The Woman Who Borrowed Memories: Selected Stories Read online

  “It’ll be good,” Fried said. “You’ll get there. Relax. I can tell you confidentially that you’re one of the better ones. You draw well, and your backgrounds are fine. I have to move on.”

  It was a very small room with brown walls, essentially just a storeroom weighed down with crowded shelves and cupboards and a large, heavy, old-fashioned desk that had drawers all the way to the floor. The walls were covered with old calendars, clippings, ads, odd posters, announcements, clumps of paper, all held in place by thumbtacks. The room gave an impression of a life that had passed long ago and been forgotten, a life no one had had time to tidy away. Samuel Stein liked the room. It gave him a feeling of being hidden and safe along with his work. And he liked being a cog in the machinery of the great, distinguished newspaper, liked feeling its respect.

  The room was very cold. He stood up, and the chill engulfed him. The whole time he could hear the distant thudding of the printing presses and, over them, the sound of traffic on the street. He was freezing. A work blouse and a sweater hung beside the door. He put on the sweater and stuck his hands into the pockets. In the right pocket, Sam Stein found a piece of paper, a list. He read it standing at the window. “Used,” it said in very small letters. “Ski skate etc. fun of government and modern art went to ball 1 masked 2 cocktail p. gangster astronaut 3x Love + vamp out hamburger India ink lighter background laundry call A. G.”

  It was a cartoonist who had worked here, and the sweater was his. Stein was curious and opened a drawer. It contained a mix of pencil stumps, tape, empty ink bottles, paper clips, all the usual junk. But maybe worse than usual. All of it had been stirred together as if in a rage. He opened the next drawer. It was empty, completely empty. He let the other drawers be and put on some water for tea—there was a hot plate on the floor under the window. It could have been Allington who’d had this room. Maybe he never worked at home, maybe he sat right here for twenty years and drew his Blubby. He had stopped abruptly, in the middle of a story. And you’re supposed to give six months’ notice. The outline had apparently got lost at the fifty-third strip. Normal length was usually eighty. Stein had asked why Allington couldn’t reconstruct the story. No, he wasn’t able to. Didn’t he want to? Had he forgotten?

  “I don’t know,” Fried said. “It was a different department that took care of that. Don’t worry about it. Go on from where he stopped and do something of your own, but preferably so no one will see the break. You can leave off the signature.”

  The tea water was boiling. Stein removed the saucepan and pulled out the plug. He took down the cup and the sugar he’d found on a shelf. There was no spoon. He had his own tea bags.

  Six days later Fried came in and said that now they’d decided. Stein had the job, no contest, and there’d be a contract in a few days. For seven years. The board had been very pleased, but wanted to reemphasize the need for greater suspense. Fried looked tired as he stood there with a smile on his soft, vague features. He stepped forward and shook hands with Stein and touched his shoulder gently in a gesture of encouragement and protectiveness.

  “That’s great,” Stein said. “That’s really great. Can you use the stuff I’ve done, or should I start over from the beginning?”

  “No, God no. We don’t have time for that. We’ll throw in the material we’ve got and you can push up the speed until we’ve got two months in the bank.”

  “Tell me something,” Stein said. “Did he work in this room?”

  “Allington?”

  “Yes. Allington.”

  “Yes, this was his room. It’s kind of fitting that you assume his mantle in the very same workroom, don’t you think?”

  “There’s a lot of his things here. I mean, I didn’t poke around that much. But is he going to come and get them?”

  “I’ll see to it that it’s all moved out,” Fried said. “It’s very crowded in here. I’ll ask someone to get it all out of the way.”

  “Is he dead?” Stein said.

  “No, no, not at all.”

  “So he got sick.”

  “My dear fellow, don’t worry yourself,” Fried replied. “He’s perfectly all right. And now I will simply wish you good luck with the job.”

