I glanced at the clock: six twenty. Where were the guys?
“I have something to tell you,” Nona went on. I snapped to, fearing the worst: cancer.
“I met someone,” Nona said.
I waited for her to go on, but she didn’t.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I met someone.”
“Like … a man?” I asked. If she were my age, I wouldn’t feel comfortable voicing this assumption, especially in Cambridge. But this was Nona.
“Of course, a man,” she said.
“Really?” Wow. “Well, who is he? What’s his name?”
“Paul,” Nona answered. “His wife died a year ago.”
“How did you meet him?”
“At church. He invited me out for coffee.”
“When was this?”
“Oh, I don’t know. A while ago.”
“Have you seen him again? Since this coffee?”
“Every day,” she said cheerfully.
“Nona, that’s so great!” I said. “That’s really … great,” I added, unable, in my shock, to think of anything else to say.
What followed was even more shocking.
My grandmother giggled.
Henry was in a philosophical mood. The church Declan and Kelly take the kids to, St. Ambrose’s, can be a little on the old school side, depending on who says the Mass. When Henry’s very tired, which he often is on Sunday nights, he can get fretful over things he’s heard in the sermon, words or concepts that unsettled him in the moment, dispersed like phantoms when he hit the fresh air, and now have returned to hover over his bed.
“Mama,” he said after I’d kissed him and tucked him in and gotten him a second glass of water and promised for the third time that I would firm up his movie date with Nat.
I gave him a stern look. The preliminaries were now officially over. It was bedtime.
“Is your mama in heaven?”
Oh, okay. So he wasn’t just stalling. I sat back down on his bed and took a minute. “I hope so,” I finally said, thinking, Whatever heaven is.
“Don’t you know?”
I shook my head. “Nobody knows, sweetie, not for sure. Nobody ever came back to tell us.”
He thought about this for a minute. “But you think she is, right?”
I wondered how truthful I should be. On the spectrum of confidence in the existence of the exact version of heaven I was raised to spend my life earning admission to, I fall somewhere in the middle. I am absolutely certain that a person’s existence doesn’t end with their last heartbeat; I’ve seen plenty of evidence of that. But I suspect that what lies on the other side of the white light is something far, far grander and more magnificent than the heaven depicted in my grade school catechism, and Henry’s, books that feature images of angels floating around on clouds. Anything is possible, really. I mean, think how unlikely it is that we are alive at all, held on by gravity to an enormous ball turning majestically through space.
“Right?” Henry said, with a little more urgency. Clearly I hadn’t answered fast enough.
He was five, he was tired, he was scared. The time for a nuanced examination of faith and doubt was not now.
“Right,” I said. I hoped it would end there, with a sigh of relief and Henry snuggling deep under the covers, but it didn’t.
“She died when you were little. Littler than me.”
I nodded. He’d heard the story before but he often asked me to repeat it, as though familiarity would eventually rub off its awful edges.
“We were walking to Nona’s,” I began, as I always begin.
“Nona’s same house?” he asked.
“Yup. Uncle Joe and Uncle Jay were at Nona’s and Mama and I were walking over to Nona’s to pick them up.” “From Pop’s.”
“Well, it’s Pop’s house now, but everybody lived there then. Mama and Pop and me, and Uncle Joe and Uncle Jay.”
“I know!”
I smiled. “I know you know. You know the whole story. So why don’t you tell it to me for a change?”
He dove under the covers. When he peeked out he was grinning nervously and shaking his head. He scurried back under the comforter.
“Come on,” I said.
Silence.
“I thought you knew the story,” I said.
“I do!”
“You must not remember it, then, because—”
From under the covers, I heard him say, “Your mama got hit by a car. And she died. But you didn’t.”
“That’s right,” I said. “She pushed the stroller out of the way, so I was safe.”
He peeked out, and he was no longer grinning.
“But if you got hit, too, you’d be in heaven with your mama.”
“May-be,” I said, trying to lighten the conversation with a singsongy tone.
I finally had an inkling of what this might be about. I wrapped his comforter around him and dragged him onto my lap.
“Are you afraid I might die?” I asked quietly.
He looked at me and gave a tentative little nod. Given the hour and how tired he was, there was only one way to handle this.
“Well I’m not going to,” I said. “Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.”
He gave me a suspicious look. Was I pulling his leg? Or could what he most wished for possibly be true? Bravely, he said, “Everybody dies, Ma. You have to die sometime.”
I shook my head. “Nope. Not me. I’m the only person who ever lived who is never, ever, ever going to die.”
He was starting to smile. “You will, too!”
“Nope. No way! I’m going to hang around and bug you and drive you crazy until I’m a thousand years old and have no teeth and have white hair down to the ground! And I’ll make you wait on me and I’ll scare away all your friends.”
I stood up and slung him down onto the bed. He was giggling now and trying to pull away from me. I threw in a tickle or two, stealth-style.
“And if they won’t go away,” I continued, “I’ll fry them up and eat them! And I’ll fry you up and eat you, too! Rrrrrrr!” I tackled him and rustled the covers and tickled his squirming form.
