The Man in the Window Read online

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 1992 Jon Cohen

  Introduction and Readers’ Guide copyright © 2013 Nancy Pearl

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by AmazonEncore

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781477848937

  ISBN-10: 1477848932

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Dedication

  PART ONE THE MONSTER OF WAVERLY

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  PART TWO THE MAN IN THE WINDOW

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  PART THREE WIDOWS AND WIDOWERS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  PART FOUR THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  PART FIVE FLAMES

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  Reader’s Guide for The Man in the Window

  Discussion Questions

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  About the Author

  About Nancy Pearl

  About Book Lust Rediscoveries

  Introduction

  PROBABLY THE question that I’m most often asked by people is, “How do you choose what you’re going to read?” and I don’t really have a good answer for them. I can relate to the novelist Carrie Brown (my favorite book of hers is Lamb in Love) who described herself as being “a promiscuous reader.” I’ll give almost any book a chance to have its way with me. I read all sorts of nonfiction (pretty much everything, in fact, but generally not self-help books, unless they’re by Harriet Lerner—my favorite of hers is The Dance of Anger). History and current events have always been two of my particular nonfiction favorites. And of course I read a lot of fiction, both literary and genre (which is not to say that I think a sharp line can be drawn between the two).

  I usually start off the process of identifying my next book by cruising the shelves in a bookstore or library, looking for jacket art that seduces my eye or a title that tugs at my mind. I know from long experience that if the author’s name on the cover is in a bigger font size than the title, then I can be pretty sure the book is aimed directly at the best-seller list and therefore probably isn’t one that I want to take to bed (where I do a lot of my reading) with me.

  Then I open the book to a random page in order to get a sense of whether it’s worth my while trying to develop a relationship with it or whether I’m better off putting it back on the shelf where I found it, knowing that it’s not right for me. (Kind of like a first date.) For example, if I discover that I’m going to be inside the head of a vicious serial killer—or sociopaths in general—even if it’s only in the first chapter or in alternate chapters, then it’s a no-go. I remember once asking a little boy—he must have been about 7 or 8—what kind of books he liked. “No dead dogs,” he told me. I knew exactly what he meant. For me, it’s no murdered, or tortured, or sexually abused children.

  I study the blurbs on the back of the book, not so much to see what they say about the book (they’re all, obviously, going to wax eloquent about how wonderful it is; otherwise they wouldn’t be there) but rather who’s saying it. If the blurbists are writers or reviewers whom I respect, I’m more inclined to read the book. I also check to see if the quotes are taken from reviews in newspapers or magazines, or if they were solicited from the author’s friends or the editor’s contacts in the literary world. There was a column called “Logrolling in Our Time” in the (very) late, (very) lamented Spy magazine that revealed authors each of whom wrote a glowing blurb for the other’s book. If the blurbists all live within hailing distance of each other, I don’t take it as a good sign. Believe me, read enough and you get to know these things, like where the authors live. Writers are asked to blurb books all the time—I receive at least one request a week. (Margaret Atwood has a wonderful poem called “Letter sent in reply to requests for blurbs” that speaks to this; it’s easy to find on the Internet.)

  I found Jon Cohen’s The Man in the Window when I was working as the head of collection development at the Tulsa (OK) City-County Library System in the spring of 1992, right after it had been published. It was displayed face out on the “New Books” shelf. I didn’t love the cover, which was in various shades of green and brown and centered on a Picasso-esque painting of a man’s head and upper body apparently looking out through (or maybe embedded in, it was hard to tell) a window. There was nothing especially wrong with it (I am a great fan of cubism), but there wasn’t anything that I found especially appealing, either. I turned the book over and looked at the blurbs on the back of the jacket. One, from an author I wasn’t familiar with, was for the book I was holding. The other four, taken from newspaper reviews, referred to Cohen’s first novel, Max Lakeman and the Beautiful Stranger, which I hadn’t read.

  No obvious turn-offs, so far, but neither was I hearing that little voice (the one that I never tire of; that delights me, still) telling me that this might be a book I didn’t want to miss. So what made me open The Man in the Window to the first page and start reading? It was, perhaps illogically, actually the size and shape of the book itself. Not its thickness, nor the number of its pages, but rather its length and breadth. It was a hardcover, but was the size and shape of a trade paperback, which were not as ubiquitous in the early 1990s as they are now. It looked like it would be utterly comfortable to hold. It looked like a book that could easily be lost amongst the bigger and brawnier novels on the shelf, the runt of the litter, so to speak, and I just couldn’t resist giving it a chance to win me over.

  And when I read the entrancing first line of The Man in the Window, I knew I’d made no mistake. Here was a novel to love. And so it proved to be. That first line—“Atlas Malone saw the angel again, this time down by the horse chestnut tree.”—made it impossible for me to put the book down. I loved the interplay of the fantastic—an angel!—with the utterly prosaic—a horse chestnut tree. And the specificity: not just any old chestnut tree, but a horse chestnut. (I have to say here that, not being a gardener or arborist, I never knew there were such things as horse chestnut trees before I read The Man in the Window. You read and learn.) And that simple word “again.” How could I bear not to find out when Atlas encountered an angel before? Clearly, this was a book that was written with a reader like me in mind.

