Bookman's wake

“Doing what, besides taking questions about Grayson?”

“That’s my full-time job.”

I thought my way through a stretch of silence. “Would it be fair to say that Scofield would pay a small fortune if a Grayson Raven were to fall into his hands?”

The silence was eloquent. Mr. Scofield would pay more than that. Mr. Scofield was that most dangerous of book animals, the man with the unquenchable passion and the inexhaustible bank account.

“I’ll get back to you,” I said.

I hung up before he could protest. I wouldn’t worry anymore about Leith Kenney or Rodney Scofield. I had their number, I knew where they were, and they’d be there when I wanted them.

Trish was another matter. I let her phone ring ten times before giving her up. I tried her desk at the Times , but she wasn’t there either.

Jonelle Jeffords continued keeping the world at bay with her husband’s answering machine.

At half past midnight, I shut down for the night.

I would sleep six hours. If supercop didn’t come in the night, I’d be well out of here in the morning.

I had a plan now, a destination that I hoped would take care of the lodging problem. It was a gamble, gutsy as hell. For that reason alone I thought it was probably the safest hotel in town.

In the morning I would become Mr. Malcolm Roberts of Birmingham. I was going back to the Hilton.

I let Trish put me to sleep with her lovely prose.

In the first hour of the new day, I walked in Grayson’s shoes.

28

The Grayson odyssey twisted its way through Georgia half a century ago. The forces that shaped them were already centuries old when they were born. Their grandfather was still alive and whoring when they were boys in grade school, the gnarled old buzzard a whorehouse regular well into his eighties. The old man never stopped righting the Civil War. The big regret of his life was not being born in time to be killed at Fredericksburg, where his father had died in 1862.

A plantation mentality ran the house of Grayson. The father ruled and allowed no dissent. His politics were boll- weevil Democrat and his neck was the color of the clay hills that stretched around Atlanta. Women were placed on pedestals and worshiped, but they quickly lost their sex appeal if they wanted anything more out of life than that. It was Darryl senior’s profound misfortune to marry Claudette Reller, a free spirit who could never quite see the charm of life in a cage. She abandoned her family on a sunny day in 1932, walking off in the middle of her garden-club luncheon without notice or fanfare. Her sons, ages eight and twelve, never saw her again. She was said to have died three years later in Paris. The old man announced it at supper one night and forbade her name to be uttered again under his roof.

The young, fair-haired son obeyed his father well. A psychologist would say, years later, that he never forgave his mother and that every experience with sex was a slap at her memory.

The older son remembered her less harshly. He knew why she’d done what she’d done, and he wished she would write him from wherever she’d gone so that he might answer her and tell her he understood. He and his father were locked in their own battle of wills, and when he thought of his mother, there was sympathy in his heart.

In the summer of his seventeenth year, young Grayson escaped to the Carolina coast. There he lived on a sea island, thinking about life and supporting himself by working in a Beaufort garage. But in the fall he was back in Georgia, doing battle with his father in the determined effort to become his own man. Women became an ever- larger part of his life. Cecile Thomas had been lovely but temporary: now there was Laura Warner, older and more experienced, twice married, widowed and divorced, cerebral, moneyed, and addicted to genius. She saw herself as Mrs. von Meek to Grayson’s Tchaikovsky, one of their literary friends suggested, but Grayson was having none of that. They parted amicably after a short but intense friendship. She moved to Birmingham and, in 1939, sailed from Miami to London, where her trail petered out.

But Grayson’s life was rich with women like that. A biographer trying to dig up his footprints forty years later could still find some of them eager to talk and have their memories mined. Others had been swallowed by time. A line had to be drawn on the hunt for old girlfriends and the book brought back to its dual focus. So Trish Aandahl let Laura Warner slip away into wartime London while she worked her narrative around and brought Richard again into the picture.

There are people in Atlanta today who remember Darryl and Richard Grayson and believe that a strong streak of real hatred existed between them. But there are others who tell a different story. They remember the hazing Richard took from a pack of bullies when he first started high school. The leader of the gang was one Jock Wheeler, a mean little bastard as remembered by the Marietta shipping clerk who had known them all. Today Jock Wheeler is an elderly mechanic in an Atlanta garage. He’s a quiet man who lives alone and bothers no one. Ask Jock Wheeler about the Grayson boys, said the shipping clerk to Trish Aandahl. Ask him about that night in the midthirties, when he was ambushed on a dark country road by two men he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, identify and beaten so badly he almost died. Wheeler had nothing to say, but the rumor mill persisted that one of the assailants was little more than a boy, twelve or fourteen years old. The sheriff floated the Grayson boys as the leading candidates, but Wheelers said no,‘t’wasn’t them. The rumor mill churned. The more thoughtful of their contemporaries pointed to it as a strange quirk of human nature. Probably on some level the Graysons truly did hate each other, but blood is