Her Grandfather's Pen (A Short Story)
I need to confess.
I need to tell you what I did.
But I need you to understand. Not just listen; not just nod your head. Not just make little sounds of sympathy like I’ve seen you do with others, when you were really only barely listening.
I need you to know.
Will you really listen?
Will you try to actually hear me?
I don’t expect you to say that what I did was OK. Or that it wasn’t really my fault. Or that it was no worse than what most people do. It was none of those things.
It was bad and it was my fault. It was worse than anything anyone I have personally known has ever done. But even so, I want you to know.
Please.
And I need to let me come at this a little bit indirectly, OK? I can’t just blurt it out. I need you to see the context. It doesn’t excuse what I did, but there is a bigger picture, and I’ve got to give you that picture.
……………………
I’d like to blame the pen show, but I can’t. You know how I get at a pen show. I practically salivate. I can’t walk in a straight line from one table to another. I can’t stop asking questions. I actually breathe heavily some of the time…I admit it. More fountain pens than I’ve seen in a year, sitting there waiting to be picked up. To be held. To be examined. To be used. Just pressing a nib against my thumbnail to test its flexibility is, and I mean this, one of those intimate experiences that I lie awake and see, all over again, as I try to get to sleep.
At pen shows I’m flying high on fountain-pen lust, and way too much of my reticence and good judgment are left behind.
So I was already totally buzzed when I first saw her. Her paper name-tag said “HELLO, I’M L…. B….” She was slim. Slight, even. Willowy, I suppose some might call her, but not young. There were streaks of gray in her long, brown hair. Her skin, though, what I could see of it, was flawlessly smooth. The skin of a child, the hair of a middle-aged woman and the posture of someone who might flee at any moment, at a loud noise. She was standing at Susan Wirth’s display, just looking. I could tell she was new to pen shows. She seemed to be afraid to ask a question, much less touch a pen, much less ask to try it. L. would start to touch one of the older, more perfect Pelikans, then draw back, then reach toward another, then put her hands back at her sides. She wore a reticent sort of outfit, too. A gingham top with some frills at the sleeves, and a skirt that took me back decades. If someone had told me she had stepped through a time-warp and into the Embassy Suites ballroom, I could not have argued with them.
If you know Susan Wirth, you know she is one of the most welcoming, warm and understanding people in all of pendom, so L’s hesitation is a pretty good measure of just how timid she was.
Susan sat at one of the tables she always rents at pen shows, talking with a customer, looking up and smiling at L every couple of minutes, and even so, L looked as if she were about to turn away. So, rushing in where any angel with an ounce of common sense would fear to tread, I walked up to L and said “You know, it’s OK to touch the pens. Isn’t it, Susan?” I asked the question loudly enough to interrupt Susan’s conversation; maybe a little too loudly, as I look back on it.
“OK? Sure it’s OK. How’re you going to know if it’s any good if you don’t pick it up? Go ahead, dear.” Then she said “Sorry” to her customer and they returned to what I realized was a very earnest negotiation.
“Thank you,” she said to Susan. And turned and looked right into my eyes, right into my brain, if the truth be told, and said “Thank you.” Soft voice. So soft I could hear nothing else.
“Maybe if you tell me what you’re looking for, I could help you.” Good old Sir Lancelot to the rescue, that’s me. Never miss an opportunity to be a hero to a damsel looking for a pen.
“I’m looking for my pen.”
“Sorry? For a moment I thought you said you were looking for your pen.”
“Yes. I’m looking for my pen.”
“Of course. You believe that somewhere here is the pen that’s just right for you. I know the feeling. I started out that way, too. Unfortunately, I’ve got about 300 ‘my pens’ and the number just continues to…”
“No, I’m looking for my pen.”
“I don’t understand. Do you think one of the dealers here has it?”
“Forty-two years ago my little brother stole it from me. It was my grand-dad’s pen. He brought it with him from Germany. I wrote all my school papers with it. I wrote poems with it. I kept my diary with it. My brother stole it. He ran off. He ran out of the house, saying he was going to sell it. He needed money. We all needed money. We were so poor. That pen was the best thing anyone in my family had. My brother, well, he ran into the street and was hit by a car. I heard the tires screeching. I was running to catch him. I heard him get hit. The driver drove off, fast. A crowd of people all stood around looking at my brother. I called out his name and I heard him calling out to me. Someone took off his coat and put it under his head while the ambulance came. Someone in that crowd stole my brother’s coat while we were getting him into the ambulance. My pen was in my brother’s coat. We never found the coat. We never found the pen. My brother never walked again. I’ve been taking care of him ever since Mother got too old to do it herself. He never stopped blaming himself for losing my pen. He died last year. Now I can go looking for it. Now I can find my pen.”
Let me begin with my physical response. My face flushed. I could feel it. My hands turned icy cold and very damp. My stomach tightened up and I felt the rest of my digestive system beginning to develop a mind all its own. I stopped breathing for longer than I can recall ever holding my breath.
My mental reaction was no less dramatic. Fear, no, terror, flooded every bit of me. Along with a memory that I had long ago thought I’d ridden myself of. A crowd in the street. A young boy on the ground, his head resting on a ragged tweed overcoat. A young girl beside him, her head on the pavement. Blood everywhere. The wail of sirens coming our way. I was just a kid myself, but I knew the girl was dead. So did everyone in the crowd. So did her brother, when he opened his eyes, turned his head and called out to her. “She tried to save him,” someone said. “She was chasing him and yelling something about a pen, and she saw the car, and she tried to push him out of the way, and she got hit herself, right along with him, but worse.” Then the ambulance. The driver and his assistant putting the kids on stretchers and into the back of the ambulance. And I was so cold. And there was the coat. I was just a kid myself. So I took his coat and left mine, which I’d outgrown at least a couple of winters before. As I put on the coat, I saw the boy looking back at me from the stretcher, but he was crying too hard to say anything.
“What’s wrong? What did I say? Are you OK?” L looked up at me. She looked worried.
I waited until I could speak without stammering. “Look, I sincerely wish you were right. I really do. But look around this room. There are thousands of pens here. Thousands! And this is just a tiny part of everything that’s out there in the world.”
“My grand-dad said it was one of the very first Pelikans ever made. Does that help?”
Help? That Pelikan, the pen that had started me on a lifetime of collecting, was in my shirt pocket.
“Not really. I mean, first of all it’s a very rare sort of pen, probably way too rare to be on open display at this show. And more important, what are you going to do to get it back? Tell every collector who happens to have such a pen that it might be yours?”
Whatever hopes she may have had, Sir Lancelot had crushed. She looked down, looked up at me one last time with a gaze that pierced every shred of defense I had erected against shame, then turned and walked away, and out of the exhibit hall. I stood there and watched her go, until, too late, I ran after her. She was not in the hall outside. Not in the parking lot. She was gone.
In my life I have lied to the people I love, I’ve lied to my employers and my colleagues, and I’ve lied to my customers. But never, not once, has I lied to the dead. To a person just waiting to find peace. Until I lied to her.
And that last look she gave me before she walked out of the room? Surely you’ve seen that look. It was a look that said she knew I was lying. Because just before she turned to go, she glanced down at my shirt pocket. And she smiled a tiny smile. And then she walked away.
But I know that somewhere she is waiting for me and her grandfather’s pen.
