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I did two tours in Vietnam. Got out in June of ’71. Nobody spit on me when I got off the plane in New York, and no one called me a baby killer. Of course no one thanked me for my service, either, so I guess that’s a wash. This story—memoir? confession?—has nothing to do with Nam, except it does. It does. If I hadn’t spent twenty-six months humping the boonies, I might have tried to stop Elgin when we saw the teeth. Not that I would have had much luck with that. The Gentleman Scientist meant to see it through, and in a way he did. But I could have walked away at least. I didn’t because the young man who went to Vietnam wasn’t the same young man who came back. That young man was empty. Emotions scrubbed. So what happened, happened. I don’t hold myself responsible. He would have gone on regardless. I just know I stayed even when I knew we were edging past sanity. I suppose I wanted to wake myself up again. I suppose I did.
I went back to Maine and stayed with my mother for awhile in Skowhegan. She was doing all right. Assistant manager at George’s Banana Stand, sounds like a roadside stall but it’s a grocery store. She told me I’d changed and I said I know. She asked me what I was going to do for work and I said I’d find something in Portland. I said I’d do what I learned from Sissy and she said that sounded good. I think she was glad to see the back of me. I think I made her nervous. I asked her once if she missed my father or my stepfather. She said my father. Of Lester she said good riddance to bad rubbish.
I bought a used car and drove to Portland and applied for work at a place called Temp-O. The woman who took my application said, “I don’t see where you went to school.” She was Mrs. Frobisher.
“I didn’t.”
“Didn’t what?”
“Go to school.”
“You don’t understand, young man. We hire stenographers here to fill in when someone is sick or quits. Some of our temps work in district court.”
“Try me,” I said.
“Do you know Gregg?”
“Yes. I learned from my sister. I was helping her with her homework, but I turned out to be better.”
“Where is your sister working?”
“She died.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Mrs. Frobisher didn’t sound sorry and I didn’t blame her. People have problems enough coping with their own tragedies without taking on the tragedies of others. “How many words a minute?”
“Hundred and eighty.”
She smiled. “Really.”
“Really.”
“I doubt it.”
I said nothing. She handed me a pad and a #2 Eberhard Faber. “I’d like to see a hundred and eighty in action. That would be a treat.”
I flipped open the pad. I thought of Sissy and me sitting in her room, she at her desk in a circle of lamplight, me on the bed. She said I was better than her. She said how I picked it up like a dream, which was true. It was like picking up Vietnamese, also the Tay and Muong dialects. It’s not a skill, just a knack. I could see words turning into pothooks and hangers. Thick strokes, thin strokes, curls. They marched across my mind in lockstep. You could ask me if I liked it and I’d say sometimes. The way a person likes breathing sometimes. Most of the time you just do it.
“Are you ready?”
“Born ready.”
“We’ll see about that.” Then, very fast, “The quality of mercy is not strained it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath you can’t just walk in off the street and say you can transcribe a hundred and eighty it is twice blessed both he who gives and he who takes. Now read that back to me.”
I read it back to her without telling her she got the last part of Portia’s speech a few words wrong. She just looked at me for a few seconds, then said, “I’ll be goddamned.”
I worked at Temp-O for the next ten months or so. We were losing in Vietnam. It didn’t take a genius to see it. Sometimes people don’t stop when they should. Saying that makes me think of Elgin. The Gentleman Scientist.
There were four of us when I started, then six, then down to three, then back up to six again. Temping was a high-turnover job. They were all women except for Pearson, a tall drink of water with a bald spot he tried to cover and eczema around his nose and the corners of his mouth. Around his mouth it looked like dried spit. Pearson was there when I came and there when I left. He could do maybe sixty words a minute. On a good day. If you went too fast he’d tell you to slow down, slow down. I know because sometimes when it was slow the bunch of us would race. Two minutes of TV ads. Dishwashing liquid. Toothpaste. Paper towels. Things women who watch daytime TV buy. I always won. After awhile Pearson wouldn’t even try. He called it a childish game. I don’t know why Mrs. Frobisher kept Pearson on. She wasn’t fucking him or anything. I think maybe he was like something you get used to overlooking, like a pile of Christmas cards on the hall table that are still there come Valentine’s Day. He didn’t like me. I didn’t feel one way or the other about him, because that was how I rolled in ’71 and ’72. But it was Pearson who introduced me to Elgin. Or so you could say. He didn’t mean to do it.
