The contents of the rest of the large envelopes were the same as of the two I’d opened at the Woodton diner: reader letters, mailed to Honestly Dearest at the Bayonne Register in New Jersey, then bundled and sent down to Windward Island, Florida, to be forwarded again, up to Woodton. A third of the large envelopes also contained a photocopy of an Honestly Dearest column, set in type for distribution to the syndicate’s newspapers.
By the postmarks, I guessed that Carolina had picked up her last batch of mail at the very end of the year, about the time she’d made out her will.
I read the letters twice through. At the end, I felt like I’d just crammed for a final exam on the continuum of human misery. All the players from the earlier columns had again been present—the cheating husbands, cheating wives, thieving children, unappreciative brides, abusive parents, touchy aunts, and touching uncles—a thousand variations of the species human, reporting up close and personal, in their own woeful words. Such was the pathos of it all that I wanted to raise my coffee with a trembling hand and toast the miracle that the controlling forces of the universe hadn’t said the hell with it and dialed up the spinning of the world until it was fast enough to throw us all off.
There were also two more notes from her editor, just as short and whining as the one I’d read in Woodton: “Carolina! YOU MUST STOP DIDDLING! Send more at once. Otherwise will void your contract immediately. Now, Carolina. Charles.” And finally: “You are canceled in one week if you don’t respond. C.”
The editor, Charles, had written truer words than he knew. Around the time he’d scratched out his last note, Carolina’s whole life had been canceled.
I stood up and kicked at the listing red vinyl chair. My head was banging from coffee jits and human angst. I’d learned nothing. For days, I’d been chasing a ghost named Louise or Carolina, and I’d discovered only that she wrote columns for throwaway papers and might have smelled of roses and Ivory soap and maybe Salem cigarettes. I put on my pea coat, gloves, and knit hat and went out. A walk in the cold might tamp the failure smoldering in my head.
It was almost dark. Across the vacant strip of land, the merrymakers who played along Thompson Avenue were beginning to gather for another evening of Just Plain Fun. Jumbled juke music drifted over, changing each time a door to a tonk opened and spilled new notes into the discordant mix. Still, there was a certain musicality to it, I supposed, as I walked toward it. Beneath the jangle of competing guitars came the more primal, smoothing rhythms of softly running automobile engines, as the night’s first wave of johns slowed to check out the winking inventory of working flesh, to see which looked to offer the least chance of bringing something residual home to mama.
I walked down Thompson, stopping when I got to the video arcade. I hadn’t been on that piece of Thompson since the months after high school. I looked up. The girl who’d owned the old Underwood typewriter like Carolina’s had lived in the apartment upstairs.
I hadn’t been able to figure things out then, either.
I walked on, waiting for the cold and the exercise to calm my head, but the blare from the tonks only made me more edgy. I turned into the quiet of the side streets. Most of the houses in Rivertown had been built in the early 1920s, blocks and blocks of brown brick bungalows, lined up tight on twenty-five-foot lots. Rivertown had factories and jobs, then. And hope. The Slavs and the Poles who worked at the factories had come down the same streets I was now walking, swinging their empty lunch boxes as they headed home to soft lights. If they thought about crime at all, it was probably to smile in anticipation of a pail of prohibition beer snuck back from a corner grocery, or a money game of mah-jongg played in a church basement.
All of that got slapped away by the Great Depression. For with that came the first of the lizards. Elected promising property tax abatements and food subsidies, the lizards instead shrouded the lights along Thompson Avenue and subsidized themselves. They tossed out the groceries and the dry goods stores, replaced them with bars and brothels. They pasted FOR SALE signs on the police station and the city council chamber and spread the word they’d welcome kickbacks from bookmakers and big-time bootleggers, pimps, and prosties.
Three-quarters of a century later, the bootleggers were gone, but the lizards—grandsons and granddaughters now—were still in power, licking quarters from the gambling machines in the backs of the tonks, and bigger money in street taxes from the drug dealers and the pimps. Nobody swung a lunch bucket walking home from the factories anymore; the factories were shuttered. The lights on the bungalow porches were now the biggest in town, bright white hundred-watt bulbs, to keep back the night.
