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By Root 12409 0

indifferent summertime streets of the city I had just left behind. I had a moment of gloom: Would I be able to summon the passion, the insight to portray this young suicide? Could I make it all seem real? I was sorely bothered by the approaching struggle of imagining the girl’s ordeal. Nonetheless I felt so serenely secure in the integrity of this novel that I had already fashioned for it an appropriately melancholy title: Inheritance of Night. This from the Requiescat of Matthew Arnold, an elegy for a woman’s spirit, with its concluding line: “Tonight it doth inherit the vasty hall of Death.” How could a book like this fail to capture the souls of thousands of readers? Gazing out at the grime-encrusted façade of the Wheatena factory—hulking, homely, its blue industrial windows reflecting the morning light—I shivered with happiness and again with pride at the sheer quality of what I had put into my book by dint of so much solitary work and perspiration and, yes, even occasional freshets of grief; and thinking once more of the as yet unwritten climax, I allowed myself to fantasize a line from the review of a dazzled critic of 1949 or 1950: “The most powerful passage of female interior monologue since Molly Bloom’s.” What folly! I thought. What conceit!

Sophie slept. Tenderly I wondered how many days and nights she would be drowsing next to me in the coming years. I speculated on our matrimonial bed at the farm, thought of its size and shape, wondered if its mattress was constructed with sufficient amplitude, bounce and resilience to accommodate the industrious venery it would certainly receive. I thought of our children, the many young towheads skipping around the farm like little Polish buttercups and thistles, and my merry paternal commands: “Time to milk the cow, Jerzy!” “Wanda, feed the chickens!” “Tadeusz! Stefania! Close up the barn!” I thought of the farm itself, which I had not seen outside of my father’s snapshots, tried to visualize it as the abode of a prominent literary figure. Like Faulkner’s Mississippi home, “Rowan Oak,” it would have to be given a name, one possibly appropriate to the peanut crop that provided its reason for being. “Goober Haven” was far and away too facetious, and I abandoned all other changes on the nut motif, playing instead with names more tony, stately, dignified: “Five Elms” perhaps (I hoped the farm had five elms, or even one) or “Rosewood,” or “Great Fields,” or “Sophia,” in tribute to my beloved dame. In my mind’s prism the years like blue hills rolled peacefully away toward the horizon of the far future. Inheritance of Night a remarkable success, gaining laurels rarely shed upon the work of a writer so young. A short novel then, also acclaimed, having to do with my wartime experiences—a taut, searing book eviscerating the military in a tragicomedy of the absurd. Meanwhile, Sophie and I living on the modest plantation in dignified seclusion, my reputation growing, the author himself being increasingly importuned by the media but steadfastly refusing all interviews. “I just farm peanuts,” says he, going about his work. At age thirty or thereabouts another masterpiece, These Blazing Leaves, the chronicle of that tragic Negro firebrand Nat Turner.

The train lurched forward, began to churn with smooth and oily precision as it gained momentum, and my vision evaporated in an effervescent blur against the grimy, receding walls of Rahway.

Sophie awoke abruptly, with a little cry. I glanced down at her. She seemed a bit feverish; her brow and cheeks were flushed, and a fragile, dewy mustache of perspiration hovered above her lip. “Where are we, Stingo?” she said.

“Somewhere in New Jersey,” I replied.

“How long does it take, this trip to Washington?” she asked.

“Oh, between three and four hours,” I said.

“And then to the farm?”

“I don’t know exactly. We’ll get a train to Richmond, then a bus down to Southampton. It’ll be quite a few more hours. It’s practically in North Carolina. That’s why I think we’ve got to spend the night in Washington and then head down to the farm tomorrow morning.