Fredo was also a peace offering of sorts. We’d been fighting a lot recently, sometimes just picking at each other. Sometimes throwing force four tornadoes.
I have to admit it began when I bought Finn Spahn’s suit at an online auction for way too much money. But as soon as I saw the listing I had to bid. Spahn has been my favorite author for years. I’ve read all of his books multiple times. When I first learned that he had died, I felt the kind of visceral bone-deep shock you’d feel on learning a close family member had died.
Ironically, it was Spahn’s great novel, The Rain Club, that brought the missus and me together in the first place. We were introduced at a party by the host, who said, “You two should talk. You both like to read.” Which of course led our first conversation to be about our favorite writers. She had never read Spahn, although she had a couple of his books on her shelves for “one-day-I’ll-get-to-him.” Although we had just been introduced, she said I spoke of Spahn’s work with such love and passion she was intrigued enough to go home that night (after giving me her phone number) and start The Rain Club. By the time she went to bed she was hooked and read until early morning.
The next time we met, her hair was bright green (or, rather, the cheap wig she’d bought at a costume shop). I got the reference immediately and knew right then something big was going to happen with us. As I walked toward her, I naturally said out loud the first line of The Rain Club: “For my green-haired Darling—”
Right before he died, Spahn was supposed to come to our city and give a reading. But Covid struck and he was one of the early victims. An online gossip site reported his wife was in Europe when he got sick so he was alone when he died. He called 911 when he could no longer breathe normally. One of the paramedics who came to take him to the hospital said Spahn’s only words were “I think I waited too long.”
I have no idea what other things he owned were sold. In a way I didn’t want to know. Buying his suit I knew I wasn’t setting some kind of ghoulish precedent. There was an auction of Philip Roth’s possessions after he died. The typewriter on which he used to write so many of his wonderful books sold for a pittance, which struck me as very sad. Frederick Exley wrote almost a whole book about trying to get one of the walking sticks of the critic Edmund Wilson after he died. Then there was Charlie Watts, the drummer for the Rolling Stones, who bought—and they say used to wear—some of the wardrobe of Edward VIII.
I certainly didn’t want to wear the Spahn suit. Just owning something of his and taking good care of it felt like a kind of small tribute to him for all the hours of pleasure his work had given me.
My wife, Mickey, said she didn’t know whether she was madder at how much money I’d spent, or just totally creeped out that I wanted to own a dead man’s suit.
I counterpunched with the fact that she’s always wearing vintage clothes from flea markets and charity stories. So what’s the difference? At least I knew where my suit had come from and I certainly had no desire to actually wear it. How did she know some of those “vintage” clothes hadn’t belonged to a serial killer? That caught her off guard. After a pause she glowered and said defiantly, “I dry-clean everything I buy twice before wearing it!” and the quarrel started again, into the whirlwind.
As our arguments sometimes did, this medium-rare spat led to other larger issues—things welling up in each of us for a while but which we’d kept to ourselves for the sake of peace between us. But the argument over the Spahn suit for some reason opened wounds that had been healing or were hidden in our day-to-day life together.
You did this!/Yeah, but you did that!
Ironically, the Spahn suit arrived the same day I brought Fredo home. Mickey must have heard my car in the driveway because she was standing right by the front door, hands on her hips and a stern look on her face.
“You got a big package. I assume it’s your Spahn.” She broke eye contact and saw what I held in both hands against my chest. “Who’s this?” Her eyes got wider and she began to smile.
“Your new best friend.” I handed her the little brown bundle of squirming warmth.
“Oh my God, are you serious?” Her face was all joy. She kissed his head. He frantically licked her face. “He’s so little!”
“Should I take him back for a bigger one?”
“Fredo. I’m going to call him Fredo.”
With my wife, Mickey, The Godfather is always somewhere in our shared air.
“Damn! If you’re going to call him a Corleone, why not Michael?”
She shook her head. “Who calls a dog Michael?”
“And you think Fredo is better?”
“Is he mine? Did you get him for me?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Then he’s Fredo.” She nodded her head like the discussion was over.
“You sure maybe Fritos wouldn’t be better?”
Her eyes flared fire a moment, then she smiled, knowing I’d given up and was just being silly. She came closer and kissed me. “Thank you for him. He really makes me happy.”
“Good.” I took her head in both my hands. “Can we call a truce about all this stuff, all these bombs we’ve been throwing at each other recently?”
She smiled wider. “Yes, absolutely. Now go open your package. Mr. Spahn is waiting for you.”
