Howard Norman - Next Life Might Be Kinder

“Problem with research,” I said, “is that it only uncovers facts.”

“Sam, why are you here? Why did you come to the shoot?”

“I’m not entirely sure why,” I said.

“It’s not healthy. I think it’s not healthy for you.”

I started to leave her room. “In the whole time Elizabeth and I lived in the Essex Hotel,” I said, “I never once saw a bellman water a plant.”

TODAY JUST AT dawn I put on my dark green windbreaker and knit cap and drove to Vogler’s Cove. It occurred to me that of late, whenever I woke looking at life at an uncharitable angle, I could always go to Vogler’s Cove, where watching birds helped me amend my thinking, if only a little. I had my field guide with me. There was a mixture of muted early sunlight and cold gusts of wind. Within two hours I was able to identify a common loon, a horned grebe, several cormorants, a group of mallards, a common eider, oldsquaws, a black scoter, two buffleheads, and a dozen or so goldeneyes. A photographer stood at the far eastern end, and she had a tripod camera and a windscreen. I admired her patience out there in the crosswinds, close as she was to the shoreline, sea spray thrown at her rain slicker. She wore gloves and almost knee-high, black, buckled galoshes. We waved at each other across the cove.

Last night — well, actually this morning at about three A.M. — I managed to add a few pages to my novel before getting an hour of sleep. My nameless narrator continues to research the day he was born. What did his parents do all that day and into the night? What was going on in the city? On page 34 he walks into a record store that has some bins of used vinyl records. In one of the bins he discovers anthologies titled Most Popular Songs of the Year. There is an anthology for 1949, 1937, 1936, and then he sees one for 1929, the year of his birth. He purchases the 1929 anthology, takes it home to his apartment, and plays it on his phonograph. The album is scratchy but listenable. “Star Dust.” “If I Had a Talking Picture of You.” “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” He writes in a notebook: “I remember that my mother listened to the radio all the time.”

That was the extent of my writing this morning.

Sipping a coffee in the café at Vogler’s Cove at eight A.M., I decided to order scrambled eggs with toast and bacon. While I ate breakfast I read the morning Chronicle-Herald, which I’d seen delivered to the café by truck a few minutes earlier. At one point, the photographer from the cove entered the café. We acknowledged each other and I turned back to my newspaper. In the left column on page 2, the headline read, “Director of Next Life Insults Author of Novel.”

Peter Istvakson, director of the movie Next Life, now being shot in Halifax, voiced his disappointment in Samuel Lattimore, whose wife Elizabeth’s murder in the Essex Hotel inspired Istvakson’s screenplay. “I have only asked Sam Lattimore to help me understand things better,” Istvakson said. “But he refuses me. I am only attempting authenticity of feeling. How could Mr. Lattimore not wish for that? He gives and then takes away. When we had cordial discussions about purchasing the rights to Sam and Elizabeth’s story, we didn’t need Sam’s permission, because the murder was in all the newspapers, so it was in the public domain. But we wanted to be ethical and asked Sam Lattimore to give his permission. We met a number of times. He promised to consult during the filming. Now he has become a disappearance.”

The Chronicle-Herald has printed a total of eleven articles about the murder of Mrs. Elizabeth Church Lattimore, a graduate student in literature at Dalhousie University, who at the time of her death was writing a dissertation on the little-known British novelist Marghanita Laski. Mrs. Lattimore died of gunshot wounds in March 1972. Alfonse Padgett, a bellman at the Essex Hotel, was convicted of the murder after the jury deliberated for less than an hour. Mr. Padgett is incarcerated in Atlantic Institution in New Brunswick.

The presence of Pentagonal Films’ cast and crew has been the talk of the town. Well-known actress Emily Kalman is playing the challenging role of the murdered woman, Elizabeth Church. Many Haligonians have been hired as extras, and according to Mayor Walter Ronald Fitzgerald, “The movie has boosted the economic health of our city.”

Samuel Lattimore, 36, author of the novel I Apologize for the Late Hour, which enjoyed modest sales, is reputed to be living under another name somewhere near Lunenburg in Atlantic Canada. He was unavailable for comment.

I threw the newspaper on the floor. I looked around the café and saw that the photographer and the waitress were both staring at me. The photographer said, “Mind if I borrow the paper? I see you’re finished reading it.”

Embarrassed, I picked up the paper, folded it so the front page was again on top, stretched over to the next table where the photographer sat. She took the paper and said, “Thank you.” I nodded and held my empty cup up in the air, and the waitress said, “Refill coming right up.” She walked over and filled my cup from the glass pot she carried. She returned to behind the counter, put the pot on the warming coils, then started paging through her own copy of the newspaper.

The photographer was maybe fifty, give or take a year or two. She hadn’t removed her rain slicker, and mist was still beaded on it. Her tripod camera was laid across two chairs she’d set close together at her table. She wore round, black-rimmed glasses and her gray-flecked black hair was windblown. She had, at first glance, to quote Chekhov, a “distracted beauty.”

She loudly drummed the newspaper with her fingers, and when I looked up, she said, “Did you read the article on that movie being shot in Halifax?”

“I glanced at it,” I said.

“Not that interested?”

“Not in the gossip.”

“I’ve seen them filming in my neighborhood,” she said, “just up from Historic Properties.”

“Did you come out here to get away from that?”

“No. I often drive out to various landscapes, take my photographs, and generally get back to the city by the dinner hour.”

“Are you a professional photographer?”

“I’m a pediatrician, now retired, actually. I photograph for myself.”

But she changed the subject. “Gossip, sure, of course there’s that. But the man whose life — marriage — the movie’s based on? The article says he’s being a bit difficult, keeping things he knows to himself, not allowing the director to make a movie that might get at the truth. I find something off-tilt in that attitude, personally.”

“You formed an opinion from the one article?”

“Well, the director has been quite outspoken for weeks now.”

I said, “My guess is, the writer signed away the rights to the story, but not the right to his privacy.”

“Wants to have his cake and eat it too. I’m not so sure.”

She went back to reading. I’d hoped the conversation had ended. The waitress stepped up to the photographer’s table and said, “Ma’am, do you want to order anything to eat, or is more coffee just the thing?”

“Wheat toast, please, jam, but no butter.”

As the waitress stood writing this down on the order pad, the photographer said to her, “Will you go see this movie when it comes out?”

“Oh, Jesus, yes,” she said. “Yes, I will see it. It sounds so romantic from the little I’ve read. Me and my fiancé will go see it. Joseph — Joe. By the time it comes out, he’ll be my husband.”

“Congratulations,” the photographer said.

“June twenty-sixth next, we get hitched.”