“Name,” I read again from the letter, and the paper shook in my hands. “He is using the name of Edward, in a series of messages, to families of those who were harmed in the 1994 pension theft. He writes that he is a reporter, finishing a book. He offers to keep their names out of it, for a fee.” I looked up at my grandson. Ryan, twenty four, stood in the doorway of the study with his jaw clenched and his eyes on the carpet. Arthur Bowman, the antique dealer, who had found the letter wedged under the roller of the old Underwood, cleared his throat and stared at the ceiling.
The letter was typed on a manual machine, with the capital E dropping a little below the line the way it always did. Edward, my husband, wrote it a month before he died. He wrote that he had begun to suspect Ryan in the autumn. Money was missing from his reporter fund. A phone call had come from a man in Reading who said the nephew of Edward was asking for payments. Edward had not told me because he could not bear to be right. He asked me, in the final paragraph, to check the old typewriter, because he had left something there for me.
Under the platen lay a second sheet, folded very small. It was a list in his square hand: eleven names and eleven sums. Families in Lancaster County whose fathers had lost their pensions when the union treasurer vanished in 1994. A girl named Tess had sent six hundred dollars. A widower named Hollister had sent twelve hundred. Edward had been writing a book about that theft for ten years. Ryan, it seemed, had taken the notes and used them as a map. “Grandma,” he said, in a voice I did not recognize, “I can explain.”
A typewriter remembers every word, even the ones a husband hoped never to type.
I let him. That was the hardest thing I have ever done. I sat in the chair of my husband, hands folded, and I let my grandson tell me about the gambling, the loan he took out in college that grew like a weed, and the man in Harrisburg who was threatening him. He said he intended to repay it all. He said he picked on people he thought would never find out. He said the book had been his idea, then not his idea, then something he stole because Edward was dead and could not mind. He cried. I did not. Outside, the March wind pushed at the shutters, and the clock on the mantel ticked on as though nothing in the world had changed. Arthur Bowman quietly studied his shoes.
When he was done, I picked up the telephone. Ryan went white. “Grandma, please.” “I am calling Mrs. Hollister,” I said. “I am going to tell her that her twelve hundred dollars is coming back to her this week. Then I am going to tell the sheriff. Then, if you like, we can both go.” I dialed. Mrs. Hollister, eighty one, answered on the fourth ring, and I told her plainly, and she was quiet for a moment, and then she said, “Margaret, I knew your Edward would not have asked.”
I sold the house in Lancaster, the big one with the porch, to cover the repayments. I sold the Underwood last, to Arthur, for four thousand dollars, and the sum went to the girl named Tess. Eleven families received every dollar by Thanksgiving. Ryan pleaded guilty to wire fraud in the federal court in Harrisburg. He received eighteen months and ordered restitution. Standing in the courtroom in a borrowed suit, he looked at me over his shoulder, and I nodded once. It was all the mercy I had.
In the end, Arthur Bowman surprised me. He found the book. Edward had left forty pages of the manuscript in the false bottom of the typewriter case, wrapped in wax paper. The title, in his hand, was The Quiet Men. It told the real story of the union treasurer, the one that no one at the time had been brave enough to say, and it named names. Arthur drove it himself to a small press in Philadelphia. He said he had never in forty years in the antique business held anything so valuable.
The book came out the following spring. It was short, and plain, and the cover was a photograph of a typewriter. The reviews were kind. A man who had once been a union treasurer was indicted at the age of eighty, and died before trial. Eleven families wrote me letters. I answered each one with a cup of tea and a pen. I wrote that Edward would have been grateful, and I told them the truth: that he never knew whether anyone would read it.
I visited Ryan in November, at the minimum security camp near Allenwood. He wore green, and a thin gray sweater, and looked ten years younger than the boy who had stood in my study. We sat at a plastic table. He said he had been reading the notes of Edward in the prison library. He asked whether he could finish the rest of the book. Not to sell, he said. Just to understand the man. I told him he could, when he was released. He put his hand over his eyes.
I still keep a typewriter on the desk in the study. It is a new used one, a Royal, that Arthur found for me. I type a single page each Sunday, on thin paper, and I fold it into an envelope, and I mail it to the camp, and sometimes to Tess. The letters say very little. They say the garden is up, and the neighbors are well, and the world is still turning. But they always end the same way. I am here. Write back. It is a small thing. But I have found that a letter is a kind of door, and I mean to keep mine open until the day I cannot stand to reach it.