Although I had seen photos of the suit on the auction website, I was still nervous to see it in person. What if it smelled? Or moths flew out of the box when I opened it? In a strange sort of mystical way, it felt like I was meeting Spahn himself for the first time and not just some clothes he wore. I cut open the box carefully with a mat knife.
The first thing that appeared was tissue paper in a beautiful shade of gray. Clearly the sender had taken care wrapping the suit. Pushing the paper aside, I found folded into the box was an apricot-colored suit bag with the words
TADEUSZ BESPOKE/ WARSZAWA
printed in bold black letters on it. That stopped me a moment. Was the suit really made in Poland? I thought surely it would have been from a Savile Row tailor in London, seeing as how Spahn was an Anglophile and often set parts of his books in London.
What was he doing in Warsaw? I knew from my brother, who is a clotheshorse, that bespoke clothing takes several fittings normally spread over months, sometimes years. First fitting, second one two months later Which meant Spahn must have visited the city a number of times. What was he doing in Warsaw? I did a quick mental run-through of his books but didn’t remember any mention of the city. Later, while examining the suit jacket, I noticed the tailor’s label on the inside breast pocket was the same apricot color as the suit bag.
I took the bag out of the shipping box and hung it on a wall hook. Unzipping it, I removed the suit and held it up in front of me.
What was I expecting? I don’t know. Secretly maybe something extraordinary, maybe even something sort of magical? It did belong to Finn Spahn, after all. Feeling silly, I said out loud, “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s a fucking suit.” A chestnut-brown herringbone tweed suit that had seen better days, to be honest.
On first inspection everything looked OK—no rips, dangling threads, or missing buttons. But there was some wear on the cuffs. The yellow-and-black–striped rayon lining in the left armhole was partially detached and would need a tailor to repair it correctly. I warily sniffed the jacket a few times in different places but there was no funk to it, no sweat or kept-in-a-closet-too-long smell, which was good.
After I bought the suit, before it arrived I had never thought of wearing the thing even if it fit perfectly. Now with one glance it was obvious it was way too small for me anyway.
I hadn’t thought of Spahn as either a large or small man. If what I held in my hands was proof, he must have been on the short side. But Faulkner was also short. Truman Capote, Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Amis, even Pablo Picasso. All short men with giant talent. As far as I was concerned, Finn Spahn deserved to be in their pantheon.
Almost as an afterthought I went through the pockets of both the jacket and trousers. I naturally assumed whoever owned the suit last would have done it to make sure nothing was in them before packing it up and shipping it to me.
I was wrong.
There were six pockets on the jacket—three on the outside, three on the inside, including a small pocket for a phone. Four more on the trousers.
In the left outside breast pocket was a yellow-lined file card with this on it in a singular, all-block-script handwriting:
SAINT STEAM
Chapter 1
Her mind was like a drawer crammed with ancient handdrawn illustrated maps, all of them full of colorful marvels, monsters, and mistakes. Much of what they depicted was wrong or “off,” but in the most original, fascinating ways. If you followed their directions, you might very well end up in heaven or hell.
For more of this, ditch the dog.
The first thing that struck me was the handwriting. In The Paris Review interview with Spahn there was a full-page photograph of his memorable script. It was well known he handwrote all of his books. Now it appeared I was holding an example.
Had he really written what was on the card? The paragraph, wherever it came from, certainly sounded like Spahn’s writing. And what did that last line mean—ditch the dog?
I heard laughing and a high screech. Mickey suddenly burst into the room chased by a skittering Fredo in hot pursuit. She ran behind me as if to hide. He went right after her, jumping up on her leg, looking as small as a human jumping up on the base of a sequoia tree.
Still laughing, she bent down and swooped the puppy up in her arms. “I love him, Jacob! He’s so sweet and funny. We’ve had him an hour and I adore him already. Thank you again. He’s the best birthday present ever.”
I smiled and nodded but my mind was obviously elsewhere. “I went through the pockets of the suit and found something.” I don’t know why I chose that exact moment to tell her. Big mistake. Before I could say anything else she made a disgusted face and pre- tended to shiver.
Her voice went up an octave. “Eww! You went through the pockets before having the suit dry-cleaned? Are you out of your mind? God knows what kind of old horrors were in there from whoever owned it before. Promise me you’ll take it to the dry cleaner’s immediately, Jacob. Promise! In the meantime, please wash your hands for like about, I don’t know, half an hour?”
Despite the adorable little puppy in her beautiful bare arms, the scowl on her face could have melted candles. I took the suit off a hook without another word and marched out the front door with it to the dry cleaner’s. My only protest was not washing my hands before leaving.