I pounded the blocks east to the city limits, each footfall crunching the snow a loud reminder that I was failing a client. I didn’t know what to do next about Carolina. I didn’t even know if that was her real name.
I came back up Thompson Avenue. The Hamburgers was open and empty. It had been changing hands and menus every few months, its offerings depending on the ethnicity of its owners. Never, though, had any of the budding restaurateurs bothered to change the big letters on the roof that had spelled, for as long as I could remember, simply HAMBURGERS. So, as the fare had changed from Chinese to Thai, Mexican to Italian, pizza back to Mexican again, hamburgers had always been on the menu. Good entrepreneurs knew it was far cheaper to lay in a few buns and some ground beef than it would be to replace the letters on the roof. That evening’s special was a jalapeño burger, a perfect melding of sign and ownership. I took one into the night to eat as I walked.
I couldn’t taste it—for the cold, for the noise jingling out of the tonks, for my rage at all the bastards that peopled the world that night: the greasy lizards who were killing Rivertown; the fussy, slow-witted attorney who worshipped a neat desk; the blueberry cop who got too easily derailed by petty crimes; the priss-pot editor of a rat-crap little shopping newspaper. I hated them all, and I hated myself, for being too myopic to see any trace of a woman who’d smelled of roses and Ivory soap.
I crossed the spit of land to the turret.
I stopped.
The slit windows on the first and second floors were casting their usual thin beams of light onto the snow, but that night, there was one too many. A sliver of light showed from the latch edge of the entry. The timbered door was open, just a crack, as though someone had entered and then pushed the door almost closed behind him.
I moved up to the turret, pressed my chest tight against the stone, and reached to push the door slowly open. I saw only the one white plastic chair and my table saw. There was no sign of an intruder. I quickly stepped in and eased the door closed to shut out the noise from the tonks. Coffee nerves, I wanted to think, and maybe a jalapeño or two that stretched the wires even tighter. My front door lock dates from my grandfather’s time. The spring bolt could have stopped short when I went out.
Above, light spilled from the open door of my second-floor office. I could have left that open, too, forgetting to shut it to trap the heat. I padded up the circular stairs slowly. They are old wrought iron, and loose; they can ring all the way up to the roof.
At the second-floor landing, I stepped into the kitchen, grabbed the flashlight from the counter, and swept the beam around. The kitchen was empty. I picked up a hammer from the top of an unfinished cabinet and crossed the hall, Mr. Coffee Nerves, with his weapon at the ready.
My office was empty of evil intruders. Starting now to feel foolish, I padded up to the third floor, found nobody lurking under my bed or beneath the clothes I keep piled on a chair. The circular stairs stop at the fourth floor. Nothing was up there except the ladder I use to get up to the trapdoor to the fifth floor, but it was lying against the wall, right where I’d left it.
I went down to the first floor, worked the lock bolt back and forth. It needed oiling. It must have stuck when I’d gone out, and I’d been too angry to notice.
Back up in my office, shrugging out of my pea coat, my eye caught the small typewriter ribbon box I’d left on the card table. I sat and threaded the ribbon into the old Underwood and typed out “Mary had a horrid little damned, double-damned lamb,” because it was a stupid, childish gesture and such things have a place in my life, especially on nights when I’m mad at absolutely everything in the world. The old typewriter clacked and rattled as the carriage chattered to the left, but it laid out a nice, even sentence.
I got up, went into the kitchen, and started a pot of coffee. As it dripped, my anger turned back to Carolina’s editor and the harassing tones of the notes he’d sent her. I tried telling myself I shouldn’t be angry at the man. He had deadlines to meet and probably wasn’t being paid enough to babysit some person to turn in a column. It didn’t work. I kept seeing a woman alone and unknown, sitting in a cold cottage, typing out advice to people who had it better than she did. The image ran over my reason, and I did blame him. I did blame that flyspeck of an editor, for not being someone she could have turned to.