  In the beginning, Stein worked without touching anything in the room. His first strip was published, without a signature, and no one noticed the difference. Anyway, Allington hadn’t signed his strips for the last three years of his contract, and that helped. Stein increased his pace to several strips a day. He was learning more and more. He learned to do half a dozen strips in pencil and then ink them all at the same time, beginning with pure black surfaces in the morning. Once he was warmed up, he’d start on details and along towards afternoon when he was completely sure of his hand, he’d draw the long lines and the elegant small bits that needed to be done quickly and deftly. Then he’d go on to the next batch.

  He came steadily closer to the prescribed lead time. They had congratulated him when his first strip was printed without any public reaction. He was depressed that day, but it passed, and he went on working steadily, pleased at doing a good job that was very well paid. He felt secure. He no longer had to dash around with illustrations and confer with irresolute, pretentious authors—three or four trips for every blessed dust jacket. Take orders, meet authors, turn in his work, wait, go in to collect his fee, and occasionally go up to the printer’s once or twice to make sure the color separations were correct.

  Now everything went like clockwork. He didn’t even have to deliver his work; he just left the day’s drawings on his desk and someone picked them up that evening. He picked up his salary in the cashier’s office every other week. Fried no longer paid him visits. He just saw him now and then on the stairs.

  “You never come to look anymore,” Stein said.

  “No longer necessary, my boy,” said Fried jokingly. “You’re doing splendidly. But God help you if you get stuck or take a wrong turn. I’ll be there like a shot!”

  “God forbid!” Stein said and laughed. He had bought himself an electric heater and the newspaper had paid for it. They were taking care of him now, and with good reason. Blubby ran in thirty or forty countries.

  Occasionally Stein would go down around the corner and have a drink. He liked the dark, messy bar. It was full of men in the same line of work who talked about their jobs, had a drink, and went back to the paper. He met the other cartoonists. They were friendly and treated him like a greenhorn, a boy who wasn’t really into the game yet but seemed quite promising. Their attitude was more affectionate than condescending. They didn’t buy each other rounds; just hung over the bar for a while with a glass in one hand, then went back.

  There was one of them he admired, an extremely talented artist named Carter. Carter didn’t do pencil sketches, he drew directly with India ink. Terrifying, naturalistic, historical scenes. He was a heavy, very ugly man with reddish hair who moved slowly. He never smiled but seemed amused by what went on around him.

  “Tell me something,” he said. “Are you one of those people who are prevented from doing Great Art because they draw comic strips?”

  “No,” Stein said. “Not at all.”

  “Good for you,” Carter said. “They’re insufferable. They’re neither fish nor fowl and they can’t stop talking about it.”

  “Did you know Allington?” Stein asked.

  “Not well.”

  “Was he one of them? I mean, one of the insufferable ones?”

  “No.”

  “But why did he quit?”

  “He got tired,” Carter said and emptied his drink and went back to do some work.

  The newspaper had forgotten to tidy up Allington’s room, which was just as well. Stein liked sitting encapsulated in a century of collected and forgotten props. They made up a kind of warm quilting, a faded tapestry that surrounded him softly on all sides. Eventually he started opening drawers, one a day, the way you open windows on an advent calendar. He found the drawers with the most recent fan mail, bound
in packets with rubber bands: “Answered,” “Can Wait,” “Important,” “Send drawing of B.” Another empty drawer. A drawer of glossy prints of Blubby on heavy stock, sophisticated vignettes for adults and funny pictures for children. Papers, papers, clippings, bills, socks, photos of children, receipts, cigarettes, corks, string—the whole accumulation of dead life that heaps up around people who’ve lost the strength to be attentive. Nothing about the strip. Stein couldn’t find any notes about Allington’s work other than that list in the right-hand pocket of the sweater.

  As Stein worked on Blubby, Allington grew more and more real to him. Allington not coming up with ideas and staring down at the street through the gray windowpanes, Allington brewing tea and rooting around in his drawers, answering the phone or completely forgotten between deadlines, Allington famous and worn out. Did he feel lonely, or was he wary of people? Did he work better in the mornings or later when the paper was quiet? What did he do when he got stuck, or did he work at a steady pace for twenty years? Now I need to be careful, Sam Stein thought. I mustn’t romanticize him. If Allington had stood at a machine for twenty years, no one would have made a big deal of it. He was popular, and well paid. So am I.