  For many years, whenever I was asked to give a talk about good books to read, I would include The Man in the Window, and I’d describe it to the audience this way:

  When he was sixteen, Louis Malone was caught in a fire that erupted at his father’s hardware store. He was burned so badly that for the next sixteen years he didn’t go out of his family’s house, spending his days watching the outside world through his second story bedroom window. And even in the house he covered up the terrible scars on his face by wearing a scarf around his mouth and chin and a b
aseball cap with a Pittsburgh Pirates logo pulled down low over his forehead. But one day Louis reenters that world, falling from, or somehow being impelled through, the window that he’s been hiding behind for so many years. Rushed to the hospital by neighbors who are wild with curiosity to find out what he looks like underneath his hat and scarf (which he manages to keep on despite the fall and a broken arm), he meets Iris Shula, an Intensive Care nurse who’s covering the emergency room when he arrives. Iris describes herself as being four foot seven and weighing one hundred fifty-five “very poorly distributed pounds,” with “a nose like a boxer’s, and the complexion of a corpse.”

  Then I’d read from the book: “Iris had been an unappealing baby—and babyhood, as it turned out, was her physical high point. She went from unappealing to unattractive, and by the time she moved into adolescence, she’d become undeniably homely. Even her parents, who loved her, who gave her every benefit of the doubt and then some, could not dispute the evidence.”

  And I’d conclude by saying that Iris, in her own way, had been just as alone in the outside world as Louis had been in his upstairs room. And that the relationship that slowly develops between Louis and Iris both breaks and remakes the reader’s heart and offers some good laughs along the way.

  Usually when I’m perusing book jacket copy, I take words like life-affirming, heartwarming, touching, uplifting, poignant, and tender as a warning: DO NOT READ, LIKELY TO BE SENTIMENTAL CLAPTRAP. But in the hands of that all too rare writer who respects his readers and doesn’t try to manipulate them through cheap emotions and easy tears, a book can be deeply satisfying because it is so authentically life-affirming and heart-warming, etc. Cohen is such a writer, and The Man in the Window is such a novel.

  Nancy Pearl

  TO MOLLY AND BEN

  PART ONE

  THE MONSTER OF WAVERLY

  CHAPTER ONE

  ATLAS MALONE saw the angel again, this time down by the horse chestnut tree. Yesterday the angel had stood, in a floaty sort of way, beside the raspberry patch—Atlas couldn’t tell if its feet touched the ground with any kind of earthly weight. Indeed, when he inspected the spot later, not a blade of grass had been disturbed, although an entire cane of raspberries had been picked. Gracie, his wife, said she had not gone near his patch.

  Today beneath the horse chestnut tree the angel appeared to have more substance, a physicality it had not possessed before—gained, perhaps, from stolen raspberries. Atlas turned to see if Gracie was nearby, but she was still in the front yard mulching the tulip bed. He opened his mouth to call to her, but then shut it again. For all he knew, the angel had the nerves of a cat and might be scared off by the least little thing.

  The angel, whose face Atlas could not discern, stood beside the tree. A bright wedge of summer sunlight touched its wings, and the angel lifted them slightly, flexing, taking in the warmth. Atlas began to walk the length of the backyard toward the horse chestnut tree. He kept his hand extended before him, ready to greet the angel as he might a guest at his weekly Rotary Club luncheon.

  The thoughts that came to him were ordinary and peaceful, and for a moment he forgot about the angel waiting for him down at the bottom of his yard. The grass needs cutting, he thought, maybe I’ll do it before I take my nap this afternoon. The hedge has filled in well. I should water the zinnias. He paused, then turned and took it all in, his house and yard, the sense of Gracie, busy in the tulip bed, close to him. He brought his hand to his chest and touched it lightly there, mistaking a tingling in his heart for pleasure.

  When Atlas turned again, his hand out and ready, he had reached the angel. The angel’s head was bent; he was looking down. At his shoes, thought Atlas. I know those shoes, and as Atlas brought his eyes slowly up again, he recognized the pants too, and the shirt. They were his clothes, old and familiar, the most comfortable he owned. Now the angel lifted his face, and revealed himself with a slight smile. Atlas saw that the face also was old and familiar, that it was his own. The angel took Atlas’s outstretched hand, and they stood together for a long moment beneath the cool shade of the tree.

  Atlas looked into the angel’s eyes, eyes he had always known, and said, “This isn’t so bad, is it?”

  No, said the angel, not moving his lips or making a sound, it’s not so bad. Beneath the angel’s feet the grass remained undisturbed, as before, but it bent and flattened as Atlas dropped first to his knees, then face forward down into the green.

  Coming around the side of the house with a wheelbarrow full of weeds, Gracie watched it happen. She saw Atlas place one hand over his heart and the other straight out in front of him as if he was reaching for something.

  “Atlas,” she called, and began to hurry, then run to him, her white hair flying. “Atlas!”

  When he fell to the grass, she knew, even before she reached him, that he was dead.

