The Unearned

The letter came in October and it came through my uncle, which meant the whole hollow read it before I did.

It was on paper with a name engraved at the top, and it said that a person whose name I was not to be told had made certain arrangements on my behalf, and that if I would present myself at the office of Harlan Voss, attorney at law, in Pittsburgh, on a Tuesday in the following week, the matter would be made plain.

Uncle Delbert read it at the counter, twice, and then folded it along the crease it already had, and said the words I have heard all my life in that voice.

"Well, now. That woman."

Everybody said that woman. That woman had the mine, that woman had the house, that woman had a ward of a girl who was said to have gone to Switzerland twice, and now that woman was going to make a gentleman out of Emmet Boggs's brother-in-law, and hold it over the hollow for a generation. It was the most natural thing in the world. It was the only thing. I had gone up that ridge every week for six years with stained hands, and now I was going to come down rich, and there was no other story that fitted. I have thought since that I did not believe it even then, and that I wanted it too much to ask, which is how most people come by the things that ruin them.

I did not ask Emmet's opinion, because I already knew it, and because I had begun the practice of not asking men their opinion when I had decided to do the thing anyway.

Mr. Voss's office was on the eleventh floor of a building with a stone lobby and one working elevator, and there was coal dust on the sill of his window because there is coal dust on the sill of every window in that city.

He was a heavy man with a heavy watch chain. He did not stand when I came in. He talked about the arrangements the way a man reads out a shipping manifest, and he had them written on a card he did not hand me: so much for tuition, so much for lodging, so much for clothes, drawn quarterly, no questions, and one condition — that I never ask the source.

"Sources," said Mr. Voss, "are not information. Sources are other people's business."

I said yes, sir.

He looked at me a while, with his hands flat on the desk like a man who has heard too many yes, sirs.

"Who do you think it is?"

I did not answer that either, but I turned red, and he read the whole of my education in it.

"I see." He looked at his watch, which told him the same thing his sill had told me. "Mr. Pryor. Understand me. I am paid to arrange, and I arrange for people whose business is not mine. If you ever discover the name, you will come back to this office, and you will sit in that chair, and you will tell me what you know." He said it without any particular interest, as a man reads a clause. "You are not the first name on that ledger and you will not be the last. That's all. You can go."

While he talked I read the top page of the file in front of him, the way I had read everything all my life, without asking whether it was mine: a schedule of payments, and under them a column of names in a hand that was not his, and one of them was a woman's name, and it meant nothing to me, and I never afterward could decide whether he had left the page open on purpose. A woman came in with a tray of paper and went out again, and neither of them said a word to her, and she had a scar through her lip, and I did not look at her twice.

At the door he added one thing, and it is the only thing out of that office I have never been able to put down.

"Your benefactor," he said, "has arranged for people before. They didn't last. If you want my advice — and nobody ever does — be expensive to keep."

In the spring, at eighteen, I went to the city.

I found it out from the inside the way a man finds out about water: not by being told but by being cold. I lodged in two rooms at the back of a brownstone off Amsterdam Avenue, and I studied under a man named Julius Perlman.

Professor Perlman took in young men of doubtful origin and doubtful prospects and tried to make them into something that would survive a dinner table. He told me once that an education was a set of tools for noticing things, and that the tools were no use to a man who did not want to notice, and it took me ten years to find out he was right.

His son Sandy was my age and had a gift for arithmetic and a worse gift for schemes, and he was the only person in that city who asked me where I was from.

That is not quite accurate. He asked me once, that first week. I said West Virginia. He said, "The one with the mountains or the one with the other mountains," and when I told him, he said, "Good, I've never met anybody from there," and then he never asked again, in all those years, and I have always been grateful for it.

The money came every quarter. I did not save any of it. There is a particular kind of spending that is not pleasure: it is an argument you are having with a stone that says PRYOR and a hollow that says who does he think he is. I bought clothes I did not want with money I had not earned, and I could not have told you at the time what I was proving, only who I was proving it to.

And once a fortnight I went to a house on the Hudson that had been in the papers twice and had no clock working inside it, and I stood in the hall with my hat in my hand and waited to be wanted.