“Noooo!” he said, “I’ll eat you! I’ll fry you up and eat you!!!”
He made gobbling sounds and tried to tickle me.
“And then what?” I said, in my meanest, witchiest voice.
“I’ll go live with Daddy!” he shouted, triumphantly.
Chapter Eleven
AS USUAL, THIS morning, I had been early. I hadn’t wanted to be late on my first day of work, so I’d allowed for an extra forty-five minutes of travel time, in case there were problems on the Red Line. There weren’t. With time to spare, I got off at Charles Street, bought a grapefruit juice at Savenor’s, and made my way over to Beacon, then up the hill toward the Athenaeum.
The air was cool. It was drizzling steadily and the streets were alive with both the living and the dead. I see them all, all the time, side by side, but I am able to tune out earthbound spirits the same way we all tune out other people, every day of our lives. Say you go to a store or a park, or any place that’s filled with people. You might take particular notice of an individual or two, but unless you make contact with that person by speaking to them or by staring at them until they look at you or by hitting them with a Frisbee or something, they probably won’t notice you. We’re all just a face in a sea of faces. I suppose we couldn’t get through life without the ability to ignore 99 percent of what crosses our field of vision, competing for our attention.
Fortunately, the same rules applied to the ghosts I saw this morning. There was the sad young woman in Colonial dress, sitting on one of the benches in the Public Garden. There was the ghost of a man I took to be a slave, possibly captured and murdered as he moved between safe houses on the Underground Railroad. There were the emaciated spirits of a father and his little girl, and while I knew nothing for certain, I guessed that they had been passengers on one of the “coffin ships” that brought the
sickly victims of Ireland’s Great Famine to New York and New England. There was the ghost of a hollow-eyed young man in his late teens or early twenties. He seemed surprised to be in the realm of the spirits, and I guessed that he had recently died in an accident or from a drug overdose. None of the ghosts noticed me, though, because I didn’t make eye contact with them or speak to them. They assumed I couldn’t see them, so they ignored me the same way they ignored all the other people on the street. And because earthbound spirits can’t pass through the bodies of living people, despite what you might see in the movies, they politely, and in a few cases, impolitely, shared the sidewalks with the rest of us, weaving in and out of the commuters scurrying for their offices, stepping aside for the mothers hurrying children to school, and darting out of the way, ironically, since they were already dead, of killer cyclists.
I had walked past the old Granary Burying Ground countless times when I lived in Back Bay but I had never taken the time to pause, climb its limestone steps, and pass through its monumental gateway to the small, quiet cemetery within. Today, I did.
Because in the movies cemeteries are always filled with ghosts, you’re probably assuming that it was another earthbound spirit that lured me into the quiet garden, yet one more lost soul with something urgent on its mind. But that’s another Hollywood myth. It doesn’t work that way. Ghosts need energy, human energy, in order to survive, and they’re not going to get it from dead people, so they don’t tend to hang around in cemeteries. You might see the occasional departed fussbudget checking up on the maintenance of her grave, but that’s usually it. This morning, there wasn’t a ghost to be seen within the cool, damp walls of the burial ground.
There were, however, the final resting places of some serious historical personages: three signers of the Declaration of Independence, eight Massachusetts governors, and Paul Revere himself. And Mother Goose. The real Mother Goose? I’d wondered. (Was there a real Mother Goose?) I didn’t know. But I did know there was a real Benjamin Franklin, and both his parents were buried there, under a curiously modern granite obelisk about twenty feet tall.
The trees had lost almost all of their leaves, and a cool, gray mist hovered over the ground. Some of the tombstones had sunk so deeply into the earth that it was impossible to read their full inscriptions.
Two hours later, though, as I gazed down from the windows in Sylvia’s office, the very same spot no longer seemed somber and melancholy, as it had earlier, but full of energy and life. The sun had broken through the layer of cloud and burned off all the morning mist, and tourists in bright rain slickers and baseball caps were now wandering the paths, taking photographs of notable headstones. Dozens of grammar school children, probably on a Freedom Trail field trip, were chasing one another up and down the soggy grass aisles.
It was nearly eleven, and I was waiting for Sylvia, who had been summoned to an unscheduled meeting by her boss, Amanda Perkins. I use the word boss, but really, Sylvia is her own boss. Still, because she is working under this roof on books that now belong to the Athenaeum, she’s in fairly close contact with the powers-that-be. The phone had rung just minutes after I’d arrived, and Amanda had asked to see her. Immediately.
“Oh, my God,” Sylvia had said. “She knows!”
“Knows what?”
“About the book! About the fact that I took it home and it—”
“There’s no way,” I said, interrupting what appeared to be a panic attack in the making. “How could she know?”
“She never calls me. Why would she be calling me?”
“You do work here. I’m sure it’s something … ordinary.”
Sylvia stood up and started to pace.
“Look,” I continued, “don’t you think that if she knew about the book, you’d have heard about it by now?”
“Not necessarily.” She was not in the mood to be reassured.
“As far as they know, it doesn’t exist, remember?” I said.
She was frowning and shaking her head; fear was overtaking reason.
“You hid it inside that cover,” I reminded her. “What was the book?”
