The Thomas Berryman Number

Getting no answer from me, Cooper slowly shook his head. He shut the door again. I heard him swearing outside. Very slowly, I was getting an emotional grasp of the situation I was involved in: I was starting to understand genuine fear of being hurt; the ability to take lives; fast, unexpected death.

Eventually I regrouped and left the building. I sent the three photographs to Lewis Rosten in Nashville. Then I spent the rest of the day visiting psychiatrists and psychologists who’d worked with Ben Toy.

I also ate a pork chop sandwich in a lunch shop run by some Greek men. The chop was silver-dollar size with the bone still in it. Because of the bone, the Greek men couldn’t cut the sandwich. I ate around it, not completely understanding how or why people live in New York City.

That night, after dinner with Alan Shulman, I called home.

My wife Nan said she was missing me, and I was missing her too. Nan knows how to put me on an even keel, and I’d been flying just a little too high in New York.

We talked about the Berryman story, and talking with her I began to feel that I’d accomplished some things.

After we finished, Nan put on my daughters for two minutes each.

Janie Bug said almost nothing. Then she started to cry because her time was up.

Little Cat said she’d pray for me at Trinity Episcopal if I promised to bring her back one of those miniature Empire State Buildings.

That kind of thing (attitude) upsets me, but I don’t know what to do about it.

I tried to go to sleep, but I couldn’t quite get there.

Amagansett, July 13

Random Observation

: I’d been handed a ticket on the fast rail, and I was well on my way to God knew where. It was Tom Wickerdom or bust.

Or was it? I began to remember strange, sad stories about men called “assassination buffs.” I remembered people laughing at the expense of an ex-newsman from Memphis who was still dredging up facts about Martin Luther King’s murder.

My body was trying to accept another northern morning. It was agreeably warm outside, but springwarm.

It was 8 A.M. and I was badly in need of a caffeine fix. I had to settle for nicotine, American-tobacco style.

Cigarette in hand, I surveyed a big, gray Victorian-style house bordering the yard of William Seward Junior High in Amagansett. I was fingering a rash under my new beard. In retrospect, I think the lack of sleep had caught up with me.

The big house had four white gables and a black Fleetwood sticking out of the garage. The house number told me it was Miss Ettie Hatfield’s place, and I was properly impressed with the living style of the Bowditch nurse.

Miss Hatfield had been night charge nurse on Bowditch for over thirty-five years. Both Shulman and Ronald Asher said she was the only person on Bowditch Ben Toy might have opened up to. Miss Hatfield was a magical old lady, they said. She was the one who’d originally alerted Shulman to the Jimmie Horn references in Toy’s ramblings.

I could distinguish a bald head reading a newspaper inside the house’s darkened living room. Steam was drifting up from a coffee cup on the windowsill.

I slogged up the spongy-wet front lawn, stood on a wet, bristle mat, and tried to get a brass lionhead to make noise for me. The knocker would stick on the downswing—then it would make a sound like

ttthummm.

Stick, then

ttthummm.

“Doesn’t work right.” A man’s voice finally came from inside. “I’m coming around. I’m coming around.”

He of the bald head, an ancient fellow in a plaid shirt with black string tie, finally opened up the front door.

He was Miss Hatfield’s father, and he appeared to be well into his nineties. He shook from Parkinson’s disease, he told me, but other than that, everything was shipshape.

“She’s sleepin’ now,” he said after we’d gotten our autobiographies in order. “Works nights up the hospital. I just picked her up seven-fifteen.”

The old man looked down at a handsome gold watch, searched the dial for arms, looked back up at me.

“Made my fortune sellin’ these Benruses,” he remarked. “You’re about six foot six, aren’t you?” he went on.

“Six foot seven,” I blushed, then slouched out of an old,

no, I don’t play basketball

habit.

Mr. Hatfield shook his head and made a clucking noise with his cheek. “Seventy-nine fuckin’ inches,” he said. “Here I stand sixty-one and a half. Used to be sixty-four. Hell, Ettie’s near sixty-three herself.”

I couldn’t help laughing at the way he’d said it, and the old man chortled along with me. I asked what time I should come back to talk with his daughter.

“Aw hell, I’m goin’ to wake her now.”

He gave me a little hand signal to follow him inside. “She’s been expectin’ you all yesterday. Ever since Ben Toy told her you come. I ever let you get away, she’d cut me off my cream of wheat.”

He went up the stairs chucking to himself. He was a country boy, in his own quaint Long Island, N.Y., way.

I met Miss Hatfield in a parlor room

already

smelling strongly of musk.