'I would have been murdered too,' said Sonia through her tears.
'We must be grateful for small mercies,' said Frensic.
Next morning Sonia Futtle resumed her duties in the office. A fresh batch of animal stories had come in during her absence and while Frensic congratulated himself on his tactics and sat at his desk silently praying that there would be no further repercussions Sonia busied herself with Bernie the Beaver. It needed a bit of rewriting but the story had promise.
Chapter 17
In a cabin in the Smokey Mountains Piper held the same opinion about Pause. He sat out on the stoop and looked down at the lake where Baby was swimming and had to admit that his first impression of the novel had been wrong. He had been misled by the passages of explicit sex. But now that he had copied it out word for word he could see that the essential structure of the story was sound. In fact there were large sections of the book which dealt meaningfully with matters of great significance. Subtract the age difference between Gwendolen and Anthony, the narrator, and eradicate the pornography and Pause O Men for the Virgin had the makings of great literature. It examined in considerable depth the meaning of life, the writer's role in contemporary society, the anonymity of the individual in the urban collective and the need to return to the values of earlier, more civilized times. It was particularly good on the miseries of adolescence and the satisfaction to be found in the craftsmanship of furniture-making. 'Gwendolen ran her fingers along the gnarled and knotted oak with a sensual touch that belied her years. 'The hardiness of time has tamed the wildness of the wood,' she said. 'You will carve against the grain and give form to what has been formless and insensate.'' Piper nodded approvingly. Passages like that had genuine merit and better still they served as an inspiration to him. He too would cut against the grain of this novel and give form to it, so that in the revised version the grossness of the bestseller would be eliminated, all the sexual addenda which defiled the very essence of the book would be removed and it would stand as a monument to his literary gifts. Posthumously perhaps, but at least his reputation would be retrieved. In years to come critics would compare the two versions and deduce from his deletions that in its earlier uncommercial form the original intentions of the author had been of the highest literary quality and that the novel had subsequently been altered to meet the demands of Frensic and Hutchmeyer and their perverse view of public taste. The blame for the bestseller would lie with them and he would be exonerated. More, he would be acclaimed. He closed the ledger and stood up as Baby came out of the water and walked up the beach to the cabin.
'Finished?' she asked. Piper nodded.
'I shall start the second version tomorrow,' he said.
'While you're doing that I'll take the first down into Ashville and get it copied. The sooner Frensic gets it the sooner we're going to light a fire under him.'
'I wish you wouldn't use that expression,' said Piper, 'lighting fires. And anyway where are you going to mail it from? They could trace us from the postmark.'
'We shan't be here from the day after tomorrow. We rented the cabin for a week. I'll drive down to Charlotte and catch a flight to New York and mail it there. I'll be back tomorrow night and we move on the day after.'
'I wish we didn't have to move all the time,' said Piper, 'I like it here. There's been nobody to bother us and I've had time to write. Why can't we just stay on?'
'Because this isn't the Deep South,' said Baby, 'and when I said Deep I meant it. There are places down Alabama, Mississippi, that just nobody has ever heard of and I want to see them.'
'And from what I've read about Mississippi they aren't partial to strangers,' said Piper, 'they are going to ask questions.'
'You've read too many Faulkners,' said Baby, 'and where we're going a quarter of a million dollars buys a lot of answers.'
