the revi
ewer is going to toss the book casually to his wife, and say, “Just read through this quickly tonight, will you, dear? Like to get another person’s opinion before I commit myself on paper.”

  After the wife has plowed through nine hundred pages of the new historical novel, she is going to come out with some such comment as this: “I like it all right, I guess, but it does seem sort of dull for nine hundred pages.”

  Then her reviewing man will say, consulting his notes, “What do you think of this character…ah…Rosita?”

  The wife thinks deeply, and answers: “Well, I don’t know why she had to go and marry Cedric, I liked the other one much better.”

  “Oh, did she marry Cedric?” the reviewer will say, writing it down. “When, about the middle of the book?”

  “No, toward the beginning, and then she kept on going back to him and leaving him and going back to him and leaving him, and I don’t see why the other one wasn’t much nicer. After all, he had all the money, and did keep sending her those plans for the new railroad to approve, didn’t he?”

  “What railroad?” the reviewer will say. “I don’t seem to remember much about that…” And so it will go on.

  A few weeks later the doting wife will pick up a copy of the very literary weekly her husband is reviewing for and find his name attached to a review that begins: “Although this book is fundamentally good structurally, it has grave faults, and one might almost go so far as to classify it as dull. Take, for instance, the character of Rosita, the heroine of the book, very ably drawn, whose marriage early on to Cedric, her husband, strikes a false note and does much to weaken the artistic integrity, or wholeness, of the author’s intention to bring out the history of the development of the railroad in this country, always a good and interesting subject to this reviewer, although unfortunately overshadowed in the present volume by the author’s disagreeable weakness of character portrayal, which, in Rosita, the ably drawn heroine of the book, appears to be…”