Talent

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“He didn’t.”

“But —”

“He didn’t. Well, for a long while he did. He’d just had enough, as far as I could tell. Then he started again. He kept notebooks. I figured you knew. I figured that was part of why you were here.”

There were two notebooks, Helen told me. Langley had started the first in 1978, when he’d been living in the attic for twelve or fifteen months. It contained ideas, outlines, scattered thoughts. He’d started the second notebook not long before he died. It contained the rough draft of a longer project. Both notebooks were now in the possession of the university’s rare-books library, the Elston, about a mile away from where we sat. But they weren’t available for public consumption because Helen claimed they belonged to her and had sued the library to establish her rightful ownership.

“Anyone who wants to study the notebooks needs my permission until the courts sort this out,” she said. “Only a small handful of people have read them — including me, naturally, but that was years ago and I don’t remember much. All I can say definitively about the notebooks is that they’re mine.”

I could hardly believe my luck: Inspired, de-inspired, re-inspired. The fifty dollars I’d given Helen at the supermarket was starting to look like the best investment I’d ever made.

Helen announced that now was as fine a time as any to show me a letter from her uncle that was “very revealing.” She led me through the house to her bedroom, which faced a patch of concrete that an ambitious broker might have called a backyard. It was spartan: a bed, a nightstand with a cheap metal lamp, a dresser and mirror. That was all. No plants or art. No personal touch. I loitered at the door, feeling awkward about entering Helen’s retreat while she knelt beside the dresser and opened the bottom drawer.

Helen knew precisely where to find what she was looking for. Without hesitation she fished out a postcard displaying a sunny Connecticut beach — Hammonasset — with the Connecticut motto, Qui transtulit sustinet. “He who is transplanted still sustains.” On the back, in messy cursive: Dear Helen, Remember what we talked about. Love, Freddy.

I returned the cryptic postcard to my host. She received it carefully with both hands, like a raw egg or a football.

“Let me explain,” said Helen, reading my thoughts. She sat on the bed and I leaned against the door frame. “One day at boarding school, the headmistress interrupted my math class to say that my uncle was on the phone; he wanted to speak to me urgently. I could tell immediately that he was in a bad state. Anxious. Morbid. He said, ‘I need you to promise me something.’ ‘Anything, Freddy.’ He said — his exact words — ‘When I’m gone, I want you to look after my notebooks.’ I never did find out what set him off, but I promised to do as instructed. Then he sent me this postcard. It’s evidence that the notebooks are mine.”

Helen still held the postcard with both hands. She gripped it chest-high, reminding me of grief-stricken survivors in post-disaster newscasts who so hopefully exhibit head shots of their probably deceased loved ones. To Helen, the postcard was evidence, but for it to carry any weight, one would have to believe that she faithfully recalled a conversation that had taken place decades earlier. I did believe her. If her lawsuit rested on so little, however, it was hopeless. The presiding judge wouldn’t have heard her laugh, wouldn’t have eaten her salty pasta on an empty stomach accustomed to Pop-Tarts, wouldn’t have any good reason to trust her.

“How’d the Elston end up with the notebooks?”

“Freddy died unexpectedly, as you might already know.”

“In a car accident.”

“Right.” She nodded. “It fell to my parents to handle the funeral, which was a nightmare, as you can imagine. They also had to dispose of all his stuff — as they saw it, all his junk. The easiest option was to ask the Salvation Army to pack up the attic, just take everything away.” Helen paused. She played with her hair. “It happened so fast, I didn’t have a chance to find the notebooks. I figured some idiot had thrown them out along with Freddy’s old sweaters and tennis shoes. But I was wrong. A few years ago, they turned up at an estate sale, and a curator from your university swooped in.”

Not for the first time, my university was taking a finders-keepers approach to cultural patrimony. It was a Collegiate professor who’d raided Tiwanaku and returned home with a truckload of artifacts: ceramics, jewelry, human skeletons. A century later, Collegiate was still insisting that its claim to Bolivia’s national treasure was as good as Bolivia’s.

“May I ask what it is you’re doing?” Helen said.

Unthinkingly, I’d fallen into my stretching routine. Arms up; chest out. I must have looked ridiculous. When I explained that my rhomboids hurt, Helen offered to rub my back. Or more like ordered me to sit on the bed so she could do so. She stood above me, using her thumbs to circle and press my sore muscles. At first the physical intimacy made me self-conscious. But the pleasure of relief banished that feeling quickly. Through some mysterious pathway in my nervous system, every pinch along my spine made my earlobes tingle.