“Hoeffler,” she answered softly. “Mysterium Musicum.”
“Right. So if they’re looking for anything, they’re looking for that.”
“Great,” she said sharply. “First I get a message from Tad, and now this.”
“Tad?” My stomach did a little swoop. So he had seen me in the alley behind his house! He’d recognized me after all, and now he was going to demand an explanation.
“What did he want?” I asked nervously.
“No idea,” she answered. “I tried him back, but it went to voice mail.”
“He’s probably just checking up on those books,” I said, not believing this for a minute.
“Maybe,” she’d said.
She’d been gone for over an hour now, though, and I must have been getting more and more nervous myself, because when I heard a noise behind me, I surprised myself by letting out a little shriek. I wheeled around.
It was the monk. The young one.
“I beg your pardon,” he said.
“That’s all right,” I answered.
“I’ve been forbidden to speak to you,” he said anxiously, glancing back at the door to be sure that his volatile abbot had not appeared, “but I had to come.”
“Is it the Book of Kildare?” I blurted out, afraid he might vanish at any moment.
He seemed puzzled. “Cill-Dara was our abbey,” he said quietly.
I thought for a minute. The Book of Kildare was probably given that name later, by art historians. To this monk, it would have been just one—although maybe a very important one—of the many manuscripts transcribed or created in their scriptorium.
“Were you killed?” I asked.
He nodded. “The abbey was burned to the ground. But please, I must hurry.”
“How can I help you?” I asked.
“He will only speak to a man of the Church.”
“A priest?”
He shook his head firmly. “A cardinal!” I smiled. “I seriously doubt that I can—”
“Or a bishop,” he added quickly.
“I can try,” I said. “I mean, I will try, but what about a monsignor? That might be easier to pull off.”
“It’s urgent!” he said loudly, apparently annoyed that I didn’t seem to be taking this seriously enough. “It’s being destroyed.”
I felt a chill. “What? What do you mean?”
From the look on his face, I gathered that he felt he had already said too much. He and his abbot might be dead, but he still felt bound by the vow of absolute obedience that he had taken in life.
“The manuscript’s being destroyed?”
He pursed his lips, squeezed his eyes tightly shut, and allowed himself to make one tiny nod in the affirmative.
“How?” I demanded. “Who’s destroying it?”
He shook his head. He would say no more.
“Who? Tell me! The person who stole it?”
His eyes flew open. “Stole it?” he whispered. “It’s been stolen?”
“It was taken from Sylvia’s place,” I informed him quietly.
“Oh, no,” he said, shaking his head. “No! Dear God, please …”
And then he vanished.
Chandler had taken a personal day, so we had the bindery to ourselves. About ten minutes after the monk disappeared, Sylvia had come back upstairs to get me, to take me through the first-day formalities of tax forms and keys and introductions. I was curious to have a conversation with Amanda, but when we got back around to her office, it was locked. I hadn’t yet heard the details of their meeting; Sylvia said she’d tell me everything once we were alone and settled in downstairs.
One nice thing about bookbinding is that it really can’t be rushed. The process is methodical, and each little step takes as much time as it takes. You might wish the glue would dry more quickly, but it dries when it dries, depending on how humid the air happens t
o be, how porous the papers are, how fine the leather is, and half a dozen other factors. You have no alternative but to slow yourself down.
Sylvia offered me a choice of books to work on, and I chose a three-volume set of Cicero’s essays. These weren’t among the valuable books waiting to be rebound; they were probably just college texts retained by Finny or someone in his family for sentimental reasons. But that was all right. I was happy to leave the high-profile manuscripts to Sylvia.
The introduction was in French and the text was in Latin, so I wouldn’t be tempted to read any of it, which, for me, is an occupational hazard. In a way, it was a shame to rebind them; they were so evocative and beautiful in their falling-apart way. They had been published in Paris in 1923, with a paperback cover that was now a soft, faded shade of pumpkin. The weight of the typesetter’s keys on the paper had embossed each page with an imprint of the text on the opposite side. The paper itself was supple and worn, as though the volumes had been carried around for years in a leather bag or a generous pocket. In the margins of the pages were notes written in pencil, in Latin and English, in neat, tiny script. An index card was tucked into one of the chapters. It looked as old as the book, and whoever had written the margin notes had written just one sentence on the card, in Latin. I wondered if that person was Finny.
The books were held together by packing tape: eight neat pieces, themselves now yellow and brittle, crossing the spine of each volume. I wouldn’t be able to replicate the engraving of Lupa, the wolf who nursed the founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, or the simple, elegant logo of the publisher, La Société des Belles Lettres, which, along with “7 francs,” was the only text printed on the back cover. But I could preserve the pages themselves, and with them, the evidence of one human being to whom the essays had once spoken.
I set to work. Sylvia was resewing chapters of a book of botanical plates, so we established ourselves at the big central table and settled in.
She let out a doleful sigh. “I’m in way over my head,” she said. “I think I’d better just come clean to everybody, let them call the police, and be done with it. And resign, if they don’t fire me first. Which they definitely will.”
The Book of Illumination Page 10
