Always I had thought about the newspaper business and the ink-stained wretches who found employment there; and always I had pictured them—no-nonsense, wise to the world, amiable, gruff—hammering away at Remingtons under umbrellas of smoke. I longed to join them. I daydreamed about working my way not up the ladder but across it, sideways and into sports. My dream was a romantic one. Baseball and boxing were of interest to me. Politics, culture, and the arts held little appeal—not even Watergate—and only gradually, after many years, did they come to weigh on my shoulders.
Like everything else I was taken in by at the time, my father had something to do with it. He had something to do with my behavior and thoughts, thoughts that were vague and unknown to me. Unprofound. It was he who brought the papers, wedged tightly under his arm, into our home every night after work; it was he who handed me the Worldand not the Globe, when I greeted him at the door; and it was he who instructed me on the proper reading of each.
The Globe was a paper for the American suburbs—I lived there happily untouched by the world—but my father never forgot—I could never forget—what he referred to as his “overseas labors—digging out holes and filling in craters, for the world’s greater good.” He called them to mind readily, and most days my father—shell-shocked, disabled, starved-out, what have you—remembered them fondly. He played with the details—omitting, replacing, then resurrecting them—to not bore me, I think, or himself. They were nothing to crow about, more a thing in the air like the cigarette smoke that followed him everywhere. It had rained cats and dogs on the march to the camp, in Belgium or Germany, he wasn’t sure which—they had redrawn the maps. Soggy did not begin to describe the conditions. The rains turned to sleet, thence to snow and back; winds grew to gales and soul-numbing cold; by praying for more, in the back of his mind, he learned how to suffer it.
My father was a strange kind of sport about it all. For the next six months, grass became a staple of his diet; then he was home, before a dock full of revelers. Comically thin and nearly invisible to his family, he was not the same boy who’d been tapped as a promising snitch by the FBI, before Normandy. He did put in his oar with them, which I understood to be dishonorable, due to the undercurrents of the political culture in which I found myself swimming years later. But the old man’s notes, if he took notes at all, must have been of no use, in kind or amount, because he never did take a position with the bureau, and his connection with it went unrewarded. He was not lost for long that day on the dock, and in no time, apparently, he became his old self. Filled out by home meals conjured by my mother—a notoriously bad cook—he parlayed his experience as an underfed laborer into a paid-laborer’s job with the assembly of companies still cheerfully known at the time as Ma Bell.
All of which is by way of explaining how the working man’s World, and the people comprising its orbit—the weather-worn stoics I aspired to be, its reporters and readers, its pressmen and copy boys—came to intrigue me and to populate my mind. I fancied myself a man of the people, stocking end-caps and shelves with food as I did, and had for five years, as a card-carrying member of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1445 at the Stop & Shop grocery. But the smell of newsprint intoxicated me.
I had it in mind to take the job from the very beginning. It hadn’t been offered, but if it were, I would accept it at once and enter the world, where I would put my talents and skills—however measured—to good use. I had my eye on the internships available to qualified students by the university I had enrolled in and had long ago tired of working my way through school, of giving it the old college try—so to speak. I had energy and aptitude, and I subscribed to a credo: it was the way in which you approached the work, not experience or who you knew or the work itself, not its politics and challenges—those were real enough—that mattered most. You had to be willing to start at the bottom. The ambitions of youth demanded it. Which is not to say that I did not turn my back on a helping hand—far from it.
For the sake of transparency, I don’t mind giving credit—I prefer giving credit—to a certain professor, a Professor Borrelli, who without hesitation, when I did ask for help, vouched to the university internship dean—Dean Keene—for my work ethic, my character, and my academic prowess, when none were very much in evidence. Twice I had taken Borrelli’s courses, and my performance each time had been poor. Even Borrelli, an inspired teacher, seemed defeated by the material, and it must have wearied him as much as it did me. I did not speak up or participate in class—I was diffident—and could not have made a good first impression. He must have seen and heard me as a mumbler—his double-pane eyeglasses attached to a hearing aid. I felt a kinship with the man. I suppose he thought he spotted in me something that others did not, I don’t know. No doubt he had a good heart. Sporting a harelip and sounding a lisp, Borrelli had soldiered his way through life; the hearing-aid glasses, he said, were the greater burden. He made no bones about his afflictions in class and was candid about their origins; he owed them, he said, to his first-cousin parents.