The next odd thing happened three days later when I went to pick up the suit. As soon as he saw me, Mr. Spyros’s face fell and his mouth tightened. We’d been bringing all of our dry cleaning to him for years and never had a problem—nothing lost, nothing ruined. If he said it would be ready by Tuesday it always was.
“I’m sorry, but we couldn’t clean your suit. Our machine broke and we’re waiting for it to be repaired.” Shrugging, he walked to the back of the store. A few minutes later he brought out the suit on a metal hanger covered in plastic.
“We should have it fixed by the end of next week, I hope. One good thing, though, is I found this card in one of the pockets. It might have been destroyed if it had gone through the machine.” He handed me a yellow card identical to the one I had found in the suit days before. Glancing at what was on it, I swallowed hard when I recognized Spahn’s unique handwriting. I hesitated to read what was on it in front of Spyros. I thanked him, slid it into my pocket, took the suit, and left.
In the car, after draping the suit over the passenger’s seat, I took out the card and read this:
She once said, “Pretty women aren’t used to men being honest with them. But I’m not pretty anymore, or not so much. Since turning that corner a few years ago, I’ve noticed men are generally much more direct, and frankly more interesting, about things when they talk to me. I assume it’s the same with other women who have entered the land of scary mirrors.”
This went on for days. I didn’t tell Mickey anything. I knew it would probably upset her. For all her strengths and wonderful curiosity about how the world works, there are certain things peculiar and not-so that spook, shake, and do her no good. A few examples are: her inordinate fear of tunnels, being locked in airplane bathrooms (never happened), and my favorite—why orange juice is poisonous. I have no idea why. Although she adores animals in general, three terrify her despite never having encountered two of them. In ascending order, they are quokkas, Komodo dragons, and, worst of all, warthogs. She was badly bitten by one at a wildlife park when we were on an African safari for our honeymoon. Those three creatures give her frequent nightmares although quokkas live only on a few islands in Australia, Komodo dragons in Indonesia, and, as far as I know, she has never encountered another warthog since Africa. But so be it. Over time I had learned what was good and bad to put in front of her windshield or even in her rearview mirror.
When I came back to the house that day with suit still in hand, I told her what had happened at the dry cleaner but not about the note Spyros had found in a pocket.
Clearly unhappy, she asked me to put it on the back porch and not in any closet mixed with our other clothes until it was cleaned. No problem. Neither of us went to that unheated part of our house often now that the cold weather had arrived. Fine with me. I wanted to keep the suit and whatever the hell was going on with it as far away from her as possible, just in case.
Before taking it to the cleaner’s, I had gone through all the pockets in both jacket and trousers. The only thing I’d found was the first yellow card. Nothing else. So how did another card suddenly show up when Spyros checked?
For the next week I checked the pockets every day, sometimes twice. Almost always I was accompanied by Fredo, who had quickly figured out the lay of the land in our home, usually racing around from room to room, usually with a squeaky toy in his mouth. He was also a quick learner about our house rules—no getting on the bed but up on the couch was OK. He wasn’t immediately housetrained but showed promise. Best of all, he made Mickey happy and this was what mattered.
I wasn’t crazy about him because I wasn’t crazy about dogs in general. I put up with his barking, yellow puddles, and little brown piles all over the place and a favorite bedroom slipper he found and devoured. Mickey was concerned he might get loose one day, run out into the street, and get hit by a car. I went to a pet store and bought a very bright fluorescent orange leather collar with his name and our phone number attached to it with a metal tag.
When I handed it to Mickey she gave me a big kiss and purred, “So, maybe you’re just a little concerned for him too, eh, Mr. Grumpy?” Mr. Grumpy knew enough not to say anything that would interrupt her purr.
The third note convinced me that somehow, some way, Finn Spahn lived on in his suit, as ridiculous as it sounds.
One night I spent hours on the computer tracking down everything I could find about Spahn. Wikipedia, photos, discussion boards, two Facebook fan pages with a large number of followers. . . .
Although I’d heard about it, because I didn’t have a subscription to the magazine at the time, I’d never read the long posthumous profile about him in The New Yorker. It was in this profile I came across the first mention of the title Saint Steam. Moments after seeing those two words together in capital letters and reading what they signified, for some reason I happened to look at my hands. Both were clenched into tight fists. The only other time I’d seen the title was on the first yellow card.
Spahn always took his latest manuscript with him when traveling. Said he could work anywhere and especially liked the anonymity of hotel rooms. Because he was a confirmed Luddite about certain things, he did not use a computer. When he completed something and was satisfied with it, his wife proofread then typed up the finished work and sent it off to the publisher. Until she did and saved a copy on her computer’s hard drive, there was only Spahn’s handwritten copy.
