How much of it was imaginary? They felt, reading each other’s letters, known; they believed that being known made them over into their best selves. They confessed.
I am a childish person. I was always jealous of Roy. I used to give away my heart too easily.
I cannot wait to see you. Everyone else bores me. I want to wrap you in cotton to keep you safe.
It was for love of Cracker that he slept with Joan (he told himself): he wanted to make sure he wasn’t making the love up. You had to test things: love, bravery, loyalty, you had to make sure your versions of these things were up to the task. Every time he slept around—and he did, all through their marriage—he thought of it as a test: if after this I see that I am not in love with my wife, I’ll leave her and end her misery. But he was always in love with his wife. She didn’t seem to think this news was as good as he did, but she was entangled, too.
How I Carry On
Broken-ankled Roy Truitt had gone, at last, to New York to look for Minna Sprague. He felt like a delinquent, but people saw his crutches and smiled at him, offered him bottles of Coke and spare sandwiches: they’d been told not to waste food for the sake of soldiers, and here one was, or so they believed. In the listings of The New Yorker he saw Minna Sprague’s name and went to see her sing at a basement club in the West Village. He had never been to a jazz club, he had only ever heard music by himself, in listening booths or his bedroom at home when nobody else was there, had no idea that it was strange, this entirely mixed crowd, or that because Minna Sprague refused to perform in front of segregated audiences, this was the only place in Manhattan she played. She wore a white dress with cutouts under the arms that showed her lovely triceps, the better to swing her drumsticks, though mostly she sang. By then Roy had read the archive of the Salford Bugler, had combed the census, and had come to the conclusion that they were in no way related. Still, he stood in the smoke and listened, and her voice—her ticking, overenunciated consonants, her round vowels full of longing, that hint of fury and foreignness—that belonged to him still. He was startled to discover that she smiled as she sang.
He sat through both sets, getting up the nerve. Then he approached her as she sat at a table with her bass player, a tall dark-skinned man whose glowering face looked as though it had been folded lengthwise and left with a crease. “Here, sit,” he said to Roy, gesturing at his crutches. Roy shook his head. “I’m Roy Truitt,” he said to Minna, and he handed her the packet of letters she’d written to her father, tied with its filthy blue ribbon. He’d brought them because they were hers, and because they were evidence. He’d brought them to make his mother furious. Minna held them by the edges. Then she said, seriously, “Come back to my place.” It was one in the morning. The bass player gave them a ride there in his dark Hudson. Roy sat in the back with his crutches across his lap, and looked through the window at the dark city, dark because of the war.
She lived then in a vast apartment in a vast building in Hamilton Heights. She offered him a hand up the marble steps to the foyer. He turned it down, then regretted it. The walls of her sitting room were a dark green, a shocking color, thought Roy. A dress, an enormous signet ring, a feathered hat: such things were green. Not apartments. One day he’d have a living room this color. She was rich. He saw that now, then reminded himself that she wasn’t actually a relative. Some bit of politeness and impertinence kicked in, and he hobbled over to help her with her coat.
“Thank you,” she said, with a note of pity. He leaned in to catch her perfume but she only smelled like other people’s cigarettes. Her voice was different than when she sang, dispassionate, European. “I have something for you.”
The apartment was jammed with objects, paintings on the walls, books piled on the floor. Perhaps they were related. It was a familial accumulation. What she had for him were his mother’s letters to her, kept in a cigar box, King Edward, five cents. “If you want.”
A box of disappointment. He was done with his mother. Then he said it aloud. “I’m done with my mother.”
“And your father?”
“Gone.” Then, “He said he was your brother. Well, half.”
She looked amused. Her expression was direct, both fond and damning. “You don’t think so? The lawyers did. Shall I call you a cab? Where are you staying, honey?”
To his right there was a glass case, as though in a museum, with five bird nests inside. He said, “I’ve run away from home.”
“No kidding? How old are you?”
“Eighteen.”
“That’s not running away from home,” she said. “That is reaching your majority. What next? You were in the service, or no?”
He raised his crutches. “I’ve been turned down.”
“College, then.”
“Not sure how,” he said.
“What in?”
“What in what?”
“What would you study?”
He wanted to impress her; he thought of the Latin and Greek in her letters to her father. “Classics,” he said.
“Well, Roy Truitt!” she said to him. Minna Sprague, too, felt the odd hum of relation, despite his porridgey freckledness. She could sense in him a little interesting temper. “Perhaps I can help you.”
“You’d pay for it?” He thought of how many hours he’d devoted to her, in listening booths, alone in the apartment. Surely she owed him something—
But Minna Sprague was acquainted with men, and boys, and even some women who thought she owed them something. “Ah, no,” she said, laughing. “But I can help you get in, and I can help you get a job, and then your education will pay for itself. Have you heard of Englert College?”
“Wow,” he said. “Yes.” It was in western Massachusetts, the farthest western edge, a little liberal arts college that was coeducational and integrated, neither of which Roy had ever given much thought to but both of which seemed, in Minna Sprague’s apartment, essential. “I do. You know the president?”
“I know the locksmith,” she said.
He’d thought this was a joke—she knew the locksmith, who would pick the enormous academic lock on the front of Englert College—but she meant the actual locksmith, a man named George originally from Cypress who’d gotten his own degree at Englert.
“For Minna, anything,” George said, and hired him immediately.
George imparted to Roy the romance of the lock. Locks were puzzles to which the solution was a key. Sometimes the key was the puzzle and the lock it fit into was the solution. The university had hundreds of locks, thousands: on dorm rooms and classrooms, faculty offices and buildings and laboratories, filing cabinets and gun storage. Locks were the school’s lingua franca. Roy made keys till his ankle healed, and then the college was open to him. Once, working on an anonymous call, Roy had found a thin pale man handcuffed to a showerhead in a woman’s locker room, wearing nothing but a black rubber swim cap and an overburdened ladies’ girdle. Why did they even make girdles so small? What could you be girding? “You couldn’t get rubber during the war,” the man said apologetically to Roy, and then, with a dazzling smile, “I am Professor Hackert, of Calculus.”
“You could have remained nameless,” Roy had said, but Professor Hackert, like most people, could not quite sort out humiliation from pride.
Roy got his bachelor’s, and then his master’s, and then his first visiting job, at Englert. All those years ago, he’d been right. To change his life, all he needed was to talk to Minna Sprague.