When Borrelli wrote the letter, he cautioned that there were limits to his influence. He had spoken to Keene just one time in two years, and two times in three. Nor did he have any dirt on Keene, who held in the palms of his bureaucratic hands the key to my place in the meaningful world. But I can think of no other way to explain how my name made it onto the shortlist for the job I was after.
My efforts to spring myself from school and get on with my life, in any event, were rewarded. I contained my excitement when Keene confirmed that I had talked myself into the only remaining position of interest to aspiring reporters; neither he nor Borrelli—to whom my debt was great—could have known of my pretense. The letter was as brief and terse as the meeting that prompted it:
Dear Mr. Carlson,
I am writing to inform you that your request to transfer out of work-study Group A and into Group B has been granted.
GlobePlease be advised than an exception has been made. Based on your commitment to the opportunity we discussed on Sept. 23rd, in my office, the University is making an internship position available to you at the Lewiston Daily Sun in Maine, for the upcoming semester beginning January 3. Our decision is conditional, therefore no further work-study transfers will be granted, and you have been permanently assigned to Group B, and to the referenced position.
Because the assignment was considered hard duty, students were rotated into and out of the job as fast as you can say “stop the presses.” It was not offered to—or accepted by—just anyone. Lewiston, Maine, was a place of self-exile. A paper mill still in operation filled the air with an awful stench, and biting winds in the winter took your breath away. I happened to be indifferent to the cold—in fact I liked it.
The mill made itself known the day I knocked on the door of the flat I’d seen in the Sun and continued to remind me of its presence every day; the flavor was hard to get out of your nose. But I’d heard all the stories. I agreed to the terms of the letter and, with the pen handed me by the dean, and the dean standing over my shoulder, signed my name at the bottom of the page, illegibly.
With an off-kind-of-luck, I was in. I had made a nuisance of myself, and they were giving in to my demands. I announced my good fortune to a handful of friends, and not one understood about seizing the day; they understood less about newspapers. To Robertson-Davies—a friend who insisted that even kindred spirits address him in all the entirety and awkwardness of his surname—I tried to explain how papers like the Sun, which even before the digital age had stared the threat of closure in the eye and not blinked, routinely called on reporters like me—or the reporter I was expected to become—to handle, in addition to their regular responsibilities, unglamorous yet essential work, and that this work included obituaries. I asked Robertson-Davies if his plan was to stock shelves and end-caps with canned vegetables and fruits for the rest of his natural life—I asked him if he had any plan at all—but he did not bite, responding instead, “Carlson, why do you want to write death notices?”
If only he knew: I found it alluring. Still the question has never stopped grating on me.
I could barely feel the chill in the air the day I arrived for my first day of work. Doucette, my new boss, was sporting a handlebar mustache, sideburns more ample and longer than my own, and a spruce goatee that was right for a goat—he thrust it out to make the least quarrelsome points. He wore wire-rimmed eyeglasses high on his nose.
“I don’t know what they told you in Boston—it’s nice there, I know. I’ve visited more than I care to admit. It’s pretty nice here, too. Not many students care for the cold, you know.”
Lewiston was in a state of decay and had been long before the Clay-Liston fight put it back on the map, if briefly. That was in 1965, ten years before I finagled my job, and two years before Clay, after famously landing his phantom punch, changed his name and the world, his religion and draft status, and went to prison for his trouble. The city disappeared again, along with him, and it was from my boss at the Sun, whom I mostly addressed, being timid at first, as Mr. Doucette, that I learned how wrong first impressions of a city can be.
