His friend had told him he should read Jeb and Dash.
"It's about Washington when you lived there" he said.
John had been a widow for 5 years, after his partner of 49 years had died suddenly. He was helping to care for his mother who still read at the age of 104. After a year he got a copy from the library, it did not have a dust jacket so he did not see their photo in the cover.
As he read, he remembered. When Dash when on a Mule Boat trip to North Africa, he remembered his friend Perks had done the same thing. Then other things started ringing a bell. Then he began seeing himself in the story. He flipped to the photo section in the middle of the book and there sat his long dead friend Carter. There behind him, the bookshelves he had help build and paint. He phoned up the friend who had suggested the book at midnight: "I'm Little Nicky!" he cried.
And so the person behind the only character that dies in the book, was the only one left to contact Ina Russell thru her publisher. This man who for three years had shared a house with Jeb and Dash was not only living, he was flourishing. Ina photocopied all three years of her uncles diaries at that house and sent it to him. Like an old friend come back from the dead, the little man told his story again. The parties, the times he felt left out if he were not invited along, the sister who came to stay with her baby and the tub full of freshly washed diapers. John, at his desk, quietly annotating with his own notes, twenty pages of them.
When I began to research Jeb and Dash I picked up on references to him. A letter Dash wrote in 1938 about their epic road trip to South Dakota even spelled out who he was. Then in 2005 I was headed to Philadelphia for a reading of a play that had been created from the story. On the train from Washington my friend Brian (Mr. Movie) told me "He is supposed to be there tonight!" My god, this was too good to be true. I was going to meet someone who not only had known them, but been part of the story. I knew the moment I saw him enter the room. Dressed in a blue jacket and tie, identical to the actor on the stage playing Little Nicky, how weird was that.
I went up to him and searching for a way to break the ice I asked had he been the one who had gone to Hermosa, South Dakota in 1938 with two friends. Indeed he was, he could hardly remember now, except for the time they went skinny dipping and locus got on their clothers and ate small holes in them. I told him I had a letter at home detailing the trip, I would send him a copy. He reached into his jacket pocket, and drew out an envelope. Pictures, old black and white pictures of long dead friends, on the beach, in suit and tie.
John left Washington in 1940 to go home to Charleston, South Carolina to write a novel. Staying in a beach house with is Aunt, the 28 year old received a letter from a female acquaintance who told him of someone he had to meet. So, John dutifully wrote a letter to Edwin, and invited him to dinner. Edwin arrived on a borrowed motorcycle wearing white shorts. John's Aunt recognized him immediately, they often spoke to one another on the ferry. For John it was love at first sight, and for Edwin it was too.
But this was 1940, and like Ennis and Jack, the man writing a novel did not have the words to express his feelings, that he suspected were mutual. All summer they got along "like a house on fire", but could not connect beyond that. John finally told him: "I love someone but they don't know it". Edwin replied "Well you should tell her". Both standing at the brink, hand in hand, afraid to jump.
John proposed they go on a hiking trip to the Smokies. The power of the mountains, where ever they lay, would have to save them. There on Clingmans Dome, in the moon light, in the fall of 1940, "suspended above normal affairs" John and Edwin came together. Their ride would last for nearly five decades. Ah, the power of the mountains.
They knew the war was comming, and neither of them felt they would ever be able to kill anyone. It was decided that the navy was the safest place to be in time of war, and they went west, to New Mexico to join, because they didn't want to be inducted in the east and end up sitting in a boring office someplace. There were separations of many months at a time, coded messages that passed the eyes of their superiors. "I owe Joe a dollar, will you see he gets it?" meant John had been to Iwo Jima. When John developed a kidney problem in the south pacific, they sent him home.
In San Francisco they had briefly shared an apartment, and made a pact if they ever arrived there separately they would go to their old land lady for news of the other. This poor woman had lost two sons in the war, and welcomed John with open arms. Edwin was indeed there, gone out to the grocery store. She let him in the apartment and he waited. "I had to carry the news paper in front of me for a week" he told me.
After the war they returned to Charleston and opened the city's only bookstore, next to the College of Charleston. They never made much money, but they didn't smoke, only drank at home, and drove their one car until it had over 200,000 miles on it. Living frugally they we able to travel the world, all over Europe, Turkey, Iran, New Zealand, North and South America. Their bookstore saw the likes of Carson McCullars, Wanda Landowska, Anna Anderson Manahan (the woman who claimed to be Czarina Anastasia).
This past weekend, armed with John's handicapped parking permit, I scrambled to keep up with the 94 year old as he showed me the brick walkways his partner had laid down in the 1950's, their apartment in the old stables, the pedestrian walkways that were once College Place and Green Street. Showed me the quad in front of the main building at the College where his family had taken refuge from the earthquake in 1886. Showed me the house where his rich cousins lived, the ones who had taken his mother to see Sarah Bernhardt. He took me to see Quincerana, which he had hoped to get to see. We sat right thru the pounding Latin rap at the closing credits, wiping out eyes for this family that had been brought back together, both on the screen and in the audience.
"I'll stay here as long as I can" he told me. "As long as I got someone to take me places, I'll stay right here" Climbing steps to his front door, climbing steps to his living room, climbing to the third floor where his office is, he sits there now in front of a manual typewriter, still writing that novel.
Topic: Shakesthegrounds Rumblings (Read 2578823 times)