The Transcriptionist, page 7
The ceramic plate from her body armor is lying on the bar and she picks it up like a trophy and holds it awkwardly with both hands. Everyone is mesmerized by the oddity of it.
“It was just an automatic response, right? Someone throws something, especially a child, and you catch it. Except it wasn’t a ball he threw to the marine. It was an IED.” She tosses the plate in the air.
“Watch out!” Zibby shouts as Katheryn catches it at the last moment. “That’s dangerous. You’re dangerous.”
“You should have seen the poor marine, nineteen years old and he had to be scraped up with the dirt. Poor kid was just playing catch with a child, trying to be friendly. The civilian instinct, that’s what kills you.”
“You mean he died?”
“Of course he died, Zibby. He caught an IED with his hands. What do you think?”
“I thought this was a story about being shot at,” Lena says.
Katheryn plops the plate on the bar. “Aren’t you a precise one? I think I made my point—”
“That the instinct to be a friendly, decent human being can kill you,” one of the reporters says to laughter. “That explains why you and Ralph hit it off.”
“Thank God for Ralph,” Katheryn says. “For all his faults, and they are multitudinous, the man knows how to run a newsroom. He understands that news is not about nuance. You have to be bold, you have to overwhelm with the Record’s force and set the national agenda. Listen to me, Russell, I can help you, dear. I may not have Ralph by the balls anymore but I still have his ears, which, by the way, are much more satisfying.”
“Katheryn!” Zibby says. “You are so vulgar. And such a braggart.”
“You know you love it, Zibby. Besides, it ain’t bragging if you really done it.”
Lena is settling her bar tab when Russell reaches out to grab her arm, but he misses and rests his hand awkwardly on the back of her barstool. She watches him try to think of what to say.
“You look pensive.”
“I was wondering—Eric Isaacs called in a lead about the mudslide in Pakistan but never called back with the adds. It’s not like him. I wondered if you’d heard anything.”
“Heard what?”
“It’s just that he always calls back with his adds. Do you know if anyone has heard from him?”
“Eric knows how to take care of himself. You shouldn’t worry. He probably just lost the phone line. And he’s so busy; he’s writing a book about American involvement in Pakistan.”
She excuses herself to go to the bathroom, and when she comes out she sees Katheryn rubbing Russell’s back as a look of panic flashes across his face.
IN HER ROOM at Parkside, she lifts the phone receiver and dials, hears three rings, then a click and the sound of her own voice. “You have reached the Recording Room’s dictation mailbox. Please note that this voice mailbox has a maximum duration of twenty minutes . . .”
Resting the receiver like an infant against her shoulder, she stands and listens to the sound of her muffled voice, then the universal tone.
“Arlene,” she says, picking up the receiver and cradling it against her ear, “it’s me.”
She pauses; it is so quiet she thinks she can hear the tape turn, but maybe it’s true that when there are no sounds, the brain can make them up. She thinks of the empty Recording Room, the panel of phones, the archaic overnight machine, the televisions, the empty desks, her desk, her chair, the window, and, on the ledge, the pigeon.
“How do people just vanish? There’s a foreign reporter with a modest, reliable voice. I look forward to his calls. He called in a story about the mudslide in Pakistan. But he never called back with the rest of the story. And when I asked Russell about it, he said, ‘Eric knows how to take care of himself.’ But what has that got to do with anything? So many things go unrecorded, Arlene. So many things are lost.”
CHAPTER SIX
Chaucer’s Scrivener Revealed
In the morning she goes for a walk, a Saturday morning ritual, and something in Madison Square Park catches her eye; she watches, motionless. A falcon holds a pigeon in its talons and tears into it as the pigeon still struggles with life. She can’t move. God, eaten alive. She remembers reading that falcons are capable of diving for prey at two hundred miles an hour. And that they can knock a bird out in flight, then swoop underneath to catch it falling.
