A Drop of the Hard Stuff

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet bird sang. That was the whole line, but what came before or after it, and who was it who’d written it?

I noticed that he’d put his glasses back on. For a moment I thought he was going to return Jack’s account, but instead he folded the papers and put them in his pocket, then got a fresh cigarette going.

Bare ruined choirs. Was it bird or birds? It made sense either way. And was sweet right?

“You have to wonder,” he said, “how much of it is true.”

“Hard to say.”

“Hard? Try impossible. The writing’s good, though. I’d have to say that. The choice of words, I mean. The phrasing. The narrative flow. I’m not talking about the penmanship.”

“I didn’t think you were.”

“Because outside of the nuns, who gives a rat’s ass about penmanship? It has a flow to it. It’s easy to follow. But you have to ask yourself, where does memory leave off and imagination take over?”

“That’s always hard to know.”

Birds, I decided. It had to be. If a single swallow didn’t make a summer, then it certainly took more than one bird for a choir.

“This fellow he calls S. Does he even exist? He could be a figment of the writer’s imagination.”

“Could be.”

“Suppose S stands for self? It’s his own self that decides the woman has to die, because she’s a witness. The whole thing with S. wrapping his hands around the writer’s hands, that’s a perfect example of a psychotic break. The guy becomes two people at once, and the bad part makes the good part do something he’s ashamed of.”

Bare ruined choirs. Was it Keats? I’d have to look it up in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Two minutes with Bartlett’s and I’d know the poet and the poem, and then I’d spend another two hours skipping around, reading no end of other fragments that I’d half remember on other occasions.

Jan had a copy of Bartlett’s, and sometimes I’d turn to it when she was busy in the kitchen, or fitting in a little work on the current sculpture-in-progress.

Maybe I’d go to the Strand and pick up a copy of my own. That was probably simpler than searching for another girlfriend who already had the book on her shelf.

“But if there is an S.,” he said, “he doesn’t strike me as a guy with a whole lot to worry about. It might be different if the writer was around to back up what he wrote, but the document all by itself, well, I don’t see it as enough to put a man in jail, do you?”

“No,” I said. “But that’s if the document’s all by itself, and it isn’t.”

“Oh?”

“There’s what you might call an interpretation. A few pages identifying Mr. S. and telling us what else he’s been up to since those days.”

“Written by somebody else.”

I nodded.

“Handwritten? Copies made?”

“The penmanship’s not as nice as in the specimen you saw,” I said. “But as you said, who cares about penmanship?”

“Only the nuns.”

“Right.”

“And damn few of them. Still, you say the penmanship’s not so hot, and the content has to be mostly conjecture. If the writer could prove it, he wouldn’t have to go through all this crap.”

“And S. would be in a cell in the Tombs.”

“Assuming there’s an S.”

“Right.”

He lit another cigarette, smoked for a few minutes, blew the smoke at the trees across the way. Maybe he had the same line rattling around in his head. Bare ruined choirs. Maybe he knew the rest of the poem, and the name of the poet. Who knows what’s going on in somebody else’s head?

“What do you want, Matt?”

“To go on living.”

“So? Who’s gonna stop you?”

“S. might try.”

“And if he did, those two documents, similar in theme but differing in penmanship, would find their way to parties who might take an official interest. Does that sound about right?”

“It does.”

“But if nothing happens to you—”