Bad move.
While he was on a book tour of Eastern Europe, his hotel room in Warsaw was broken into while he was out to dinner with his publisher. The briefcase containing the new novel he had almost completed, entitled Saint Steam, was stolen. Two hours before, he was uncharacteristically going on and on to the publisher about this new book, which he hoped would be his best.
Spahn immediately contacted a private investigator there and later made several trips to Warsaw in hopes of finding the lost manuscript. To no avail.
The literary world is full of horror stories of lost manuscripts. Hemingway’s early stories being stolen on a train, Ralph Ellison’s follow-up to The Invisible Man burning up in a fire, Bruno Schulz’s The Messiah, Walter Benjamin, Malcolm Lowry, Marshall France. . . .
The loss of Saint Steam apparently broke something in Spahn. He stopped writing altogether for a few years. As bad luck would have it, he was well into rewriting the novel from memory when Covid stole his last breath.
All of the pockets were empty when I brought the suit in for dry cleaning. I made sure of it. But up pops the note Spyros found. And in the following days I found more and more yellow cards in those once-empty pockets. Not every day, but frequently, frequently.
The passages were all connected. It was plain I was reading Finn Spahn’s last, lost unfinished novel bit by bit, yellow card by yellow card. It was thrilling and scary as hell at the same time. For a while I felt torn. I didn’t know what to do next because selfishly I admit it felt very special reading words no one else had ever seen. Or so I thought.
The solution for what to do came from a stranger who was an even more rabid Spahn fan than I was.
Out of the blue the good idea came to me to contact the previous owner of the suit. Ask if the same thing had happened when they owned it. Wasn’t hard to track them down over the internet. A little surprising, however, to learn the previous owner was a woman.
Her name was Pia Bardelis and from the first mail of our correspondence, she was adamant.
“Get rid of it. Does it fit you yet? For God’s sake, get rid of it before it does.”
Taken aback both by her tone and the question, I wrote that I had never tried the suit on because it was obviously too small.
She instantly wrote back, “It fit me almost perfectly after a while. You’re obviously bigger than me. But beware—the longer you own it, the more cards you read, the better the suit will fit. This is why I sold it. The damned thing was almost perfect on me by the time I sent it to you.
“But it was Spahn’s book! I almost couldn’t stop reading those damned yellow cards. The more I read, the better the fit. I was completely hooked on his new story and got out just in time. How could I stop reading a brand-new Finn Spahn novel? Maybe I was one of the only people on earth who had read it.”
Like me, Pia was a devoted Spahnian. Not only did she own signed copies of all his books, but many in different languages. By accident she had seen the suit for sale on eBay with a notarized letter of provenance (she had typed in his name on the search bar, looking to see if there was one limited UK edition she didn’t have). She immediately put in a ridiculously high bid, fearing someone else might snatch it. Surprisingly, there were several other bidders also willing to spend a lot of money to own something of Spahn’s.
“Has he asked you to join the club yet?”
“What club? No.”
“The Rain Club. If you receive one of those, get rid of the suit immediately.”
“I don’t understand.”
Fredo came into the room and jumped on my leg, scratching for attention. I picked him up and plopped him in my lap. He immediately got comfortable and went to sleep. I had to admit, whether I liked dogs or not, he looked very cute down there with his bright orange collar, curled in a furry ball.
“After you’ve read maybe fifteen or twenty cards, when you’re absolutely hooked on the story, one will ask if you want to join the Rain Club. I had no idea what that was, but I was suspicious. Because the card said the first step to joining was to put the suit on. NEVER take it to a dry cleaner, especially after you’ve tried it on the first time. Unfortunately, I already had, right out of the box the day it arrived. Why not? Spahn had worn it. But that first time it was much too big for me. I assumed the last owner was a man.
“Look, whether you think I’m crazy or not, I’m sure something of Finn Spahn still lives in the suit. It explains the cards. The spirit or ghost or whatever is rewriting Saint Steam. But I believe it’s weakening. Because I found fewer and fewer cards in the pockets as time went on. Plus, the handwriting got kind of sloppy, wobbly.
“I think dry cleaning the suit chemically destroys the link between you and this spirit. If you join the Rain Club and keep putting it on, eventually the suit will fit perfectly. Then alive-you will be the source of energy he needs to finish his book.”
Oddly enough, with all this mad soup of speculation swirling around in my head, I had only one question for her.
“Once this stuff started happening, why didn’t you just get rid of it—throw it out or give it away? Give it to charity.”