What did Arlene feel the moment the lions’ teeth first tore her skin? It is one thing to kill yourself, and another to have someone else do it, and still another to give yourself to teeth and hunger that know no judgment, no free will. And it is even something else when the killers themselves are confined to cages where people can come and watch them live.
ON THE WAY back to Parkside, she pauses by a deli to watch a man cutting flowers to sell. The funereal lilies give off their sweet, cloying scent, the irises’ beauty is already beginning to fade, the elegant tulips stand tall on slender stalks. Lena looks at the gerbera daisies, bright, fat, and gay, and reaches for a bunch, then suddenly changes her mind and picks a bouquet of yellow roses.
The Salvation Army is quiet; Mrs. Pelletier sits behind her desk, her glasses hang from a chain around her neck, her hands cover her eyes. Lena pauses, and Mrs. Pelletier sits up straight, puts her glasses on carefully, placing both plastic arms securely behind her ears.
“Yes, Ms. Respass?”
“Good morning, Mrs. Pelletier. No matter what time I come in or go out, you seem to always be at your post.”
“No rest for the weary, Ms. Respass.”
Lena lifts the roses and holds them through the partition. “These are for you. I thought they might brighten things up a bit.”
“Why, Ms. Respass,” she says, half rising, “that is . . . this is”—she pauses, feeling speechless, something she does not like to feel—“not necessary.”
“Oh, of course, it’s not necessary. I just thought it might be nice to have fresh flowers—”
“But Ms. Respass—”
“—in the reception area.”
“I see. Well, of course, if it’s for the reception area I suppose it might be nice to, as you say, brighten things up a bit.”
“Yes. I think the residents would like to be greeted with flowers.”
“I see. Well, of course, it’s not necessary,” she says, reaching through the window for the flowers and placing them on the counter. “But I’m sure the girls will appreciate it.” She leans over, pressing her hand to her chest as if to close a gaping blouse, and smells the roses with her eyes closed.
“I’m sorry,” Lena says. “They don’t have much scent.”
“Oh, well, everything fades.”
Lena nods and considers the remark, since the deli roses never had any scent to lose. The scent has been bred out, she starts to say, then thinks better of it.
“Mrs. Pelletier, do you have a phone book?”
“Yes, of course, Ms. Respass. Do you want the yellow pages or the white?”
“White, please.”
Mrs. Pelletier disappears below the counter and reappears with the bulky book. “There’s something so satisfying about a phone book, isn’t there?” she asks, patting the book’s cover. “Such a useful book, so full of names. It’s exactly the information you need and nothing more. No waste.”
“Yes.” Lena opens the pulpy-paged thing, and Mrs. Pelletier hesitates, as if to say something else, but instead goes to her desk and leaves Lena alone with the names.
She flips to L and turns pages, passing hundreds of New Yorkers by: Label, Labov, Ladyrinth, Laflamme, Laitman, Lamardore, Landberg, Landis—faster—Lanyard, Lazarus, Lear, Leazard, Lebidois, Lebin, Leblanc, Leblanche, Leblang, Lebleu, Leboeuf, Lebonitte, Lebosco, Lebot, Lebous, Lebovits, Lebovitz, Lebow . . . Armand, Benita, Bennett, Colin, Earl, Ellen. Ellen Lebow. She writes down the Upper West Side address and closes the book with a slapping sound.
“Thank you.”
Waiting for the elevator, she turns back. Mrs. Pelletier sits at her desk, staring at her hands. The harsh lights thrum faintly overhead, the fake glass window waits to be closed and locked, a round white-faced clock like those in public schools hangs on the wall, and Mrs. Pelletier sits at her station, wearing a brown skirt two inches below the knee and a crepe de chine blouse that ties in a droopy bow at the neck. The scene could be a diorama at the Natural History Museum, where years ago an anthropologist kept several Inuit in the basement for study. When four of them died, the bodies were dissected and kept in the museum. Even after one man’s son discovered that his father’s bones were on display, he was not able to claim them. A museum where children play and shriek at dinosaurs, and a place where a boy’s father is displayed behind glass and his son has no rights to his bones.