The Sunwas in the hinterlands. A hundred years earlier, a few thousand workers in a town of twenty thousand ran the textile mills. By the time I arrived, on the day after New Year’s, 1975, the working class had gone the way of a long-lost people—extinct among the general population. After dark, around town, the street-corner drunks—they smoked and drank more outside than in, whatever the weather—and the cops on the beat ran the city. The place, Doucette said, had its share of scoundrels and geezers, but time, he continued—helplessly throwing his arms in the air—marches on. He shrugged—what to do? The town was doing well in collapse. It hadn’t always been like that, and most of the residents—the ones who had stayed—were upstanding citizens.
Like the rest of the staff, Doucette smoked his way through the shift. That was OK with me; my father smoked three packs a day, and a fourth one at dinner. Doucette, a wealth of information, continued to bring me up to speed.
More recently—“we’re talking decades, not scores, not centuries,” he said—neighboring municipalities had committed generous sums toward the construction of a new high school, “an Eastern Bloc–looking structure with not enough windows,” to accommodate a hoped-for increase in the number of students. That hope was never fulfilled, so the school now doubled as the site of town meetings, to which I would be assigned first thing tomorrow. The police station had received a much-needed facelift, and the few leftover dollars went to study carrels for the library, though the building turned out to be too old and too small to make use of them. The city’s most accident-prone intersections got crosswalks and traffic lights.
Doucette pushed his glasses higher up on his nose. I thought his face narrow, and the mildness of his manner made me ill-at-ease. He spoke so softly that in order to hear I had to lean forward, and the softer his words, the greater their import. It was entirely possible things would work out, but if not, what good could come of my convoluted arrangements with the university?
The paper came out first thing in the morning. Nothing much happened in that icy little town, and we were not in the business of ruffling feathers. The population was elderly, and my nightly compilation of natural-cause deaths, Doucette told me, was by far the most popular page in the paper. What people did not understand, and could probably never know, was the fair difficulty of getting correct the names, numbers, and places called for by the otherwise simple obituary form. Already rife with the possibility of error, we allocate to it more words than are usually merited, and still it must be written swiftly and sensitively. You cannot write forlornly and well at the same time.
When I tried explaining all this to Robertson-Davies, his face just went blank; he was faultless because ill-informed. He’d accompanied me in search of a flat, and the day we arrived it was storming as usual. At the doorstep, we could hear people carrying on inside. The remarks seemed directed at me but of course could not have been. Nonetheless they had a personal ring. After what must have been more than a minute, standing there windswept on the doorstep in the snow, I was about to turn back when the door was flung open. I stammered an introduction to the elderly couple—my landlords, Mr. and Mrs. Vadnais—who eyed us suspiciously; regardless, they invited us in. Mr. Vadnais spoke first:
“You’re from Boston, is it?”
“Yes sir, from Boston.”
“Haven’t been. You work at the Sun, is it?”
Mr. and Mrs. Vadnais, coordinated in Bates College sweaters, together folded back the doily on the dining room table, offered us water and gestured toward chairs. The apartment was stultifying.
“Yes sir, I do.”
They ignored Robertson-Davies.
Mr. Vadnais placed a copy of the lease before me, stipulating “no loud party, no overnight guests, no drugs, no lots of drinking,” and a host of other restrictions that I did not read. Rent was due weekly. Up front I was to pay both first and last week, another week’s security, a key deposit, a cleaning fee, half the total in cash with the last three items refundable on successful inspection of the property the day I moved out. Notice of severability was seven days for each party.
In the stifling room, I counted out tens and twenties into the palm of Mr. Vadnais under the watchful eye of Mrs. Vadnais, who stood over us smiling, tersely, I thought. Survivors of the Depression, Mr. and Mrs. Vadnais had had the misfortune to watch their city collapse almost literally into the Penobscot River as well as the luck to live long enough to witness today the sight of cars queuing up at gas stations the way the Soviets waited in orderly lines for bread.
I stood up with my copy of the lease, thanked my new landlords and left. As soon as I closed the door behind us I breathed freely; I don’t know about Robertson-Davies. Mr. and Mrs. Vadnais erupted into heated conversation, and it occurred to me to knock on the door. I did not, and headed into the driving snow. On the drive home, Robertson-Davies and I talked about the couple from whom I had rented the flat, and their troubling manner. Still, the price was right, the place was furnished, and I could pay by the week.