The wide, restless anger I’d tried to walk off in the cold was back, but now it was focused on Bayonne, New Jersey. What the hell, Charles; you want input? I’ll give you input. I poured coffee, gasoline for an already raging inferno, and went back to my office and fed a clean sheet of paper into the Underwood. “Dear Sir,” I began, and stopped. What would be appropriate? “Dear Sir, a woman who wrote for you was brutally murdered a couple of weeks ago. She died alone, in trauma. Her body froze before it was discovered because she had no one, except perhaps you, to ask after her. Yet by the whine in your petulant letters, clearly you were interested only in input for your lousy little news rag. Please submit whatever you owe her in the usual way, you prick, and do it damned quickly.”
I stopped and read what I’d typed. It might be a touch aggressive, I allowed. I tore it out, wadded it up, and threw it across the room.
The seconds I should have used to reconsider such a foolish outburst I spent instead rolling in another blank sheet. Then I did stop, for the first faint thoughts of a more appropriate response were beginning to flit around my cranky brain. No, my wise self said, to what I was thinking. Yes, the caffeine countered. The caffeine won, and popped me out of the chair to rootle in the pile of unanswered reader letters. After a few minutes, I found one that made me laugh most inappropriately, wired as I was by the coffee, and the rage.
“Dear Honestly Dearest,” it began, “I was a virgin when I married at fifty-six. My husband is a sweet man, four years older, but he was in the navy for forty years, and complains that our sex life is boring because I only like what he calls the mission position. What should a proper girl do? Rigid in Dubuque.”
It wasn’t funny. It had been written by a woman with a real problem. On the other hand, Charles, the whining editor, wasn’t funny either, and neither had anything else been since I started digging through the few remains of Louise Thomas’s life.
I took another sip of coffee to keep the jitters dancing and began typing: “Honestly, Dearest, you can be proper and a bit naughty, too. Gourmet chefs will tell you that spice adds flavor to even the oldest meat. Get your sweet self down to the hardware store and buy a couple of eye bolts and one of those child’s swings, the kind that has chains and a strap seat to cradle your loving derriere. Hire a handyman to attach it to the bedroom ceiling. And let love be love! P.S.: When sailor hubby asks how you know of such things, look away and smile enigmatically, a Mona Lisa with her memories. Swingingly, Honestly Dearest.”
I’d read enough of Carolina’s columns to believe I’d captured her tone. My words, though, were sophomoric and stupid, chosen not to advise but to trigger a few palpitations in Charles’s chest. I laughed for the first time in days, imagining the horror on his face as he read the faked column. I drank more coffee and rootled again in the unanswered mail.
“Dear Honestly Dearest,” the letter from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, started. “My sister-in-law, ‘Gladys,’ who lives in another state, comes to visit every year, as we go to visit her as well. She’s just gotten an older miniature schnauzer from the pound, ‘Oofhausen.’ Since her husband expired several years ago, we like that she has company when she’s not with us. The problem is that Oofhausen thinks he’s a cat, and marks his territory everywhere inside our house. During their last visit, Oofy puddled the living room carpet twice, wet the dining room oriental rug in all four corners, and sprayed our fish tank, fireplace screen, and antique map stand. When I mentioned these occurrences to Gladys, she just giggled and said, ‘Older boys do lose their arc, you know,’ as though it was only his aim that was off. My husband doesn’t want to say anything to his sister, but since we are about to visit her, I feel I must use the opportunity to tell her how I feel. Am I right? Snorkling in Sioux Falls.”
“Honestly, Dearest,” I typed, on fire now. “Of course, honesty is usually the best policy, but it sounds like you’ve hinted at the problem enough for her to get the point. Short of grabbing her by the back of the head and rubbing her nose in Oofy’s aquatic aftermaths, consider an alternative. Before setting off to see Gladys, phone around her town for the name of an agency that will loan or rent you a St. Bernard for an afternoon. Bring the pooch—call him ‘Gaseous,’ for extra impact—with you when you arrive at her place. As you lead him inside, mention to Gladys that Gaseous is prone to intestinal challenges, and that you hope it won’t be a problem. Then, in the kitchen, produce a dog bowl and the quarts of chili you also picked up on the way. As you’re filling Gaseous’s bowl, ask Gladys if she’s got any Lousiana Hot Sauce, explaining that Gaseous is especially fond of spicy things, though it does increase his discomfort. That ought to do it. Assuming Gladys has not fainted, smile sweetly and offer to put Gaseous up in a kennel, if she would prefer. She’ll prefer, in a heartbeat, and more importantly, she’ll get the point. Dryly Yours, Honestly Dearest.”
