I went inside and called Columbia University, reaching the English department without too much trouble (after all, in most universities we’re dealing with bureaucracies aspiring to heights achieved only in the Soviet Union), finally getting through to the chairman.
“Yes?” he said. “Could I help you?” in an accent that was part New England, part Virginia. The sort of accent you think of Robert Lowell as having.
I told him who I was and asked if David was safely back at work.
“As a matter of fact, Mr. Griffin, we’re quite worried about Dave up here. He was to have been on campus last week, and should en effet have met his first class today. But no, we’ve heard nothing. He’s not there, by any chance?”
“No. There’s been no word from him-no one he was close to, to whom he might have sent a postcard, a letter?”
“Well, of course we all like him a great deal. Admire his work tremendously, it goes without saying. But close, no. I don’t think so. Not very social, Dave, if you know what I mean. Keeps his own counsel. Different drummers and all that. But wait, now that I think of it, there was one of the librarians he saw quite often, Miss Porter, our special collections curator. Nothing of the romantic sort, you understand, but good colleagues. Would you like me to transfer you? Miss Porter should be on duty?”
“If you don’t mind.”
“Not at all, es nada. By the way, I’m a great admirer of yours. We’ve even taught your books, in a course we offered on the proletarian novel, quite a popular course as it turned out.”
“Thank you. I’ve always thought of them as only entertainment.”
“Ah. And so they are, most decidedly. But on another level certainly a bit more than mere entertainment-no?”
“Maybe.”
“That’s the stuff: keep the critics guessing, eh? Here you go then, over to Special Collections.”
I got an idiot undergrad shelver, with persistence a graduate assistant, and finally Miss Porter, who told me to call her Alison, one l. She said it as though no one ever had. I explained who I was.
“I thought maybe you’d have had a card, a letter. We don’t even know if he’s back in the States,” I said.
“Well,” she said. “He did write almost every week. We have so much in common, you know. I’m a real Francophile; and he would write and tell me all his discoveries, all about the people he’d met, rare books or manuscripts he had seen all over France. I so looked forward to those letters.”
“When did you last hear from David, Miss Porter-Alison?”
“O dear, I really wouldn’t know. Time and dates and those things just get terribly away from me. Could you hold a moment?”
I said certainly, and listened to the humming in the wires.
“Yes, here it is. The last letter I have is dated 24 August, from Paris. Then there’s a postcard, no return address but with a New York postmark, the date on it’s something of September-seventh, seventeenth? Just ‘See you soon, amities.’ ”
“And nothing since?”
“Rien.”
“Thank you, Alison. I hope if you have further word you’ll let us know.” I gave her my number, thanked her again, and hung up.
After a while I went across the patio into the house and put on the kettle. I was grinding beans when the front door opened and, a little later, Verne came into the kitchen.
“Coffee, huh?”
“Right.”
“Enough for me?”
“Always.”
She filled a pitcher and started watering plants on the window ledge.
“Gonna be away a few days, Lew.”
“Milk?”
“Black, I think. You be okay?”
“As always.”
We sat at the kitchen table, steaming cups between us. Verne sipped and made a face.
“You’re not angry with me.”
I shrugged.
“You know I’ll always come back. No one else makes coffee like you.”
She took her cup and drank it while packing. I turned on the radio to The Marriage of Figaro. Later I heard the cab driver at the door, Verne’s suitcase bumping against the sill as she left. And then the silence.