The police beat—that was another part of my job. At nine every night, I walked the few blocks to read the police blog, over which Sergeant LeClerc, a man of great girth and spirit, presided. I imagined a longstanding, informal arrangement preceded me in which the sergeant would feed me everyday stories. In return I would not snoop or poke about, or ask many questions, but no. LeClerc had no reason to feed me a story. He moved without urgency, shuffled his papers, and now and then choked out his words in a fit of coughing so violent, it took him a very long minute to recover. He wanted to leave things just as they were, and I complied.
“Save your time, kiddo, nothing there. Family fights, speeding cars. Check back at eleven, I’ll give a call.”
I never checked back and LeClerc never called. By that time I would be up to my neck in notes on a story whose deadline was nearing. It didn’t take long for me to see the wisdom of the arrangement. A one-paper hamlet, we competed only with the evening edition of ourselves; the chances that something would happen in the hours before the Sun went to press were negligible.
LeClerc waved me off and crossed out a day on the girly calendar on the wall.
I stepped outside into bittercold air, face-first and hatless into the wind, and made my way to the new improved crosswalk, outside Painters Pub. Drunks ambled up to me, angling for smokes. They could see how wet I was, right there behind the ears, but not having cigarettes, I offered them money, because most were in need, harmless but skilled at exploiting that side of me that was soft. We stood there awhile, getting brittle together.
I could see the comings and goings of the office. Behind my desk, in the back, linotypes grinding out newsprint produced enough heat to burn a downtown three-decker to the ground. The heat was tremendous; I mean it was feverish. The pressroom machinery thundered like freight trains passing through the office. The buzz and the hum, the prattle of telephones jangled the nerves and at times it was hard to concentrate, really think there; and all night from above, wan fluorescent lighting deadened the senses and hindered performance.
None of this bothered my colleagues, all of them comfortable in their own skin and impressive in their accomplishments. Margaret, a matronly lady, shuffled in late, left religiously early, and returned the next day, unburdened by the world. As a reporter she was masterful, an adept on the phone who did not use a notebook, a marvel able to cut off her subjects and flatter with the shrewdest of prompts, composing the while, directly on the typewriter, near-perfect drafts that Doucette deigned to eyeball before walking them back—sheepishly, as if after all those years he had never caught on to her excellence and perfection—to the compositor.
The state house reporter, barely older than me and in accordance with the times, wore a wide leather belt through the loops of his jeans; the sports department that I purportedly wanted to join consisted of an easy-ambling guy who attacked his keyboard with two calloused fingers and such ferocity that his keystrokes carved holes the shape of letters in his copy. On his own, Mac was up to the task, but if he had not been they could not have paid me enough to do his job. It was sports, yes, but high school sports and, willing or not, Mac was plain-as-day doomed to hunt-and-peck stories on local athletic heroes and villains, their exploits and college pursuits, for the rest of his working life. In his third decade with the Sun, however, the Clay-Liston fight found its way into town, and Mac found himself ringside. Not since the French had settled the city, he said, had Lewiston seen such a historic event.
The source of the only bad news I received at the Sunwas the funeral home and its director, Guy Verlaine, who, unlike LeClerc, fed me nightly. Night after night he blew in like a storm, a carnation stemmed in his camel’s hair coat, rubbers stretched tight across Italian-leather shoes, ushering in gusts of Arctic-like air that swept through the length of the newsroom; I could feel the glacial chill coming off him at my desk near the heat and din of the linotypes, and welcomed it. He was dapper and friendly, a dandy of sorts whose disposition was sunny, who became for me at that time a sort of friend. Guy went about in mittens and hats, never earmuffs or gloves, and greeted me with mock vainglorious propriety.
“Good evening, young sir!” he would say. “This cold and bitter night finds you healthy and hale, I trust?”
“It does, Guy,” I would answer. “It does.”
One night—it was not long before my time at the Sunwas up—Guy opened a sunshine-colored binder atop a stack of business announcements on my desk, clapping his muffled hands together. Inside it were scribbled notes on the recently dead, their mourners, their relatives, fact sheets and business cards, brochures about caskets. “Our business tonight involves only one,” he said, removing a large glossy from a clear plastic sleeve. “Perhaps it’s news.”
