“Really?”
“Really.”
“That’s wonderful. After you’ve hammered me with the truth,thenyou can coddle me just a little.”
“Unless the story is so good that you don’t need any coddling.”
“Wouldn’t that be an amazement?”
“What’s the title of this novella?”
“I’ve written several. I’ll have to decide which one. I’ll need to read them all again and think about it. Give me a few days. Give me a week. I want to pick the right one. The least crappy one. Give me a month.”
I leaned forward in my armchair, rubbing my hands together like a malevolent witch in a fairy tale. “Izzy will be leaving here next Thursday morning. I will accept a manuscript from you no later than dinner Friday. If you fail to provide the promised novella, then when you return to your room, you will find a very large pile of dead rats, which you must spin into gold for me.”
“Hmmm. It’s usually straw.”
“Yes. It’s usually straw. But this time it will be rats. Large, juicy, moldering, dead rats.”
The week passed. Isadora came for three days and left for San Diego on Thursday. When the five of us arrived in the dining room for Friday dinner, I made a show of looking under my chair until Loretta askedif I had dropped something. “No. I thought I saw one of Rafael’s toys, the thing that’s like a squirrel or maybe it’s a rat. But nothing’s there. It was just a shadow.”
As we settled in our chairs, Gertie said, “If you’re looking for a pile of rats, don’t bother looking in my room. I have no need for a pile of rats.”
Loretta said, “Why on earth would Addie be looking for a pile of rats?”
“Do we have a rat problem?” Franklin asked. “We’ve had mice in the garage but never rats, and certainly not in the house.”
Our salads were already plated before us, and as Gertie picked up her fork, she said, “There weren’t any rats left in Hamelin after the Pied Piper lured them into the river. He’s my hero.”
“But when he didn’t get paid,” said Harry, “he hypnotized all the children with music and drowned them in the same river. That’s not a hero in my book.”
“Well,” said Gertie, “if you had a contract to spin rats into gold and the task disgusted you, maybe you’d cut him some slack.”
I said, “Perhaps there aren’t any rats in Hamelin now, but there are plenty in California. Finding a pile of them is easy. Finding a magical spinning wheel might be harder.”
Speaking so quick after me that her parents had no chance to express whatever confusion they were experiencing, which was the point of the game, Gertie said, “A person who expects to come into a fabulous rat gold fortune will be disappointed when she discovers the very thing she thought impossible is waiting to be found under her bed pillow.”
“Franklin,” Loretta said, “the children have evidently spent the day in the wine cellar.”
Franklin said, “The girls are talking in code concerning something they don’t want us to know about. Anyway, I hope that’s what they’re doing. Psychiatrists charge a fortune.”
“I don’t know about any code,” Harry said.
“That’s okay, son. Eventually you’ll learn half of everything women say to each other is in code, to prevent us from realizing they rule the world.”
“From now on,” Loretta said, “the only talking in code allowed will be between your father and me. And there will be no talking at all about rats when we’re at the table.”
“You’re taking all the fun out of dinner,” Harry said.
“Chef Lattuada wouldn’t want to hear that,” Loretta said. “And he’s the only one with the power to make it happen, just to teach you a lesson.”
After dinner, I went directly to my suite. In my bedroom, under my pillow, a manila envelope contained a sheaf of typing paper. On the envelope, in Gertie’s neat printing, were ten words:Only the truth will help me. Waiting to be eviscerated.
The novella was titledBackward Down the Staircase. Seventy-six pages of double-spaced text. The first page carried no byline, as if she didn’t want to admit to having written the piece until someone confirmed that it wasn’t an embarrassment.
One of the drawers in my vanity was the size of the paper on which the story was written. I pulled it out and carried it into the living room and put the pages in it so that they wouldn’t slide around while I was reading. I sat in my armchair with a decorative pillow on my lap and the drawer on the pillow. As I finished each page, I intended to put it on the small table beside the chair. I didn’t have a pen because I had no intention of reading critically or making notations on this first pass.
I hesitated to begin. I was eager to read the story, to know whether she had been blessed with talent. However, of the thousands of books I’d read, what I’d thought of them had mattered to no one but me. Never before had the author been waiting a few rooms away, eager to know my opinion. Never before had the author been someone whom Iloved more than I loved myself. I had promised her an honest response, and Gertie knew me well enough and was perceptive enough to detect the slightest inflation or evasion of my true evaluation of her work. I sat there with her heart in my lap, her heart as she had exposed it on seventy-six pages, and I almost became paralyzed as I considered the wounds I could inflict even with the tenderest of rejections. Any of the arts—and writing fiction is one—can be approached casually, as a hobby or a test of one’s creativity, and in such a case, the result might occasionally be an enjoyable work of good craftsmanship but rarely a work of art. The intensity with which Gertie devoted herself to writing suggested that she would, in the short term, settle for being judged at best a good craftsman, but only if it could fairly be said that the pale possibility of art haunted the otherwise common chambers of her novella and that with unrelenting effort she could surely conjure it into flesh in her future writings. My hesitation to begin reading lasted perhaps half an hour, until I reminded myself that Gertie, although in one sense a child of privilege, was also one of my kind—designed by God but produced by his chosen manufacturer, Mother Nature, and coughed out incomplete during a partial breakdown of her machinery. Gertie was not a delicate crystal vase that could be shattered by a singer’s sustained high note. Experience had tempered her, as it had me.