  “Damn you, Atlas,” she whispered fiercely, as she drew him to her. She held him, her white hair dropping forward, mingling with his. Somewhere above her came a fluttering of wings and a rising.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE UNDERTAKER, Jim Rose, son of Big Bill Rose, founder and owner of Rose’s Funeral Home, the only funeral home in Waverly, Pennsylvania, didn’t appear to understand what Gracie was saying.

  “Mrs. Malone,” he said, in a voice modulated by eight hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of concern and accommodation—eight hundred and fifty dollars being the price of the cheapest of the cheap coffins, the one Gracie wanted, and a funeral with a minimum of fixings. “Mrs. Malone, if you don’t feel you have a suit appropriate for Mr. Malone, Rose’s can arrange—”

  “My husband, I guarantee you, Mr. Rose, does not wish to travel through eternity in a necktie and a pair of shiny shoes pressing on his bunions.”

  Louis Malone, Gracie’s thirty-two-year-old son, sat at the top of the stairs listening to his mother and Jim Rose.

  Gracie held out a flannel work shirt, a pair of corduroys thin at the knees, gray cotton socks, and an old pair of Hush Puppies. Atlas’s favorite clothes.

  Jim Rose still declined to take them. “Mrs. Malone, really. I just don’t feel this is, well… I don’t feel we’d be doing our job. It’s just not professionally acceptable.”

  Louis coughed. He knew his mother had been given her opening.

  “Professionally acceptable,” mused Gracie, her hand smoothing back and forth over the flannel shirt. “You have standards, after all.”

  “Yes ma’am,” said Jim Rose. “Of course.” He tried a smile.

  “Big Bill’s standards. Of course.”

  The smile began to disappear back into Jim Rose’s face. “My father’s standards, yes.”

  “Now tell me, Mr. Rose, are those the standards he had prior to the unfortunate incident of the ice, or the new standards that followed the unfortunate incident of the ice?”

  Louis shifted on the stair and laughed softly. The unfortunate incident of the ice had been one of Atlas’s favorite stories. In fact, everybody in Waverly had enjoyed it for over forty years. Everybody, that is, except the perpetrator and those related to him.

  During World War II, Big Bill Rose came up with an idea, or scheme as Atlas would call it whenever he told his version of the story, that was patriotic, enterprising, and good for an easy buck. When he got caught, Big Bill emphasized the patriotic part, and his accusers emphasized the buck part.

  Big Bill’s was one of the last funeral homes in that part of Pennsylvania that still used ice instead of mechanical refrigeration to maintain the loved one until interment—or, as Atlas put it in his version, to keep the corpses cold and the stink down before planting them, getting his words out quick before Gracie could reach across the dinner table to slap his arm. Wasting so much good, usable ice after each burial had always pained Big Bill. When World War II came along and conservation and thrift became every good citizen’s duty, a light bulb clicked on in the dim attic of Big Bill’s brain. Without offering too many details as to the origins of the ice, B
ig Bill approached his sister, Edith, who ran a little catering business out of her own kitchen, with a plan that, as he would later explain to his accusers, “was first and foremost, and originally intended, to ease the burdens of our fighting boys overseas.” This was not what he had told Edith. He referred to his “surplus of ice” and a small deal that would be mutually beneficial to them both—whenever Edith was in need of ice for one of her grander events, such as the Waverly Firemen’s Ball or the Kiwanis’s annual chicken barbecue, Big Bill would supply her at half price. His yearly revenue, for the one year he derived income before his scheme collapsed, came to six dollars and twenty-three cents—an amount, Atlas would say in his version of the story, that even in those days was still a pissy handful of change (Gracie would not even bother to slap at him at this point, he’d used so much dirty talk).

  Big Bill’s twice-used ice operation might have flourished had Lucy Jameson not ordered a Pepsi-Cola with “lots of ice” at her wedding reception at Waverly Lodge, catered by Edith Rose, in the hot summer of 1943. To his credit, and as he repeatedly explained to his accusers, Big Bill always rinsed his ice, “carefully,” he said. Of course “carefully” meant one thing to his accusers and something else again to Big Bill, who rinsed, carefully, making real sure he didn’t melt his profits down the drain—a drain that in this case was located in the center of Big Bill’s aging porcelain embalming table. Lucy, impelled by the heat of the day and the anticipated heat of her impending honeymoon encounter, had drained her Pepsi-Cola (chilled with carefully rinsed ice) in one great swallow. When she finished, she continued to hold her tilted glass to her lips. An array of looks flashed across her face, all partially concealed by her upended glass. Surprise. Confusion. And then, slowly, a sort of giddiness. For there, in the bottom of the glass that Lucy still pressed up into her face, came a glint of frozen gold from among the silver chips of ice. A ring, a man’s wedding band. Lucy was pleased. She looked shyly at her new husband, Albert Jameson, who stood at her side. She had no idea Al was capable of play, that he was such a trickster, and this odd little game came as something of a relief to her. But when she looked down at Al’s left hand and saw his wedding band firmly in place on his finger, her giddy feeling returned to one of confusion.