The photo was of a young man in uniform, positioned before an indistinct background. He must have been instructed to turn his head toward an object just above the left shoulder of the photographer, and his pose succeeded in suggesting nobility and courage. The date it was taken was stamped on the back but I could not make it out.
“Just this then?”
“The one and only, young sir. The rest of us get another reprieve.”
Guy left me his scribbled notes and strolled out, doffing his hat in a mannered salute. I studied the photo again. What a card! The habits of speech, the rubbers and mittens; perhaps it is news? We would never stop seeing that kind of obituary.
So here was an obit. I wrote it up fast: A couple had lost their son in the war. Survived by both parents and family, some local. A funeral Mass, interment to follow, calling hours at Guy’s, in lieu of flowers, visitors welcome. Not to linger on anguish, I made the obituary short and sweet, and moved on to make-work.
The high school was as Doucette described it: a concrete creature, built with one eye on aesthetics and the other on fiscal responsibility. The town affairs were deliberated there, and as often as not I sat unobtrusively, wordlessly taking notes; without reporters in the room, people spoke more freely, so I stayed out of view, and faded away.
If my interests were narrow and my questions few—if I lacked a searching curiosity—I was not entirely guileless. Due, apparently, to a story I wrote on an art exhibit at the high school gymnasium—the artist was somebody locally famous, a painter of seagulls and lighthouses—I became, unofficially, the arts and entertainment guy, a role I neither relished nor asked for. Doucette must have considered the story incisive. Thereafter, any circus that rolled into town—“World-ranked chess champ takes on dozens”; “Farmer’s Almanac 95% right, editor says”—all such stories fell to me.
Ingloriously, and unexpectedly, the chess champ lost two of his twenty-seven matches. Even if I had been inclined to do so—and I was not so inclined—I would not have had the heart to ask him about it. One night, a visiting scholar from the Sorbonne addressed an audience of twelve at the St. John the Baptist Church—I counted heads but did not include the count in my story, for why make another man look bad?—on the topic of the Chartres Cathedral, so famous, yet so unknown to me. At the start of his talk, he warned against spelling the name of the church incorrectly; it was his experience that just about every reporter and newspaper could be counted on to get it wrong, and I understood his remarks to be directed at me, at the back of the empty church where I sat, in a semblance of anonymity, taking notes and straining to hear.
The scholar whose name now escapes me—I could look it up in my clippings if pressed—droned on. I starred the word: C-h-a-r-t-r-e-s. I circled it, capped it, underlined it; I littered my notes with it. I doodled the problematic letters in question. But I was prone to rookie mistakes.
Three people, including me, read the story I turned in that night. And next morning there it was, in big Bodoni Bold type: Charters. The mistake led to a call from the scholar, who reminded Doucette that he’d cautioned his audience against just such a mistake, and as fast as my fortunes had begun to bear fruit, they as quickly began a wintry wilt.
I must have been off my game, like the chess player. From most perspectives his performance was singular. It’s an unfair comparison, but even so—Doucette’s reaction was not easy to read. He seemed weary and bemused, at what exactly I could not say.
They uncovered my typescripts in the trash. Real reporters retained their notes and their scratchpads but the half-life of my own notes could be measured in hours. Crippled in the face of disorder, I routinely swept them off the desk.
Doucette laid the typescripts down on my typewriter. Most of us worked on old-fashioned manuals; we really banged away at them, filling the newsroom with clamor and babel. Had my father not smoked his three packs a day, Doucette, enveloped in billowing smoke, might have choked me to death simply standing there. So I thanked the old man at the back of my mind. Doucette said only that I could have done better.
A couple of days after the Charters event—that’s how it came to be known in the newsroom—an elderly couple stood facing Doucette. He sprang to greet them like a cat but the look on his face to my mind was canine. The elderly couple were graven and ashen-faced, distinct to me in the fog of the newsroom. Doucette shook his head in commiseration and grimaced. I felt he was scheming; he gestured toward me. “That young man right there,” he told them. “He can help you, if anyone can.”
