The Tree of Forgetfulness Read Free Page B

fingers rising and falling, picking and twisting. He was still in uniform, the red cross of the medical corps on both sleeves, and whenever he looked up at the train, people smiled down at him or nodded solemnly, as though they knew him. In one car a woman held a little boy up to the windowand pointed. The boy waved and smiled and saluted, and when he only waved back, the child pouted and hid his face in his mother’s shoulder. No doubt, once the train was moving, and the only way off was to jump, the woman and the boy would walk through the cars until they found him, and then they would stand there and wait for him to return the salute the boy was owed.
    He could not trust himself to be reasonable if that happened, so he cashed in his ticket, rented a room. A few days later, reading the
New York World
in a coffee shop in Times Square, he’d come across Joseph Pulitzer’s statement on the mission of his newspaper: “An institution that should always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.” The hard, clear certainty of it had moved him, and he’d realized it wasn’t just the flying spindles he couldn’t go back to; it was the piety of the Sunday dinner table as well, the prime rib and Potatoes Anna, his father’s interminable prayer for the well-being of his business. A few days later he wired home: “Detained in NY. Don’t wait up.”
    â€œGod bless and keep you, son,” his father had wired back. “Come home when you can.” He hadn’t expected more.
    Carrying the hard black case that held his typewriter, he stepped down from the train in Aiken, South Carolina, walked through the station and out the double doors at the front. He set the case down under the portico. He took a cigarette out of a silver case and tapped it on the case and lit up, blew the smoke straight up into the air.
Take a good look
. People would be watching, Leland had said. Count on it. A porter followed, pushing a handcart on which were piled two brown leather suitcases with CNRB stamped in gold just above the handle. He gave the man a dollar bill, went back to smoking. The sun slanted through pinesand palmettos at a low, early-morning angle. In a small oak beside the station, blue jays squabbled; a smell of woodsmoke hung in the air.
    Curtis N. R. Barrett, what kind of name was that?
people eating lunch at the counter at the Savoy would say to one another, throwing their napkins down in disgust. It suits him right well, they’d say; it matches the vanity of the thick, wavy hair combed back just so, the dark vest and trousers and white shirt, the silver cuff links and collar pin, the dark glasses and that signet ring on the pinkie finger of the hand that brought the cigarette up to his mouth and down again. Another big shot New York reporter come to tar a community of decent people for the actions of the lawless few. He stood in front of the station, smoking, and watched the fountain splash.
Take a good damn look
. A few people did, slowing their cars. A man in overalls driving a wagon pulled by two dusty mules stared at him as he passed then turned his head to keep looking. The breeze picked up and rustled the fronds of the palmettos in front of the station. He smelled breakfast in the air.
    Two days earlier his editor, Bayard Swope, had summoned him to his office. “King of the
World
,” reporters called Swope. It was a joke, but also true. His window offered a king’s vista—the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge, with its symphony of cables. Swope was a famous gambler, lucky