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“Nut!” cried the cabbie and left.
Gloriously damp, I ducked inside, shook myself like a dog, and froze, eyes shut, hearing the rain bang that high tin roof.
“Which way?” I said to the darkness.
Intuition said left.
I turned and found, in the tintinnabulation of downpour (what a great word: tintinnabulation!) stacks of shelves of old high school annuals which I usually avoid like funerals.
For bookshops are, by their nature, graveyards where old elephants drop their bones.
Uneasily, then, I prowled the high school yearbooks to read the spines: Burlington, Vermont, Orange, New Jersey, Roswell, New Mexico, big sandwiches of memorabilia from fifty states. I did not touch my own godforsaken yearbook, which lay buried with its scribbled time-capsule insults from the Great Depression: “Get lost, sappo. Jim.” “Have a great life, you should live so long. Sam.” “To a fine writer, lousy lover. Fay.”
I blew the dust off Remington High, Pennsylvania, to thumb through scores of baseball, basketball, football braves no longer brave.
1912.
I scanned ten dozen bright faces.
You, you, and you, I thought. Was your life good? Did you marry well? Did your kids like you? Was there a great first love and another later? How, how did it go?
Too many flowers here from too many biers. All those eager eyes staring above their wondrous smiles.
I almost shut the book but …
My finger stayed on the pictures of the 1912 graduating class, with World War I not yet, unimagined and unknown, when I blinked at one snapshot and gasped:
“My God! Charles! Old Charlie Nesbitt!”
Yes! Framed there in a far year, with his freckles, roostercomb hair, big ears, flared nostrils, and corncob teeth. Charles Woodley Nesbitt!
“Charlie!” I cried.
The rain buckshot the tin roof above. The cold blew down my neck.
“Charlie,” I whispered. “What’re you doing here?”
I carried the book out to a better light, heart thumping, and stared.
The name under the picture was Reynolds. Winton Reynolds.
Destined for Harvard
Wants to make a million.
Likes golf.
But the picture?
“Charlie, dammit!”
Charlie Nesbitt was god-awful homely, a tennis pro, top gymnast, speed swimmer, girl collector. How come? Did those ears, teeth, and nostrils make girls swarm? To be like him, we would have signed up for lessons.
And now here he was on a wrong page of an old book in a lost year with his berserk smile and crazed ears.
Could there once have been two Charlie Nesbitts alive? Identical twins, separated at birth? Hell. My Charlie was born in 1920, same as me. Wait!
I dodged back in the stacks to grab my 1938 yearbook and riffle the graduate photos until I found:
