Love, Death & Rare Books

by Robert Hellenga

“We’ll see what there is. We’ll buy some. Maybe a lot. There’s bound to be a lot of junk that’s not worth the cost of shipping.”

  We followed Sheridan Road through some of the wealthiest suburbs in the United States: Evanston, Wilmette, Winnetka, Kenilworth, Glencoe, Highland Park. We didn’t talk about the Romantics, about the new sources of meaning—Nature, Art, the Romantic Hero. Olivia was done with the Romantics. She sat in the passenger seat staring out the window, when I asked her what was the matter, she said: angst, nausée, ennui—and winter in Chicago. She was in the passenger seat and her face was in the morning sun, turned away from me, but I could tell she wasn’t smiling.

  In front of the Administration Building, a red brick Victorian relic, originally part of a seminary, we were met by a priest, a handsome man in black clericals. Father Gregory, SJ.

  We introduced ourselves and shook hands. His black robe gave me a little frisson, because it made me think of the stories that Grandpa Chaz and Clare Duval told about the Jesuit fathers who’d been tortured by the Iroquois.

  “I’ve never shaken hands with a Jesuit before,” Olivia said.

  Father Gregory laughed. “Let’s get some coffee to take with us,” he said. “I’ve got some water going in the staff kitchen.”

  We never got an exact count of the books, but Father Gregory thought there were well over a hundred thousand. I was astonished. The college had been closed for almost a year. The college library had been moved to a seminary in Wisconsin, and most of the Vatican books had been put on the shelves in the old library, in no particular order. Others were in boxes on the floor in the unheated basement of the Administration Building, or piled on trestle tables in the old gymnasium. Some were still in crates covered with colorful stamps and stamped Poste Vatican in the basement of one of the dormitories.

  By four o’clock in the afternoon, we were frozen. We’d probably looked at—or walked past—twenty thousand books, and that was just the beginning. Father Gregory boiled more water in the little kitchen and spooned some instant coffee into Styrofoam cups. “A lot of dealers would give their eyeteeth to have a look at these books,” he said.

  “Then you should have invited a lot of dealers at the outset, which is what I suggested, instead of asking me to look at a hundred thousand books. What exactly are you trying to accomplish here anyway? Do you want to start a bidding war? I could arrange a shelf auction or a bulk auction. Invite dealers to bid on two or three hundred books at a time. All or nothing.”

  “All right,” he said. “Forget about other dealers. What we want is to turn these books into cash without making a lot of noise. St. Mary’s College got a lot of bad press when they sold off their rare books. Like Ronald Reagan wanting to sell off the rare book collections in the Bancroft Library at the University of California. The bishop doesn’t want that to happen to us. The main thing is to make sure we’re not unloading something really valuable, like a Gutenberg Bible or a Shakespeare First Folio.”

  “Unlikely,” I said. “Most of these books are going to wind up in the landfill.”

  “The landfill!” Father Gregory was indignant. But I was right, most of these books were going to wind up in the landfill. On the other hand, there were some treasures here too, and I wanted to get my hands on them. I’d seen too much to turn back. It was a huge opportunity for the shop, but I didn’t want to be too obvious about it.

  “What if we just sent the books to Christie’s or Sotheby’s?” Father Gregory asked.

  “Father Gregory,” I said. “Christie’s and Sotheby’s are not going to sell any lots under five thousand dollars, and they’re not going to sort through a hundred thousand books.”

  Olivia hadn’t touched her coffee. I’d drunk about half of mine. It wasn’t any better than it had been in the morning.

  “Here’s what I suggest,” I said. “I’ll pick out some books for the shop and offer you a fair price. I’ll box them up and send a truck to pick them up. Then we’ll pick out a couple thousand books and I’ll arrange to sell them at auction at Swann’s. You’ve got to understand that you won’t get market value from a dealer. Any dealer. You won’t get market value from me, but you’ll do better if I go through them first. You might see your fifth edition of Burton’s Anatomy in a catalog for four or five thousand, but that doesn’t mean that a dealer will give you four or five thousand. It means that a dealer might give you a thousand, if you’re lucky.”

  “All right,” he said. “All right.”

  We’d walked the stacks for six hours. We hadn’t eaten. I was ready to go home, but Olivia had disappeared. Father Gregory and I started to look around. After a few minutes we started shouting: Olivia, Olivia, Olivia. We were starting to retrace our steps when she came out of the bathroom in the administration building. She’d been crying. Father Gregory and I crowded around her. I thought she looked beautiful.

  She turned to Father Gregory. “Before we go,” she said, “there’s something I’d like to ask you.”

  “Ask away.”

  “This is kind of private,” she said, turning to me.

  I was taken by surprise. Father Gregory too. He pulled a package of cigarettes from a pocket under his Jesuit robe.

  “Could I have one?” she said.

  I backed away. I didn’t want to hear this, didn’t want to intrude. It was embarrassing. Well, of course, I did want to hear, didn’t want to miss anything, but I thought backing away was the right thing to do. Was there something about Father Gregory that I’d missed? Something that invited this sort of confession?

  “What would you say,” I heard Olivia ask, “to someone who was thinking of becoming a Roman Catholic?”

  Father Gregory tapped the pack of cigarettes expertly against his wrist and offered one to Olivia. Olivia said something I couldn’t make out. Father Gregory lit their cigarettes and the smoke curled up and disappeared. “I would say,” he said, inhaling deeply, “if someone were to ask me… I would say… I would want to know what’s troubling you right now, at this moment in your life? As you’re standing here with me.”

  I couldn’t hear Olivia’s answer.

  “You’re turning everything inward,” I heard the priest say. I remembered Olivia smoking with Dad in the warming shed at the ice rink. Dad smoking too.

  “Like a teenager,” I heard, or thought I heard, Olivia say.

  The priest shook his head.

  Olivia’s back was toward me. The priest kept his head down. He touched her shoulder, her arm. She kept her head down too. I was thinking about all the books. Was it like winning the lottery? Or was I like the guy at the end of Beowulf who stumbles on the dragon’s treasure—and unfortunately wakes the sleeping dragon. I’d have to talk it over with Dad.

  Father Gregory made the sign of the cross over Olivia. It was time to go.

  Instead of following Sheridan Road, we drove back on the Edens Expressway, not saying a word till we saw the sign for Highland Park. I asked her about her tête-à-tête with Father Gregory, but she didn’t want to talk about it.

  “Up ahead, Gabe,” she said suddenly. “What’s that? You’d better slow down.”

  It wasn’t snowing, but a heavy black cloud had settled down over the highway ahead of us, stretching east to the lake and west as far as we could see. But it didn’t look like a cloud. It looked like a solid mass.

  “Gabe, we’re driving into the side of a mountain…”

  The cloud-mountain was outlined in black against a dark gray sky that was only slightly lighter than the cloud itself. You could see summits and peaks silhouetted, like mountain peaks. Nothing moved. It was a solid mass. It was hard not to see it as a mountain.

  “Don’t you see it?”

  I did see it.

  “Gabe, slow down.”

  “I’m only going fifty.”

  Olivia was starting to tremble. “Gab
e, we’re going to crash into it.”

  “It’s just a cloud.”

  “It doesn’t look like a cloud. You should pull over.”

  I knew it was just a cloud. What else could it be? But the illusion that it was a solid mass, a mountain, was too strong. I couldn’t see it any other way. But I kept on driving. Other cars were driving too, disappearing. Cars were coming toward us, out of the mountain. Headlights on.

  “If it’s a solid mountain, where are the cars going, or coming from?”

  “There must be tunnels.”

  “We’re on the Eden’s Expressway. There are no tunnels. Or if there are tunnels, we can go through them too.”

  “You see it too, don’t you.”

  I had to admit that I did.

  “Please, Gabe. Pull over.”

  “You want someone to run into us?”

  “No, Gabe, no. It’s too horrible.” She started to unfasten her seat belt.

  “Don’t do that.”

  “I can’t help it, Gabe. You’ve got to pull over. I have to get out of the van. I’m going to scream.” She was breathing hard, as she had been earlier. “Once I start, I won’t be able to stop. I’ll just keep on screaming.”

