“Wait a minute,” I said. “Was he just visiting or has he moved to Owensboro too? And what mall are you talking about?”
“What mall!” Janet said. “There’s only one, out Livermore Road. It’s so far out of town that hardly anybody ever goes out there. I couldn’t believe it when we saw Philip Roth out there.”
“What were you doing out at the mall with my mother?” I asked. “Is she bothering you again?”
“She gets a little lonesome. I go by and see her, and maybe we go shopping or something. Is that a crime?”
“Of course not,” I said. I’m glad my mother has friends. I just wish they weren’t my best friends, with the same name as me.
Mother called me at work the next day. I have asked her not to do this when I am temping, but sometimes she can’t make the pay-phone thing work. Most companies don’t like for temps to get calls, even from family. E. L. Doctorow had moved to Owensboro and was staying in Dr. Crippen’s house on Wildwood Drive, only two blocks away.
“He has a little beard,” Mother said, “He has a little dog and walks it regularly every day. He’s renting the house while Dr. Crippen and his wife are in Michigan.”
“So he hasn’t exactly moved to Owensboro,” I said, somehow relieved.
“Well, he’s out here every morning,” she said, “walking his dog. Call it whatever you want to.”
I know the house very well. The Crippens are not ostentatiously tacky the way some (indeed, most) doctors are. It was the Crippens who had encouraged me to go ahead and move to New York if that was what I wanted, when everybody else in my class was getting married. It’s not an older home, of the kind I prefer, but if you had to live in a suburban-style house, theirs would do.
All day I imagined E. L. Doctorow watering the plants and looking through Dr. and Dr. (they are both doctors) Crippen’s books. They have the most books of anybody in Owensboro. The next day at lunch I went to Barnes and Noble and looked through Doctorow’s novels in paperback. All together they made a neat little stack the size of a shoebox.
I decided I was glad he had moved to Owensboro.
It’s hard to make friends in New York. I wondered what it was like in Owensboro for famous writers. Did they ever meet? Did they know one another? Did they pay visits, talk shop, drink together? I asked Alan when he called Monday night (right after the rates changed) but he seemed embarrassed by the question.
“Apparently, they have all moved here independently,” he said. “They’re never seen together. I wouldn’t want to speculate.”
When William Styron moved to Owensboro the last day in May, I wasn’t so surprised. At least he was from the South, although two more different regions than the lower Ohio Valley and the Tidewater of Virginia could hardly be imagined. May and even June are nice in Owensboro, but July and August were coming, and when I thought of Styron blinking in the fierce muggy heat, he seemed even more out of place than the urban Jewish writers like Roth, Doctorow, and Bellow. And Updike, a New Englander! I felt sorry for them all. But that was silly. Every place now has air-conditioning.
When I called Janet, she reminded me that Mother’s birthday was coming up. I knew I was expected to fly home.
Janet told me all about how she and Alan were planning to take her out to dinner. This was to make me feel guilty. I wasn’t planning to fall for it like I did last year, at the last minute.
It is very hard to make friends in New York. My roommate and her ex-roommate had shares in a house in the Hamptons (well, almost the Hamptons) and I had been invited out for the weekend. “You can’t go home for your mother’s birthday every year,” I tell myself.
Mother called me a few days later—a pay phone again, this one near a deli on Thirty-ninth Street where she had gotten me once before—to announce that J. D. Salinger had moved to Owensboro.
“Wait a minute,” I said. This was getting out of hand. “How come no women writers ever move to Owensboro?
What about Ann Tyler? Or Alice Walker? Or Bobbie Ann Mason, who is actually from Mayfield (not that far away)?
How come they’re all men, and all these old guys?”
“I suppose you expect me to ask them that!” Mother said. “I only found out the author of Catcher in the Rye moved here because Mr. Roth told Reverend Curtis.”
“Mr. Roth?” So now it was “Mr.” Roth.
“Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus? He’s renting Reverend Curtis’s son Wallace’s house out on Livermore Road, and you know how Reverend Curtis won’t take checks, and they saw this strange-looking man at the cash machine, and Mr. Roth whispers, ‘That’s J. D. Salinger. Catcher in the Rye?’ Man said he looked like some hillbilly in town from Ohio County.”
“How did Alan get into this?”
“He was standing in line behind them at the cash machine,” Mother said. “He just happened to overhear.”
On Monday night, Alan told me Philip Roth had seemed as surprised as the rest of them to see J. D. Salinger in Owensboro.
“Maybe they had all moved to Owensboro trying to get away from him,” I said, trying to be funny.
“I doubt that,” Alan said. “Anyway, it’s hardly the kind of question you can ask.”