In her room, she stares at the slip of paper with Ellen’s address and asks herself what a detective would do. She knows no detectives but she has read Chandler and Hammett, so she gets the Jack Daniel’s from underneath the socks in the top dresser drawer. She washes her one glass, the one holding her toothbrush, and pours. There is no ice, so when she shakes the glass it makes no sound. She sips, swallows, breathes with her mouth open.
She dresses carefully, black linen pants and a sleeveless top, espadrilles bought in Chinatown. Since it’s a special occasion, she puts on lipstick, called Damned. She remembers the way her mother did it, before church on Sunday: Wearing one of her four dresses, she would open her mouth and tuck her lips over her teeth so that she appeared toothless and widemouthed, which is how she looked when she died at the age of forty-three of the disease the name of which is still whispered by a certain generation in a certain part of the country. Pink in the Afternoon, the only shade she ever owned, in a gold tube, the only bright gold thing in the house. Lena has never mastered the art of application and wipes around her mouth with a tissue.
IN FRONT OF the gray prewar building at 112th Street and Riverside Drive, she paces up and down the block, clutching her Record ID in her hand and rehearsing what she will say. She takes her newly purchased recorder out of her bag and tests it three times, even though she has tested it several times before.
Finally she forces herself to stop outside Ellen’s building and, after finding “E. Lebow” on the metal intercom, she presses the button for apartment 7E.
“Hello?” a voice says over the door-speaker static.
“Hello, is this Ellen Lebow? I’m Lena Respass from the Record. May I talk with you?”
There is no response, only a long pause and then the sound of the buzzer, the sound of entry, of arrival, of expectation, of being buzzed in. To Lena, the sound is that of the starting bell that begins a race, and her heart lurches as she opens the door and enters the lobby. On the seventh floor, she knocks on Ellen’s door, and as soon as it opens, she presents her ID like a badge, but the woman just smiles and ushers her inside.
She leads Lena down a book-lined hallway to a spacious room, the living room of an academic whose field has fallen from favor: parquet floors; a comfortable, cushiony sofa covered with a red Turkish throw; more bookshelves; paintings of dark landscapes; and a white cat balancing on one of the clawed feet of a heavy dining table. It could be a theater set for an academic’s apartment.
“I’m Lena. Thank you for agreeing to speak with me.”
“I’m Ellen. You’re working on the weekend?”
“The news is relentless.”
Ellen removes her glasses, and Lena sees that she is an attractive woman, fiftysomething, with the tired eyes of a constant reader.
“So, what do you want to know?”
“Oh, anything you want to tell me.”
“Well, mainly I’m surprised that no one found it before.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was so simple, really, hiding in plain sight.”
Lena has no idea how to respond. It must be a mistake, a misunderstanding, she thinks as she looks out the big windows that overlook the Hudson. The sky is white, bleached bright, stripped of clouds.
“It was in the handwriting,” Ellen says. “I compared his signature on the scrivener’s register with the signature on the manuscript.”
“Pardon?”
“That’s how I discovered the name of Chaucer’s copyist, his scrivener.”
“I’m sorry—Chaucer. You thought I was here about Chaucer?”
“That’s not why you wanted to talk to me?”
“I wanted to talk to you about your sister, Arlene.”
“Oh,” Ellen says, touching her throat. “I thought you were here about my discovery.”
“I’m happy to hear about it,” Lena says quickly, feeling weak. If there was a point at which she could turn back, she has passed it. She is an impostor. Strangely, this makes her feel more confident, and she smiles encouragingly at Ellen just as she has imagined reporters doing countless times while she has transcribed their interviews.
