Love, Death & Rare Books

by Robert Hellenga

  Our copy of Faulkner’s first book, The Marble Faun—the only book he ever signed “Bill”—and our copy of The Anatomy of Melancholy—the one that I’d been lugging around for four years—were side by side in a case next to Julius Caplan’s Shakespeare First Folio, in perfect condition—worth more than all the other books in the room combined.

  Outside in the world of retail, the big box stores were duking it out in what became known as the Chicago Book Wars. Independent bookstores were closing right and left. Farther outside, in what we now think of as cyberspace, the Internet was just beginning to make its presence felt in the rare book trade—a huge giant stirring on the sidelines, mentioned only in whispers. But our first floor was still humming like a conveyor belt, and our rare book business was doing better than ever. Institutional buying had tapered off, but collectors had stepped up to the plate and were dominating the market, driving prices higher and higher. And inside in the Fellows’ Lounge, surrounded by beautiful books, the mood was convivial. We drank champagne and ate Lake Michigan salmon tartare, with pressed caviar and tomatoes, till dinner was served in the Reading Room on the third floor. We found our places and two minutes later the waiter set down our soup—“consommé with sorrel leaves floating on the surface.” Olivia lowered her head and reached under the table, as if she’d dropped her napkin and was having trouble finding it.

  “Need some help?” I asked, pushing my chair away from the table. And then I realized that she was praying, saying grace and trying not to be observed. I wasn’t too surprised. I supposed that, like me, she was tired of waiting and that, like me, she had her own agenda, one that ran parallel to mine. She been corresponding with Father Gregory, who was teaching at Regis College, part of the University of Toronto, and had started reading the book he’d given her—A. G. Sertillanges’s La vie intellectuale—reading it in French. She was going to begin a serious spiritual practice; she was going to keep a journal; she was going to follow Sertillanges’s advice by reading one thing at a time instead of skipping all over the map; she was going to listen for the truth; she was going to seek out the law within that needed to be obeyed; she started taking instruction at St. Tom’s on Kimbark, where Mamma had taken me on Easter and on Christmas Eve and on her saint’s day, October second—feast of the Guardian Angels.

  Dad and I were planning to spend a week in July at the Loft in St. Anne, and I was going to suggest to Olivia that she and Saskia might like to come with us, but then the weather suddenly went out of control. On Wednesday, July 12, the temperature shot up to 100 degrees and kept on rising. We decided to keep the shop open, as we’d done during previous heat waves—not for business, but as an unofficial cooling center. We brought down our supply of box fans and closed off the top two floors because the air-conditioning couldn’t handle the load. We arranged the fans in a circle around the perimeter of the first floor, blowing counterclockwise.

  The next day the temperature reached 106 degrees. Humidity was at record levels, and the heat index reached 119 at O’Hare and 125 at Midway. Bridges had to be hosed down to keep from buckling; power grids failed; many hospitals closed, unable to handle any more people. Three thousand fire hydrants were opened.

  Parker Abrams, Delilah’s father, and Delilah brought people in the funeral home limousines, and they brought some blankets and mats for bedding. Refrigerated trucks were brought to keep the bodies from decomposing on the sidewalks outside the morgue in the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office on West Harrison Street. The Red Cross brought sandwiches and bottled water. The bathrooms couldn’t handle this many people. Men peed outside. We rented a couple of porta-potties that we put in the alley. Dad and I drove the van out to the suburbs to get bottled water. It was impossible to think.

  Olivia was everywhere. She kept up morale, filling the whole shop with her energy, like a songbird—reading to children, passing around pieces of fruit and pillows and bottles of water. By Friday, there were two hundred people on the first two floors of the shop. Sitting. Leaning against the stacks. Lying on the floor. The oldest people got the few comfortable chairs on the second floor and a dozen cots that Parker Abrams brought over.

  The Red Cross sandwiches were supplemented by sandwiches from the Medici and Salonica and the Café Florian. Fruit and canned goods came from the Hispanic grocery store. Saskia ran around, which was good for the old people. I could see that Olivia was enjoying herself, though “enjoying” is the wrong word. I could see that Olivia wasn’t aware of herself at all. She was losing herself in this work, bossing me around, Dad too. She sent Dad to the Randolph Street market to buy crates of apricots and boxes of plums and cherries. I watched her from the landing when I went up to the second floor to check the temperature in the rare book room. She deployed her entire arsenal of smiles—shy and demure, bold and inviting, skeptical, encouraging, thoughtful; smiles that sprang from the heart, and smiles that said “you can’t fool me,” eyes-only smiles and now-you-listen-to-me smiles, amused smiles, naughty-girl smiles, sideways smiles for the old men, smiles with a promise of mysteries. She put things in perspective, and I could see that she was happy. She leaned forward into the heat as if she were walking into a bracing wind. She listened to her own advice as if she were learning something, or in the process of discovering something funny. And as it turned out, she was.

  “The secret of life,” she told me when the heatwave was at its worst, “is to live for others.”

  “Like one of Tolstoy’s peasants?”

  “You don’t need to be sarcastic.”

  I wasn’t being sarcastic.

  When it was over and the shop had emptied out—the cots returned to the Abrams Funeral Home, the box fans put back in the attic—she gave me a copy of a book that Father Gregory had given her—based on the precepts of St. Thomas Aquinas—La vie intellectuelle. “There is a law within you,” she said, as if confiding a secret. “Let it be obeyed.”

  “You should send a copy to the mayor,” I said.

