Joe Gould's Secret by Mitchell Joseph;

Author:Mitchell, Joseph;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media

The next night, I went into Goody’s again. Gould was sitting at a table across from the bar. There was an empty beer glass in front of him. He was wearing the same dirty seersucker suit that he had been wearing at our first meeting, only now it was much dirtier and had a bad rip at the shoulder. It looked as if somewhere along the line someone had given his left sleeve an angry jerk, ripping it half off at the shoulder. I went over and sat down and returned the composition books and the little magazines that I had got from him, and thanked him for letting me read them.

“You were disappointed,” he said accusingly.

“Oh, no,” I said.

“Yes you were,” he said. “I can tell.”

“To be honest,” I said, “I was. I understood from what you told me that the Oral History was mostly talk, but there wasn’t any talk in the chapters you lent me or in the ones I saw at Siskind’s.”

Gould threw up his hands. “Naturally there wasn’t,” he said. “There are two kinds of chapters in the Oral History—essay chapters and oral chapters. As it happens, all those you read were essay chapters.”

This remark instantly cleared up my puzzlement about the Oral History; it seemed to explain everything. I took Gould’s empty glass over to the bar and got him a beer. Then, sitting down, I told him I would like very much to read some of the oral chapters.

“Oh, Lord,” Gould said. “Since we’ve gone this far, there’s something about the Oral History I’ll have to tell you—something about its present whereabouts. I was hoping I could keep it quiet, but I can see now I would’ve had to let people know about it sooner or later anyhow.” He frowned and cocked his eyes at the ceiling and stroked his bearded chin and seemed to be casting around in his mind for the simplest way to tell about something that was extraordinarily involved. “Oh, well, to go back a little,” he said, “a woman I know who used to work in the main branch of the Public Library retired several years ago and bought a duck-and-chicken farm on Long Island, and last Thanksgiving she invited me out there. I’m not going to tell you her name or the exact location of her farm, so don’t ask me any questions. It’s an isolated place, out on a dirt road. Huntington is the nearest railroad station, but it’s a considerable distance from Huntington. There are two houses on the place. One is a frame house, and a Polish farmer and his wife live in it and look after the ducks and chickens. The other is an old stone house, and my friend and a niece of hers live in it. My friend showed me over the house, including the cellar. The cellar was snug and dry and whitewashed, and it was partitioned into one large room and three small rooms. The small rooms were built to be used for storage, and had good strong doors.

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