  One weekend, Carter asked Stein if he’d like to come out to his place in the country. It was a great mark of favor; Carter disliked almost everyone and wanted to be left in peace. It was early spring, and the countryside was completely quiet. Carter took him around and showed him his pigs and chickens. He showed him his snakes, lifted a stone in the lawn very carefully and said, “There they are. They’re still a little sleepy, but they’ll liven up.”

  Stein was fascinated. “What do you feed them?” he said.

  “Nothing. They feed themselves. There are lots of frogs and toads and other things they like.”

  Stein had heard that Carter never answered letters, that he didn’t even open them. He wasn’t the least bit curious about their contents, and his conscience didn’t bother him.

  “You can’t do that,” Stein said. “You’re famous, they admire you. Those letters are from children, and they need to be answered.”

  “Why?” said Carter.

  They were sitting in front of the house with drinks. It was very warm and still.

  “They have faith,” Stein said. “When I was little I wrote to the president of France and asked him to close down the Foreign Legion.”

  “And did you get an answer?”

  “Certainly did. My mother wrote a reply from the president and said now they were going to shut the whole thing down. With French stamps and everything.”

  “You’re too young,” Carter said. “It’s better for them to get used to it right from the start, you know, used to the fact that things don’t turn out the way you imagined and that it doesn’t matter that much.” He went off to feed the pigs and was gone for quite a while. When he came back, Stein started talking about Allington and how he’d worked steadily for twenty years and then just walked away without even leaving an outline.

  “He got tired,” Carter said.

  “Did he ever talk to you about it?”

  “No, he said almost nothing. One day he was gone. Left a note on his desk. In fact it was a half-finished strip, and on it he’d written ‘I’m tired.’ He never even came back for his money.”

  “But didn’t they try to find him?”

  “Good lord,” Carter said. “Just listen to you. Didn’t they try to find him? Holy Moses. The entire police department was out searching. Everyone was hysterical. Blubby about to breathe his last . . . The franchise holders got wind of it and were running in and out of the offices like madmen.”

  “Franchise holders?”

  “You don’t know a thing, do you?” said Carter, lighting his pipe. “The people who live on Blubby. Have you never seen a charming little Blubby in plastic or marzipan or candle wax?” He stood up and started walking slowly back and forth on the grass, chanting, “Blubby curtains, Blubby jelly, Blubby clocks and Blubby socks, Blubby shirts and Blubby shorts . . . Shall I go on?”

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” Stein said.

  “I could go on for an hour. Allington made sketches for all of it. He was very careful with his comic strip. He was very particular; everything had to be just so. You know, he supervised all of it down to the tiniest detail. Textiles, metals, paper products, rubber, wood, all of it . . . And then there were the Blubby films and Blubby Week and children’s theater and journalists and dissertations about Blubby and all the charities and something called the Blubby Marmalade Campaign . . . Holy Moses. Anyway, he couldn’t ever say no. And then he got tired.”

  Stein said nothing, but he looked frightened.

  “Don’t worry,” Carter went on. “None of it’s your headache. All you have to do is draw and the paper will take care of all the rest of it.”

  “But how do you know all that?” Stein said. “He didn’t talk to people.”

  “I’ve got eyes in my head,” Carter said. “And I draw my own strip. But, you see, I can say no. And it’s no skin off my nose if they mess around with my work. Do you get a lot of letters?”

  “Yes,” Stein said. “But they’re all to him. Fried told me to give them to the department. They’ve got a stamp with Allington’s signature and they’ve got people who sit there and answer them. And if I’m going to write letters,” Stein went on angrily, “I’ll sign my own name to them, not someone else’s.”

  “You’re awfully careful with your name, aren’t you?” said Carter with a grin.

