By Matthew Dodd.
In a deckchair under the late afternoon sun, he sat lazily writing in a worn leather pocketbook. A pale blue linen shirt fit loosely over his torso, setting off the darker blue of his linen trousers. His deckchair stood a little off-centre on the balcony of La Porte Ouverte, one of the finer hotels that overlooked the River Loire before its destruction by a German bomber, which was to prematurely eject its load en-route to Tours at the onset of the war. This would not happen for half a decade yet; he had no notion of staying that long.
In the pocketbook he was, with a fervent energy, composing passionate declarations of love to women he’d never met nor had any intention of meeting again. By this point in the afternoon (a large antique clock over the balcony entrance informed him, and twelve other patrons, that it was twenty-six minutes past four) he had completed one hundred and twenty-five such declarations in pieces that ranged from single sentences to polemics spanning a dozen pages. The object of this practice was unclear, but it evidently engaged the man deeply: his attention had hardly left the pocketbook since lunch, save short trips to the bar to order gin rickeys. By the bank of the river, a small child reached her hand out to feed a heron which had landed a metre or so into the water, only to tumble unceremoniously into the mud before her. Nearby, her parents did not seem to notice. They were, at that moment, preoccupied with the task of cutting a few slices of brie.
The balustrades that enclosed the balcony were ornate with various vaguely Grecian images – an all but unrecognisable figure of Perseus that was recovered from La Porte’s wreck now takes pride-of-place in a local museum – and were spaced evenly as to allow guests an ample view of the river below. A single hollow chime announced the arrival of the half hour. At this, he set the pocketbook down on the table by his deckchair and got up, setting off once more on his familiar pilgrimage to the bar. The book, whose once black covers had grown brown by continued exposure to sunlight, displayed two open pages of an impassioned message to one Miss Delilah June. It was not one of the stronger pieces in the book but nevertheless exhibited the finely tempered prose on which he prided himself. At the end of the address he had written in a delicate hand: ‘With my love, which clings to you like climbing hydrangea, Frankie Oregon.’
Oregon wasn’t really his name. It was only the first name that his grandfather’s father had seen when he poked his head out from the boat on which he had stolen a trip out of Manila. And so it became his name. When it came time for him to pass his name on to a son – who would in turn pass it onto another son, who would then pass it onto Frankie – the suggestion of a family name preceding Oregon had evaporated. That life in Manila, and whatever name it was attached to, had been lost. Great-Grandfather Oregon was a man of few words and had never felt his own history to be worth wasting them on, so the memory of his life had died with him. By the time that Frankie Oregon was sat on the balcony of La Porte Ouverte, working on his second gin rickey, he had no family in either Manila or Oregon as far as he knew. The few relatives that he was aware of were scattered randomly about the world, on ranches or living in sensible two-bedroomed apartments. The River Oregon had no clear mouth and Frankie hardly cared to seek one out. As far as he was concerned, all that he owed to his ancestors was the odd flower on a gravestone, if he should happen to pass it by. Beyond that, he was content to be a singular, floating person. He had drifted all over the world in this way. Europe, Africa, Asia – oceans to oceans and coasts to coasts. He had briefly stopped in both Manila and Oregon but had felt very little in either. Indeed, very few places elicited a response from him merely by the fact of his being in them. Of course, he remembered the Parthenon and the Taj Mahal and, of course, he could itemise and expound their many intricacies and resonances – he had taken courses in both history and architecture – but, excluding those, the places meant practically nothing to him. For him, there was nothing in between the lines.
While Frankie was sitting on the balcony, head poised immovably above the pocketbook, a telegram arrived at the hotel’s front desk addressed to him. It was an invitation to the wedding of his sister, Evelyn, in Syracuse. Frankie would not read this message and the paper on which it was printed would one day join the unrecognisably charred rubble that had once been this fine hotel. The concierge who was on duty at the time of the arrival of this telegram had, most peculiarly, just received one himself. In it, he learnt that his uncle had passed away from pneumonia at his home in Nantes just last weekend. As such, the concierge, whose name was Antoine (although everyone called him Tony), abandoned his post for the first time in his decade at La Porte Ouverte and ran off in the direction of a nearby bus station.
Outside, Frankie was nearly finished with his gin rickey. The next morning, he would check out of La Porte Ouverte and take a car to Orleans where he would likely find yet another hotel, or perhaps a café, and another deckchair to sit in. For now, though, he persisted in his scribblings. Behind him, in the hotel’s quite extravagant dining hall, tonight’s dinner service was being prepared. A bearded and bespectacled old man in a gravy-stained apron was yelling directions at a fleet of young chefs who, as a rule, wore far tidier uniforms than their superior. This evening, they would be serving a Chicken Fricassee, a dish La Porte’s kitchen was renowned for, with a crab bisque for its starter. In a few hours, Frankie Oregon would take the staff up on both these dishes, as well as a Crème Brulée which he would take once more on the balcony. By all accounts, he would enjoy them. After dinner he would drink a glass of neat scotch in his room and be in bed by eleven; he might even dream.
As the clock’s larger hand moved towards the Roman numeral V, Frankie noticed something. His pocketbook was full. By a stroke of sheer coincidence, Frankie found that upon completing a plea of gentle longing to an unattached book clerk in Somerset, he had reached the book’s exact end. There were now precisely one hundred and thirty-two full messages in the book. Without exception, they were signed by the author, although the specific nature of his closing remarks differed throughout. The final words of his last message, and by extension the whole book, were uncomplicated: ‘with love, Frankie’. If he’d known these were to be his final words, perhaps he would’ve thought of something more exciting, but he hadn’t, so he didn’t.
Upon finishing, he closed the book and placed it in his left trouser pocket. From his right, he produced a silver cigarette case out of which he drew one white cigarette. He raised it to his lips and, with a gold lighter he’d picked up somewhere in Warsaw, lit it. After taking two drags he began to walk towards the edge of the balcony. A gentle wind blew through a poplar tree across the river. Frankie gripped the banister with one hand and gazed down at the Loire as it passed below him. With the other he took the cigarette out of his mouth and tossed it off of the balcony, aiming vaguely for a small outcrop of thrushes on the riverbank. After a few moments he reached into his left pocket and took out the pocketbook. For a matter of seconds he observed the book, turning it over once, then twice, in his hands before casting it deliberately over the banister. It spun wildly in an arc through the air, its covers splayed to give the impression of a bird fruitlessly attempting to take flight. After a journey of some seconds it landed noiselessly in the river and was borne immediately by the current downstream, where it soon passed a small girl feeding some cheese to a heron, before disappearing ultimately and irretrievably into the dark recesses of the water.