  I pulled over, and Olivia jumped out of the van and started to walk up and down on a paper-thin layer of snow.

  More snow was starting to fall. Light snow. Out of the light gray sky. Olivia sat down. I turned the engine off and got out of the van. I was frightened too. I sat next to her on the verge, in tallish grass. About a quarter inch of snow. I was afraid to touch her. She was twitching. I got up and stood behind her. Defenseless. Her hair was tied back with what looked like an old shoelace. I hadn’t noticed it before. I put my hand on her head. She didn’t move. I massaged her shoulders. She was very tense.

  “Think about Saskia,” I said. “Think how happy she is. And your aunt. It’s good to have an aunt. I’ve always wished I had an aunt.”

  When I closed my eyes, I could see her as a young girl. Before I’d known her—though I had almost no images of her childhood apart from a few photos—holding a chicken in her arms, on a farm in Goshen, Indiana; in her prom dress in front of her aunt’s big house in Evanston. I could see her standing outside the shop in her enchanted boat sweatshirt; sitting across the table from me at Jimmy’s after we’d put together the Orwell display.

  Cars disappeared into the mountain and other cars appeared. We sat in the snow till the wind started to blow in from the lake and blew the mountain away, and we got back in the van and drove off.

  We didn’t talk about what had happened till we were back in Hyde Park. “You were right to keep on driving,” she said as we pulled into the turnaround in front of the 1700 Building. “But I was right too, to be afraid. I think the mountain was a mountain of books. Father Gregory said you could read all those books and still not understand. You drove right into it, but I panicked.”

  “Understand what?”

  “Understand what’s important. He didn’t say. Maybe it’s not something you can say. He gave me a book that he said would help me. But it’s in French. How am I supposed to read it?” She produced the book from her green book bag. Yellow, soft-cover, probably from the twenties: La vie intellectuelle; son esprit, ses conditions, ses méthodes. “It’s by a Dominican priest.”

  “You can read French,” I said.

  “Not a whole book.”

  Was she joking? I didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what to hope for. A car was pulling in behind us, and Randall, the doorman, was opening Olivia’s door. So I didn’t say anything, tried not to hope for anything. I pulled out of the turnaround and drove back to Blackstone, trying to figure out what had just happened so I could explain it to Dad.

  It took me six weeks, off and on, to go through the books at Cardinal Newman College. I’d take a sandwich with me and eat it in the little kitchenette. I’d make coffee in Mamma’s Moka pot because I couldn’t stand the powdered coffee that was the only thing on offer at Cardinal Newman.

  Dad and I spent some long evenings sitting at the partner’s desk in the office at the shop, sipping some of Dad’s Balvenie 10, consulting Allen and Patricia Ahearn’s Book Prices Current, going through old auction catalogs in our reference library—records for the books themselves and similar books—looking at our own records of similar books in our card catalog, filling long yellow legal pads with our calculations. Arguing about tentative prices, and about whom to quote to, what to put in a catalog. You’re willing to spend a lot more on a book that you figure you can sell with a phone call than you are on a book that’s likely to sit on your shelf for two or three years, or five or ten years. I already had two customers in mind for an early Geneva Bible, but the seven volume supplement to Diderot’s Encyclopédie? Keep it or send it to Swann’s? Today you could go online and see how many copies were owned by libraries in the United States, and that would give you a pretty good idea of how scarce it was. But in 1990? It wasn’t listed in American Book Prices Current, but we decided to hang on to it.

  At the end of February, I laid the results of these calculations out for Father Gregory in the little kitchenette, where I’d been eating my sandwiches at lunchtime. I offered him $40,000 for 2,000 books I thought I could sell for $100 apiece, and $72,000 for 600 books I thought I could sell for $600 apiece. A total of $60,000. In short, I offered $112,000 for 2,600 books. And I offered to sell the high-end items on consignment: a Wicked Bible with a famous misprint (“Thou shalt commit adultery”), a German Bible (the only incunable), Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, three books of hours, the supplement to Diderot’s Encyclopédie, the Evelyn translation of Lucretius, and Vesalius’s De humani corporis (seven volumes, 1568). And finally, I arranged for another three thousand books to be sent to Swann Galleries to be auctioned off over a period of two years.