Then my landlords were at my desk, looking down at me. I remembered the staleness of their home. The deceased soldier’s father—that’s who he turned out to be—held a black-banded fedora over his heart. Mrs. Vadnais, I thought, would dissolve like a pillar of salt, into tears, but did not. When she lowered her head, as if penitent, I could see to the roots of her hair, gone gray or about to. Were they seeking my pardon? It turned out to be otherwise.
Addressing me as Mister, they thanked me for what they called the writeup on their son. I had noted the sacrifice he made to his country and stressed the significance of his loss to the Lewiston community at large. Verlaine’s big tip came back into mind—perhaps it was news? I could not have expected him to tell me who, exactly, the slain soldier was—the way people knew him, why they chose to, why they bothered at all. Even so. These were the things Vadnais was getting at—human interest. But he had the wrong department, I wasn’t that at all. I did include the man’s high school successes, athletic and academic both; I had checked all my facts.
Mac especially remembered him: “The Vadnais kid? A legend. And modest? I had to coach him on how to answer my questions. I wrote out the answers and had him sign off. Smart, though. Maybe the kid was shy. I don’t know.” But Mac was prone to exaggeration; how else could his work attract readers?
“We’ve come for his photo,” Mr. Vadnais was saying. On his face he wore the look of the lost and forlorn, and dread had begun to animate me in a way I imagined to be unnatural. I was trembling but only slightly so and was just beginning to gather myself when Vadnais spoke again about the photo—the black-and-white eight-by-ten that he had given to Mr. Verlaine of his uniformed son and which turned out to be the one and only copy the couple owned. I no longer had it, and Mrs. Vadnais began sniffling, as if she had seen me sweep it into the trash or believed I had done so, but that would not have been accurate, it’s not what happened, I had no memory of its fate and can only describe its disappearance as a mystery. All this I did my best to explain, but I had made the kind of unforgivable mistake that can only befall the obituary writer; and the best I could do, in that time and place, was express my despair at the regrettable mishap, and how miserable I felt, and offer my apologies to the stricken couple, who had already turned away from me and from the clamor of the linotypes and begun making their way to the exit.
The following day, Mr. and Mrs. Vadnais, angry and saddened by my role in the debacle, and understandably crestfallen, exercised the clause in the lease allowing either party to cancel. I had a week to get out, which was just as well, for neither was I long for the Sun. The same day my landlords canceled the lease, I ran into Doucette on my way to the office. He stopped me before I could enter the building.
“Have you no horse sense?” he cried. “That man was at war!”
I thought to answer in kind, or explain myself; surely there were other copies or a negative. Instead I fell silent, becalmed by the cold. The Lewiston air clung closely to the fabric of Doucette’s coat; it stiffened him as he trembled, and for an instant I was sure I’d been right about the man. He gave me a week to clean out my desk, and what little was on it.
From the start I’d been on my own at the Sun. But I owed my job depended on to the aging population. I was still a young man; I thought it OK to consult the old man.
He didn’t know how or exactly why, but I had bitten off more than I could chew and placed myself in a predicament. He did his best to fathom my predicament as I described it to him, and I expected he might describe a way for me to suffer it. But no. He did not insist I return to school, or look into getting my old job back; he suggested instead, as a parting gesture, that I find a rock the size of a baseball and throw it “directly through the picture window of the Frenchman.”
I considered doing exactly that, until I realized that my father’s faith in my aim and accuracy was unwarranted.
It was a common little town on another side of history. In the years to come, Somalis began to populate the French-Canadian neighborhoods, and I remembered the old man’s long-ago grumble about cooling his heels at the Arc de Triomphe, in order that the Resistance could pass under it first. In my final days there—Doucette had placed me on pencil-sharpening duty—I discovered in the archives that the city and the Sun had locked horns more than once: the police station facelift, gone well over budget, had been suspiciously managed, with my friend LeClerc offering pious “no comments”; the downtown intersections widened for traffic, the funds for which had been misappropriated, were today no less accident-prone than before; and counting Doucette, more than a few found a lot to dislike about the Eastern Bloc high school.