Cackling as crazily as a loon, I had to open a dozen more envelopes before I found another letter that was bound to offend. “Dear Honestly Dearest, My problem is my college roommate, ‘Marco.’ He says he’s devoutly religious, but he prays to a carrot, ‘Hector the Carrot God,’ that he’s suspended from the ceiling. Sometimes he chants for hours. I want to respect his religious views, but I’m afraid the other guys on our floor are going to think I’m strange, too. Concerned in Champaign.”
I thought for a minute, sipped more coffee, and wrote, “Honestly, Dearest. Eat the carrot. Munchingly Yours, Honestly Dearest.”
At ten o’clock, I made what I swore would be the last pot of coffee and rootled again. The letter was perfection: “Dear Honestly Dearest, I’ll admit I have not lived a perfect life. For the past ten years, I’ve entertained as a clothing-diminished dancer. A gentleman customer, ‘Richard,’ wants to marry me. He is seventy-four and the man of my dreams, and has asked nothing of me (well… almost nothing, if you catch my drift, because little works, if you catch my drift) other than, before we get married, he would like me to have removed the names of my former husbands that are tattooed on the inside of one thigh. As he is quite wealthy, he has offered to pay for the procedure. I don’t want to upset him before the wedding—he is not in the best health—but am wondering if he is bargaining for more than he should. The tattoos are small, almost unreadable since I put on weight, and there are only six of them. Nervous Bride in Tulsa.”
“Honestly, Dearest,” I wrote, “the finest business schools in the country teach one thing over and over: Cost-Benefit Analysis. What’s it going to cost you, and what are you going to get? Sounds like you’ve already been to Harvard, honey. Assuming there’s no outlandish prenup, what’s a little lasering when so much more will be gained? Lose the ‘toos. Yours for a Clean Slate, Honestly Dearest.”
So it went, me pounding on the old Underwood, overcaffeinated, demented, and giggling. It was catharsis, and it was working.
At one in the morning, the last of the caffeine had vaporized, the giggles were gone. Only a picture of Carolina, alone, frozen, anonymous, and dead, now filled my mind. I’d typed eighteen responses, each crude and ridiculous, each aimed to cause discomfort in Charles, my audience of one.
There was one last letter to write. For that, I had to make up both parts.
“Dear Honestly Dearest, I am the editor of a greasy grocery store tabloid that’s best used to blot up hamster droppings. I have an advice columnist, an easily bullied woman whom I’ve tormented for years. She’s suddenly stopped sending in new material. What should I do? Charles.”
I leaned back, massaged fingers that were throbbing from punching round metal keys all night, then bent to type the response: “Honestly Dearest, Charles, you kill me. OK, maybe it wasn’t you, but it was someone else who gave less than a damn about me. Now I am dead. Terminally, Honestly Dearest.”
Black stuff for an ending. No grace, no humor. Later, when I felt kinder, I’d have to send him a proper letter, if only to find out Carolina’s last name, but this wasn’t the night. I put all the responses in a big envelope, addressed it to New Jersey, stuck it with only one stamp, and took it out to my mailbox. Some would say I’d wasted the night. As I raised the red flag, I told myself I’d come to my senses in the morning and retrieve the envelope. For now, though, it was the best repository for my rage, and best left in the cold.
I went back inside, turned off the space heater, and climbed up to my bed on the third floor. I never sleep well. I’m grateful when I can manage three uninterrupted hours, and those come only after I’ve spent at least an hour categorizing dilemmas, past, present, and most certainly future.
That night, I had to do no such categorizing. Crawling between the frigid sheets and worn woolen blankets, I felt warmed by my indulgent, childish typings. I had the sense, too, that Carolina would have approved of my pettiness, and I fell asleep almost instantly after my head touched the cold pillow.