We’d come in around eight-thirty or nine and sit in the back room there on Exchange Street, drinking coffee and eating doughnuts and watching a little portable TV or reading. Sometimes having a race. There were usually two or three copies of the Press Herald and Pearson always had one of them, muttering away at the stories and rubbing at his eczema so it snowed down in flurries. Mrs. Frobisher would call for Anne or Diane or Stella if it was an ordinary job. I mostly got court if someone was out sick. I had to learn the stenograph and I had to wear a stenomask, but that was all right. I got sent to high-powered meetings sometimes where recording devices were verboten. Then it was just me and my pad. So far as I liked any job, I liked those. Sometimes I’d transcribe and then have to hand over my pad. That was all right. Sometimes I got tipped.
Pearson used to drop sections of the paper on the floor when he finished with them. Diane called that slutty behavior one day and Pearson told her that if she didn’t like it she could just roll it small and stick it up her ass and a week or two later Diane left. Some days I would pick up the sections Pearson dropped and glance through them. The back room, which we called the bullpen, got boring when there were no jobs. The game shows and talk shows were tiresome. I always carried a paperback but this one day, the day I found out about Elgin (although I didn’t know his name just then because it wasn’t in the ad), the book I was reading didn’t engage my attention. It was a warbook written by a man who didn’t know anything about war.
It was the ad section I got hold of. Cars for sale by owner on one page and help wanted on the other. I cast my eye down the help wanteds, not exactly looking for another job, I was okay with Temp-O, just passing the time. The words Gentleman Scientist in boldface caught my eye. And the word phlegmatic. Not a word often seen in classified ads.
GENTLEMAN SCIENTIST wants assistant to aid in series of experiments. Stenographic expertise a must (60-80 wpm or better). Excellent wages upon receipt of excellent references. Confidentiality and phlegmatic temperament also a must.
There was a number. Curious to know who wanted a phlegmatic assistant, I called it. Passing the time. That was Thursday noon. On Saturday I drove seventy or so miles to Castle Rock in my used Ford and out Lake Road, which ended at Dark Score Lake. On the beach was a large stone house with a gated drive and a small stone house behind it where I came to live while in the employ of Elgin, the Gentleman Scientist. The house wasn’t a mansion, but it was close. There was a Volkswagen Bug and a Mercedes in the driveway. The Bug had a Maine plate and a flower decal on the gas hatch and a bumper sticker saying STOP THE WAR. I recognized it. The Mercedes had a Massachusetts plate. I thought it must belong to the Gentleman Scientist, which turned out right. I never knew where Elgin’s money came from. Maybe gentlemen don’t tell. What I thought was that he inherited it because he had no job so far as I could tell except for gentleman science and called the not-quite-a-mansion his summer place. I don’t know where the winter place was. Probably Boston or one of those outlying suburbs where the only Black or Asian faces you ever saw were pushing lawnmowers or serving lunch. I could have investigated these things, asked around town because town people have a way of knowing things and if you ask the right way they will always tell you, they want to tell you, nothing passes the time like gossip, and I did know the right way having grown up in a small town myself and elided my r’s as good Yankees do, but that wasn’t “where I was at,” as we used to say back then. I didn’t care if it was Weston or Brookline or the Back Bay. I didn’t even want the job or not want it. I wasn’t sick or anything, but I wasn’t a well man. You might understand that or you might not. Most nights I didn’t get much sleep and darkness is full of long hours. Most nights I fought the war and the war won. It’s an old story, I know. You can see it on television once a week.
