Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade by Walter Kirn

Author:Walter Kirn
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9780871407337
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2014-03-03T08:00:00+00:00

TEN

IT WAS THE summer of 2002, about a month before my fortieth birthday and the terrible accident-miracle involving my son Charlie and the blue truck. Because I, like the rest of the country, was in a crouch, bracing for the next bombing, I don’t remember the weather that season, just that there was some. I don’t remember the headlines, just that they could have been much worse. Clark was living in New Hampshire, where he’d moved in early 2000 from New York after first retreating to Nantucket following the supposed nervous breakdown that led him to ask me about staying on my ranch. He’d bought the estate of the late Judge Learned Hand, a famous mid-century liberal jurist of whom I knew nothing except that I probably should know more. Clark seemed proud of the place and insisted that I come see it every time we spoke.

One reason I finally agreed to visit was that he’d been hounding me for ages about a series of novels he’d written and wanted me to edit, for a fee, which would presumably be more than I’d gotten for hauling Shelby to New York. I was headed to Boston anyway for a meeting with my Atlantic editors. I hadn’t flown much in the run of months since the World Trade Center fell, and it was time—time to mount up again, to normalize. Still, Clark sniffed out a certain hesitation, and said he’d pulled strings to secure a room for me at his Boston club, the Athenaeum.

The staff treated me like a proper Rockefeller, not the favor-taking guest of one. I hated the establishment nonetheless. Its rooms had an eerie, evacuated quality, as though the club’s departed members had inhaled all its air and energy and carried them down into their tombs. Clark loved such lamplit, varnished dessication, but without him beside me fizzing with boasts and tattle I felt out of place. Princeton had had the same effect on me. The density of its traditions weighed on me. I lay in my bedroom with nothing else to do, too jazzed from flying to go to sleep, and meditated on the Yankee heritage that Clark identified with so eagerly. Its New York version stimulated me, exuding glamor and excitement, but its pinched, moralistic New England version unsettled me. I associated it with ghost stories—Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and the like—and with Hawthorne’s tales of repressed hysteria. The local blend of religion and enlightenment, virtue and reason, left me worse than cold; it struck me as bloodless and inhuman, a formula for manias and crusades. Learned Hand—what a name! Was his portrait around here somewhere? He sounded like a bony, spry old warlock.

At lunch with Robert and Michael, my editors, the talk was of Iraq, the coming war. Michael, who supported it, would later join the troops in Baghdad and be the first U.S. journalist to die there when the Humvee he was riding in was fired on and overturned in a canal.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.