  They said no more about Allington. Stein had meant to ask if he’d ever been found, but he felt suddenly dejected and said nothing.

  Later they saw each other in the bar from time to time, in passing.

  Sam Stein came to his third outline. He would work them up in pencil sketches with a little dialogue and give them to Fried. Five or six days later, they’d come back with corrections and he’d find them on his desk. “Better, but you need to pick up the pace.” “Cut the references to toilet paper and cemeteries.” “Numbers sixty-five to seventy too subtle.” “No jokes about the government and the manufacturers.” And so on.

  People at the paper started to recognize him; he began to belong. It was mostly Johnson he talked to in the bar. Johnson was in advertising, and sometimes when he had the time he’d answer Allington’s fan mail.

  “Oh, Carter,” said Johnson. “I know. All he cares about are his pigs and those snakes—and money. He’s so fabulously talented, the drawings run out of him like diarrhea, but he has absolutely no ambition. And why should he? Did you know he also grows vegetables and some cousin of his sells them at a farmers’ market?”

  “He never answers fan mail,” Stein said. “He doesn’t give a damn. You know what? These cartoonists—either they’re all touchy and conscience-stricken or else they don’t give a damn about anything. Am I right?”

  “Maybe you’re right and maybe you’re wrong. I don’t know if they’re all nuts to begin with or if they get that way from drawing comic strips. Shall we have another?” It was evening and they were lingering in the bar. It was really too late to go back and get anything done.

  “This thing with Allington,” Stein said. “I can’t get free of him. He’s everywhere. What actually happened?”

  “He went nuts,” Johnson said.

  “You mean, really?”

  “Well, sort of, more or less.”

  Sam Stein leaned over the bar and looked into the mirror behind the bottles. I look tired, he thought. But in a few weeks, I can take it easier. I could have Blubby go to a bar. It’s been a long time since he did that. He’d gone through four years of Allington’s old strips. No one remembered further back than that.

  He said, “Is there anyone who knows where he is? I want to talk to him.”

  “Why? You’re doing fine.”

  “That’s not it. I want to know why he couldn’t go on.”

  “But you know that,” said Johnson amiably. “You’ve already figured
it out. It’s like drummers in jazz bands. After a certain number of years, it’s just over. What do you say? Shall we have another?”

  “No,” Stein said. “I don’t think so. I thought I’d do some laundry this evening.”

  The next morning, Stein went into the storage room behind Allington’s office and started pulling down cartons from the shelves, bundles of letters, bags, and boxes. He lined them up on the floor in order to go through all of it. There was fan mail in four boxes and a suitcase. On three of them was the word “Done.” One said “Sent things,” and on the suitcase was written “Pathetic Cases.” On yet another little box Allington had written “Good Letters” and on another, “Anonymous.” Product samples, Blubby in every possible material and packaging, all of them with wide blue eyes with big black pupils. Outlines crossed out with a felt-tip pen, all except one, something about the Wild West. A notation: “Not used.”

  Stein smoothed out Allington’s manuscript and put it on his desk. Maybe he could use it. The next carton was “unsorted” and it broke when he pulled it out and a sea of paper flowed out across the floor. Poor man, Stein thought. How he must have hated paper. Messages, queries, bills, exhortations, pleas, accusations, declarations of love . . . There was an address book with neatly noted names and in parentheses the wife’s name or the husband’s, names of the children, of the dog or the cat . . . Maybe the courtesy of remembering made letters a little shorter for him—it got him off the hook more easily.

  Suddenly Stein didn’t want to know more. All he wanted was to try and find Allington. He needed to understand. He had a seven-year contract and he needed to be calmed or alarmed, one or the other, but he had to know.

  The next day Stein tried to find Allington’s address, but no one could help him.

  “My dear boy,” Fried said, “you’re just wasting your time. Allington has no address. His apartment was essentially untouched and he never came back.”

  “But the police,” Stein said. “They searched for him. They did a lousy job. Here’s his address book. A thousand names or more. Have they seen it?”