He grunted a kind of reluctant acceptance. “Tomorrow, then. We’ll talk about it then.”
He hung up. I made my phone checks yet again, to no avail. Outside, the rain fell harder, bringing my spirits down with it.
In this mood of desolate pessimism, having exhausted for the moment my last best hopes by telephone, I lay back on the bed and started reading Trish Aandahl’s book on Darryl and Richard Grayson.
26
The earliest Grayson alphabets were etched in the cool, hard sand of Hilton Head Island in the fall of 1937. It was a wild beach then: there were no luxury hotels or golf courses, and the beach was fringed by strips of jungle. On Sunday mornings Grayson would crank up his ‘29 International pickup and clatter out on the oyster-shell road from Beaufort. Never again have I known such a sense of freedom and raw potential , he wrote, years later, to a friend in Atlanta. Never have I had such a clear vision of the road ahead . He was seventeen and on fire with life. He walked the beach alone, glorying in the solitude and in the wonder of his emerging wisdom. His cutting tool was a mason’s trowel. He covered the beach with alphabet, running with the sunrise and racing the tide. He knew all the classic typefaces: he could freehand a Roman face that was startling, and when the tide came up and washed it all away, it left him with a feeling of accomplishment, never loss. It was all temporary, but so necessary—the sweet bewilderment, the sudden clarity, the furious bursts of energy that sometimes produced nothing more than a sense that in his failure he had taken another vital step. It would come, oh, it would come! He could do things at seventeen that he could not have dreamt at sixteen. His youth was his greatest ally, as fine an asset as experience would be when he was forty. A photograph exists—two photographs, reproduced back-to-back in Trish’s book. The young Grayson stands on the beach, his face in shadow, the sand behind him etched with letters. The same scene on the verso, a young woman standing where Grayson had been. The capsule identifies her as Cecile Thomas, the day, September 15, 1931. He was my first love, the dearest, most desperate, most painful. I was eighteen, a year older than he was, but he was in all ways my teacher . On that moonlit night, warm for early autumn, they had become lovers on the sand, obliterating the writing he had done by firelight. Never mind , he said, I’ll make you another one , and he did, running blind in the dark with the tide going out, and when they came back in the morning, the incoming tide had not yet reached it.
Oh, it’s perfect , she had said: when the tide finally did come up and wash it away, I cried, and he laughed and said it was nothing . Someday, Grayson told her, he would create something that couldn’t be washed away, so why cry now for trifles such as this? God, I loved him…still do in a way. I couldn’t believe how it affected me when I read of his death, and I hadn’t seen him in more than twenty-five years . The world was a poorer place when he died. He cared nothing for money or roles or the things that drove others. He learned his art the only way an artist ever learns, by probing the secrets of his own vast heart. He always took the road less traveled, always: he rose up on the page and strode across it, an unspent force even in death. Here he comes now, walking up Hilton Head alone. He carves up the sand with his trowel, running an alphabet of his own creation, knocked off on the spot. The tide licks away the A even as he touches off the small z , and he stands ankle- deep in the surf, breathing the pure Carolina air and tasting his coming victories. Only the spirit of Trish Aandahl is there to keep him company, this woman yet unborn, a kindred essence wafting in the wind. Somewhere in the cosmos they connect, inspiring her to better prose, perhaps, than she can ever do. And slowly as she writes of Grayson, a dim picture emerges of herself. She’s there beside him, coaxing him along the sandy shore. She tells me things about Grayson that would leave a photographer baffled. The camera would miss it all. A magnificent picture is never worth a thousand perfect words. Ansel Adams can be a great artist, but he can never be Shakespeare. His tools are too literal.
27
I finally reached Leith Kenney at midnight. The conversation was short but potent.
“Mr. Kenney?”
“Yes.”
“I’m calling from Seattle.” I didn’t tell him who I was. I was more interested at this stage in finding out who he was. I played my trump card right out of the gate. “I’m calling about Grayson’s Raven . The 1969 edition.”
I heard him catch his breath, as Lewis and Clark might’ve done at their first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean. I knew one thing right away: I had dealt myself a strong hand, even if I couldn’t see all the cards.
I let his pause become my own. Then I said, “Are you interested in talking about it?”
“Oh, yes.” His voice quivered at the prospect. “Yes, sir,” he said, underlining the sir part.
His eagerness was so palpable that I knew I could run the show. “Tell me about Rodney Scofield.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Look, I’m just a guy who’s stumbled into something. I was tipped to you people by somebody who might know a lot more than I do. But right now I don’t know you boys from far left field.”
“Mr. Scofield is a businessman…”
“And?”
“He collects books.”
“Grayson books.”
“Yes.”
“And it’s fair to say that Mr. Scofield is a pretty substantial man.”
“You can check him out. You’ll find him in most of the financial reports that are available in the library.”
“And who are you?”
“Well,” he said as if it should be obvious, “I work for Mr. Scofield.”