  He wasn’t happy, but he wasn’t up for a fight. He didn’t want to wait two or three years for three thousand books to be auctioned off at Swann’s; he didn’t want to wait two or three years or more for me to sell the high-end items on commission; he didn’t want to worry about separating the remaining books into sheep and goats. In the end, I agreed to take everything: I offered him four hundred thousand for the lot—for about fifty-six hundred books I hoped to sell for two and a half million, though some of those books would sit on our shelves for three or four years. Or five. Or ten. But it was good material and would sell in the end.

  “It will take a few days to get the money together,” I said.

  “That’s all right,” he said. “Just get the books out of here. I don’t want to see them. Or maybe I don’t want them to see me. We never had any use for them.”

  “I’ll come out tomorrow with a truck and boxes and some college kids to pack the books—books for the shop, books for Swann’s, books for the landfill. It will take a couple of days.”

  We sealed the deal with a drink, not in the kitchenette but in Father Gregory’s modest office, which was full of his own books, on collapsible folding shelves, the kind we used to display our books at book fairs.

  He got two jelly glasses from the cupboard and poured us each a little Scotch, Cutty Sark. The office was cold. We kept our coats on. I asked him what he’d said to Olivia at the end of our first visit.

  “You should ask her.”

  “I have.” I tasted the Scotch. “What would you say to me?”

  “Are you considering joining the church?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “What happened here anyway?” I asked.

  “Monsignor Reitman,” he said, “was too idealistic. We all were. A classical education in a Roman Catholic framework—a ‘clear, calm, accurate vision and comprehension of all things, as far as the finite mind can embrace them.’ It worked for Cardinal Newman, though he didn’t actually found a university,
but we couldn’t make it work here. We couldn’t agree on a science curriculum. We took on ten million dollars in debt thinking we could triple our enrollment by 1985, four years after we opened our doors, but we never had more than three hundred students.” We needed another two million for repairs. The accrediting agency put us on probation…”

  “O tempus, O mores,” I said.

  “Cicero,” he said. “Cardinal Newman patterned his style on Cicero.” He was sitting at his desk. He swiveled around and looked out the window. “Come over here,” he said.

  I stood beside his chair and looked out the window.

  “When Cardinal Newman left Oxford on February 23, 1846, he recalled the snapdragons that had been growing on the wall opposite his window in his first college, Trinity College. He took them as an emblem—‘my own perpetual residence even unto death in my own University.’ That’s what I’m going to be doing now. Recalling snapdragons. You see where your van is parked?”

  I could see the van in front of the Administration Building.

  “You see those Italian pots? They look like terra cotta but they’re actually plastic. If they were terracotta, they’d have cracked during the winter. They should have been taken inside anyway, but there’s no one left to do that sort of thing.”

  I nodded.

  “I filled those pots with snapdragons every spring in honor of Cardinal Newman. They’re annuals. You can grow them as perennials, but not this far north.”

  “My grandfather planted daylilies,” I said. “Our yard is full of them. They come back every year.”

  “Maybe that’s what I should have planted,” he said. “Daylilies.”

  VI. THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY

  (March 1990)

  I didn’t know what to make of Olivia’s visionary mountain, or her private conversations with Father Gregory, but I was on a high, not just because of the book deal, but because Olivia had come out of her funk. She reorganized the children’s books on the first floor and started a story hour on Saturday mornings—leaving baby Saskia with her aunt, who brought her to the shop twice a day so Olivia could nurse her in the staff room. She was a little prickly, uncomfortable about accepting help, but we saw each other every day, often in intimate circumstances (nursing the baby in the staff room). Dad still wanted me to marry her. He wanted a grandson, or a granddaughter, someone who would carry the shop into the fourth generation when the time came. And Olivia’s aunt, who always spoke her mind, also wanted me to marry her. “Gabe,” she said one blustery winter day as she was tucking Saskia’s little arms and legs into a snowsuit. “Take her out to dinner. Tell her you love her. It’s not that hard. She doesn’t want to burden you with somebody else’s child. But I don’t think you’re worried about that.”