Lawrence Block - The Burglar in the Rye

“Or write them very lightly in pencil,” I said. “Gulliver Fairborn’s signature is rare, which is a rarity itself in this age of mass public book-signings. But you won’t see Fairborn hawking signed copies on QVC, or jetting around the country with pen in hand. In fact you won’t see him at all, and I for one wouldn’t recognize him if I did. He’s never given an interview or allowed himself to be photographed. Nobody knows where he lives or what he looks like, and a few books ago you started hearing rumors that he’d died, and that the recent books were the work of a ghostwriter. V. C. Andrews, no doubt.”

“Not Elliott Roosevelt?”

“Always a possibility. Anyway, someone did a computerized textual analysis, the same kind that reporter did to prove Joe Klein wrote Primary Colors, and established that Fairborn was writing his own books. But he hasn’t been signing them.”

“Suppose he signed one.”

“Well, how sure could we be that he really did the signing? It’s not terribly difficult to scribble ‘Gulliver Fairborn’ on a flyleaf, especially when hardly anyone has seen an authentic signature.”

“Suppose the signature’s authentic,” she said. “And suppose it’s what I originally asked you about, not just a signed copy but an inscribed one.”

“Saying something about Timmy and his birthday?”

“Saying something like ‘To Tiny Alice – Rye can do more than Milt or Malt / To let us know it’s not our fault. Love always, Gully.’”

“Gully,” I said.

“Yes.”

“And I guess you’d be Tiny Alice.”

“You’re very quick.”

“Everybody tells me that. So your question’s not hypothetical. You’ve got the book, and you’re in a position to be sure of the signature.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me the inscription again.” She did, and I nodded. “He’s paraphrasing Housman, isn’t he? ‘Malt can do more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man.’ A friend of mine used to recite that couplet just before he drank the fourth beer of the evening. Unfortunately he did it again with beers five through twelve, and one grew a little weary of it. ‘ Rye can do more than Milt or Malt’-why rye, do you suppose?”

“It’s all he drinks.”

“You’d think he could find something better to drink, wouldn’t you? What with Nobody’s Baby still in print after…how many years?”

She answered before I could consult the copyright page. “About forty. He was in his mid-twenties when he wrote it. He’s in his early sixties now.”

“If the computer analysis is right, and he’s still alive.”

“He’s alive.”

“And you…know him?”

“I used to.”

“And he inscribed a book to you. Well, as far as the value’s concerned, all I could do is guess. If the copy came into my hands, I’d call a few specialists and see what I could find out. I’d get the handwriting authenticated. And then I’d probably consign the book to an auction gallery and let it find its own price, which I’d be hard put to guess at. Over two thousand, certainly, and possibly as much as five. It would depend who wanted it and how avid they were.”

“And if you had a few of them bidding against each other.”

“Exactly. And it wouldn’t hurt if you were somebody famous. Alice Walker, say, or Alice Hoffman, or even Alice Roosevelt Longworth. That would make it an association copy, and would render it a little more special for a collector.”

“I see.”

“On the other hand, the inscription’s interesting in and of itself. How did he come to sign it? For that matter, how did you happen to meet him? And, uh…”

“What?”

“Well, this may be a stupid question, but are you sure the man who signed your book was who he claimed to be? Because if no photos of the man exist, and if nobody knows where he lives or what he looks like…”

She smiled a knowing smile. “Oh, it was Gully.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Well, I didn’t just run into him at a bookstore,” she said. “I lived with him for three years.”

“You lived with him?”

“For three years. Do you suppose that makes my book an association copy? Because you could say we had an association.”

“When did this happen?”

“Years ago,” she said. “I moved in twenty-three years ago, and-”

“But you would have been a child,” I said. “What did he do, adopt you?”

“I was fourteen.”

“You’re thirty-seven now? I’d have said early thirties.”

“And you’d have been sweet to say it. I’m thirty-seven, and I was fourteen when I met Gully Fairborn, and seventeen when we parted company.”

“And you were, uh…”

“We were.”

“No kidding,” I said. “How did you meet?”

“He wrote to me.”

“You wrote him and he wrote back? That’s remarkable in and of itself. For thirty-some years every sensitive seventeen-year-old in America has read Nobody’s Baby. Half of them write letters to Fairborn, and they never get an answer. He’s famous for never answering a letter.”

“I know.”

“But he answered yours? You must write a hell of a letter.”

“I do. But he wrote to me first.”

“Huh?”

“I was precocious,” she said.

“I can believe that,” I said. “But how would Gulliver Fairborn know of your precocity, or even of your existence? And what would move him to write you a letter?”

“He read something I wrote. And it wasn’t a letter.”

“Oh?”

“I read Nobody’s Baby, ” she said, “but I wasn’t seventeen when I read it. I was thirteen.”

“Well, you already said you were precocious.”

“It makes an impression on most people, especially the ones who read it at an impressionable age. It certainly made an impression on me. There was a point when I was certain Gulliver Fairborn wrote the book with me in mind, and I thought of writing him a letter, but I didn’t do it.

“Instead, a couple of months later, I wrote an article. I handed it in for a school assignment and my teacher was over the moon about it. It’s not hard to understand why. The best anybody else managed was two or three ungrammatical pages, ‘How I Spent My Summer Vacation,’ di dah di dah di dah. I turned in a closely reasoned seven-thousand-word essay full of half-baked philosophy and sophomoric soul-searching.”

“And your teacher sent it to Fairborn?”

“I’m sure that never occurred to her. She did something far more outrageous. She sent it to The New Yorker. ”

“Don’t tell me.”

“I’m afraid I must. They accepted it, incredibly enough. I’d called it ‘How I Didn’t Spend My Summer Vacation,’ which made a kind of ironic sense, but only in context. They changed the title to ‘A Ninth-Grader Looks at the World.’”

“My God,” I said. “You’re Alice Cottrell.”

The essay was a sensation, and won the young author a good deal of attention. She had her fifteen minutes of fame, about which Edgar Lee Horvath had then only recently expounded, and was every op-ed writer’s flavor of the month. And then, just as the fuss was winding down, she got a letter in a purple envelope.

It was typed on paper of the same hue, and ran to three single-spaced pages. It began as a response to her essay, a sort of essay in reply, but by the middle of the second page it had wandered far afield and overflowed with its middle-aged author’s musings on life and the Universe.

She knew almost from the first sentence who its author was, but even so the signature left her breathless. Gulliver Fairborn, in beautiful flowing script, and, beneath it, an address on a rural route in Tesuque, New Mexico. She looked it up in the atlas, and it turned out to be just north of Santa Fe.