“Oh, I should have known. It’s just that Arlene’s story is over, that’s done now. The Record reporter I spoke with, he said they wouldn’t bother me anymore. And the university issued a release about my academic discovery just yesterday, and the press, well, some press, mainly British, of course, have been contacting me to ask about it. So you see—”
“Of course. Please, start with Chaucer. What were you saying—you found Chaucer’s copyist?”
The excitement comes back into her eyes, erasing the fatigue. “Yes. I discovered the identity of Chaucer’s scrivener, which helps certify Chaucer’s work. He had written a poem about Adam—are you sure you’re interested?”
“Yes, please, go on. I have a personal interest in scriveners. And an editor at the Record might be interested.”
“Oh, but someone at the Record has already called.”
Lena smiles and swallows what seems to be sweat in her mouth. “That would be culture. I’m with metro.”
“I see. Well, besides being Arlene’s sister, I’m a Chaucer scholar. I’d been on the trail for quite a while and I finally compared the two signatures. The evidence has been there for centuries, but I suppose no one had looked for it before.”
“And how did you know which scrivener to look for?”
“Chaucer had written a poem about him, criticizing his mistakes and threatening to curse him with scabs.”
“Was he incompetent?”
“No, not at all. In fact, I think he was Chaucer’s favorite. But it’s a strange relationship between an author and his copyist. This was a time when writers were still working closely with individual scribes and relied on them tremendously. Later, the scriptoria became the standard. But it was one man, Adam the scrivener, who noted Chaucer’s death in the tales, letting us know that Chaucer died before he finished them.”
“How did he do it?”
“He put a line right in the text saying Chaucer had written no more of the tale,” she says, stroking the cat, which has left its perch under the table and is now stalking the tabletop as if on a runway, “a copyist’s code that we might find hundreds of years later.”
“I wonder how he felt, an anonymous scrivener announcing Chaucer’s death in print, inserting his obit in his own text.”
“It was a tribute. And as someone who works for a newspaper, you must see how we are all dependent on public recognition. Now we have—come here, look at this,” she says, gently pushing the cat away and crossing the room to the computer on a scroll-top desk. “I’ve created a database of scribes in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England.”
She pages down the screen and there are the rescued names of the scribes of England. “Do you know anything else about them?” Lena asks.
“No, only their names. What else can we know?”
“I wonder if any of the others added or omitted anything from the texts they copied. There were so many, it seems unlikely that Adam was the only one.”
“I wonder about that, too,” Ellen says. “There were so many manuscripts to be copied; a codex was such a laborious object to produce. Not like now, when we’re drowning in words.”
“It’s true. There’s entirely too much writing. ‘When did we write so much as since our dissensions began? When did the Romans write so much as in the time of their downfall?’ ”
“Excuse me?”
“Montaigne. I’m sorry. I quote a lot, it’s a bad habit I’m trying to quit.”
“Ah. Well, here, let’s sit down.” She gestures toward the couch. “You’re here about Arlene. What did you want to know?”
The cat leaps onto Ellen’s lap and they both look at the animal, which, sensing the shift in attention, swishes its tail with elaborate slowness.
“To be honest, I don’t know that the Record will run another story about Arlene. But if I had more information, I could pitch something to an editor. So, whatever you want to tell me would be helpful.”
“About her blindness?”
“More about her life.”
“You seem remarkably patient for a reporter. You haven’t been doing this long, have you?”
“No, I’m quite new to it. It’s also—I’ve taken a personal interest in Arlene.”
“Why?”
“I can’t explain it.”
“She used to say that she didn’t have a blind spot. Funny the things you remember. I didn’t know what she meant, but it always stayed with me. She said seeing people have blind spots and she didn’t.”
“Was she”—Lena pauses, unable to find the word—“happy?”
Ellen shrugs. “She wasn’t always unhappy. Then she was. Things tend to catch up.”
“Yes, they do. Was she blind from childhood?”
“No. She went blind at the age of nineteen, when she had meningitis. What exactly are you looking for, Lena?”