There was a long wait for her answer. Almost as if she was hesitant to tell me the truth. “Once you own the suit, once you’ve paid a huge amount for it, you can’t get rid of it until someone else buys it. Believe me, I tried more than once to dump it.”
“Why did you charge so much for it? Why not a dollar instead of the crazy price I paid?”
“I tried that too but it didn’t work. I paid a fortune for the suit, much more than you, believe it or not. Eventually I realized how it worked—the only way to get free of it was to dry-clean it, then sell it to someone as mad for Spahn’s work as I was. Someone willing to pay anything to own something of his. A true Spahn zealot like you and me was needed to continue his work.”
The day after I got an invitation to join the Rain Club I went to the back porch to again check the pockets. Mickey was standing in front of the suit, staring at it, arms crossed. She had taken it off the hook and draped it over my easy chair. The bottom was almost touching the floor. Fredo was at our feet, tail wagging furiously as if expecting something great to happen.
“Are you ever going to take this very important suit to be drycleaned? Would you like me to do it? I’d be honored. Anything to get its cooties out of this house.”
Uh oh. There it was again—the nasty little scorpion stinger in her voice. The all-too-familiar tone she used whenever we really fought and the battle had reached a crescendo. I loathed the voice—a noxious mix of condescending and dismissive.
I was not in the mood to hear it. “Just cool it with the fucking voice, willya, Mickey? I’ll take it today.”
Her eyes narrowed then widened, revving up to say something unpleasant. I was an expert at reading my wife’s eyes. Their various expressions were always her greatest tell.
Unexpectedly, she said, “Remember the scene in The Rain Club where Skofield opens the door of her house and the thing that scares her the absolute most is just waiting there for her?”
By the tone of her voice she was about to go on, and, with this as an example, somehow send the argument to the next level. Instead, she saw something over my shoulder, froze, and shouted, “Fredo, no! No, bad dog!”
I turned and saw the dog pissing on the suit.
Shocked seconds passed in silence, then both of us burst out laughing. Fredo smiled his cute dachshund smile and continued to piss on Finn Spahn. I’m sure part of our laughter was because seconds before we were on the brink of our very own World War III. That dark fuel was thankfully converted into funny by Fredo’s wee-wee.
Mickey bent down and picked him up while I grabbed the Spahn. We were still laughing, thank God.
“I’ll take it now.” I held the suit at arm’s length so as not to touch it and bump into any of the wet spots.
“I’ll go with you. I have a dress I want cleaned.”
Our car was parked in front of the house on the street. I opened the door and laid the suit down on the back seat, urine side up. Waiting for Mickey to come, I said out loud, “Big step today, no more fooling around. I’m going to clean the damned suit, then sell it for as much as I can get, and that’s the end. Out of the house, out of my life. Love you, Mr. Spahn, but you’re beginning to scratch on my soul.”
Mickey opened the passenger door and got in. She started to put her dress in the back seat, saw what was already there, and said, “Whoops—uh uh.”
“What did you do with the little pisser?”
“Put him in the kitchen behind the doggy gate. He likes it in there. He’s got his new bed and lots of toys. Let’s go. Let’s have fish and chips for lunch at the new place next to Spyro’s.”
The car wouldn’t start. The engine in my one-year-old wonderful Toyota, which had never had any problem, wouldn’t even turn over. I tried several times to start it but not a peep. Throwing up both hands in frustration, I looked at Mickey.
In a sweet voice, she said, “What’s the problem, Cap?”
“I have no idea. The car’s a year old. It’s still under warranty! Do you have your phone? I’ll call the auto club.”
She shook her head. “I left it in the house. I’ll go get it.” She climbed out of the car and walked up the path to the front door.
I closed my eyes and willed the car to start. Turned the ignition key—nothing.
Then I heard the scream.
Mickey was running toward the car, pursued by a huge warthog. A huge, hairy warthog wearing a very familiar bright orange collar. Even with the car windows up I could hear its grunting noises as it chased my wife down the walk to the car.
As I mentioned before, Mickey is afraid of many things. But what scares her most is warthogs, after what happened in Africa. They are her worst nightmare animal and despite never having seen one live again, they still terrify her.
She reached the car and jumped in before the beast closed in on her.
I knew in a second it was Spahn’s doing. But why Mickey and not me? How did he know her greatest fear? Can the dead really know what is going on in the minds of the living?
Just like Fredo, the warthog jumped up on Mickey’s door, squealing for attention. But now when it was so close, I saw the hog’s eyes were a little dog’s eyes, surprisingly gentle and . . . loving.
Its collar—a much larger version of Fredo’s collar—so bright and orange.