  Seven hundred people died in Chicago, many of them old and alone, more on the South Side than on the North. When it was over and the temperature was back down to the lower nineties, the mayor, who’d been on vacation, pooh-poohed the crisis, said he hadn’t known anything about it, denied the findings of the medical autopsies, sat on the numbers, refused to accept responsibility for the city’s failure to follow its own heat-emergency guidelines, blamed the victims—the dead—for neglecting themselves, and chided their neighbors for expecting the city to take care of them instead of taking care of their own.

  Dad and I resumed our plan to go to Michigan, our first summer without Grandpa Chaz, so we’d have two bedrooms instead of just one. I caught up with Olivia on the stairs going up to the second floor. I told myself that when we reached the top step, I would speak, but before I could invite Olivia to Michigan, she told me she was giving notice. She was on her way to talk to Dad. David, she explained, had finally managed to divorce his wife. She and Saskia were going to live with him in Ann Arbor.

  I was stunned. I followed her to Dad’s office at the back of the second floor. She wanted to let him know first, she said.

  I could see that she was elated and trying not to show it. “So,” I said. “This is the law within you that needs to be obeyed?”

  “I suppose so,” she said without irony. Either she was obtuse; or she was cruel. Or maybe she was just happy.

  She knocked on the office door. I was ready to step inside with her, but she said she needed to do this alone.”

  “Okay,” I said. And that was better, I thought, than breaking down and crying in Dad’s office.

  “I loved her too, you know,” Dad said on the way home that afternoon. “Too bad she’s such a cunt.” Dad used a lot of profanity, but I’d never heard him use that word before. I started to argue, but there was nothing to argue about.

  “Let’s leave tonight,” Dad said.

  �
�Tonight?”

  “Oscar’s going to keep on cataloging, and Delilah’s going to mind the shop. I already spoke to them.”

  I’d lost my enthusiasm for the trip to Michigan, didn’t care one way of the other, but Dad was eager to go. It took us twenty minutes to throw some clothes in a suitcase and pack a couple of knives and our big cast iron frying pan. Dad said he was too tired to drive, so I drove Grandpa Chaz’s Cadillac, which was still in good shape. This was a first. Not really a shift in power, just a shift. I wasn’t sure what it meant. Probably nothing, or maybe Dad just wanted me to feel useful. We headed out of Chicago on Stony Island, past Moo & Oink, past Mosque Maryam, past the old Avalon. As we approached Seventy-Ninth Street, we were passed by an old VW camper. Painted on the side, in bright colors: sometimes i go around feeling sorry for myself, and all the while i’m being carried by great winds across the sky. I was tempted to follow the camper, but it was too late. We were already climbing the Skyway ramp. I thought about painting that on the side of our own van, which looked a little bit like a hearse.

  We were in a different world now, up in the air. Dad was snoozing, his head up against the window. He was wearing the old clothes that he always wore in St. Anne—jeans and a short-sleeved white shirt frayed at the collar. I’d made this trip alone, of course, but when we were together, Dad had always driven. Even when Grandpa Chaz was with us. It was an odd feeling. As if we’d come up over the top of an old glacial deposit that I hadn’t known was there and were now speeding up as we went down the other side. And, in fact, we had driven over an old glacial deposit, the original “stony island.” I was thinking that this would have been a good moment to share with Olivia. I looked at Dad, and then I looked down at the speedometer. I was going eighty-five miles an hour. I could almost hear Grandpa Chaz’s voice from the backseat telling me to slow down.

  I touched the brake and slowed down to seventy, and time itself slowed down. We didn’t have to hurry anymore. When we crossed into Michigan, I turned the air-conditioning off. Dad woke up and we rolled the windows down. We were almost there; the familiar landmarks were overlaid with memories: Redamaks (a legend in its own time); Judy’s Motel (air conditioning, free tv); the big sign for the Simpson Boat Factory (custom wood boats, runabouts, cruisers, deck boats and motor yachts, trawlers and sailboats).

  “Your mother always wanted a sailboat,” he said. “Maybe I should have gotten her a sailboat instead of that coat.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. I thought Dad was opening a door that he’d always kept locked.

  “You never let go of Mamma, did you?” I said, tacking into new territory.

  He didn’t answer at first, and then he said, “I don’t know, Gabe. I can understand why she left me, but I still can’t understand how she could have left you behind.”

  “Why would she have left you?” I asked.

  “She was nineteen when we got married. I was twenty-eight. She was pregnant. I thought I could be her teacher, her guide, but it was the other way around. She was my teacher, my guide. In all the important things. Sex, dancing, music, food.”

  And I pictured her, the way she swung her shoulders when she walked across a room, or the way she raised her chin and lowered her eyes when she came into my room to read me a story and say good night.

  “We used to go over to the Trianon on Cottage Grove, or we’d take the IC downtown and then the El all the way up north to the Aragon or the Edgewater Beach Hotel’s Beachwalk. The jitterbug, the twist, all the new dances. She didn’t have to learn, she just knew what to do, and she taught me. Night Clubs too. Chez Paree on the third floor of the Schatz Building, just before it closed. We heard Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Bob Hope, Milton Berle. The only thing I taught her was how to swim. She caught on right away, and we used to swim off the Point at night, late at night. The cops showed up one night. We stayed out in the water, about fifty feet out, and finally they went away. Maybe they figured that we weren’t going to drown.

  “I thought about going to Rome, you know. After she left. You could have stayed here with Alex. I wanted to walk around Rome, but I knew it was a bad idea.”

  I was usually able to stand outside myself, understand my own feelings. But I had trouble doing so as we followed Duval Street into town, past the Williams orchards and vineyards, past the Dudeck Cold Storage plant and the Catholic Cemetery and past the sign that said, st. anne, pop. 10,600. I was driving back into a past where, during July and August, Mamma and I would drive to the depot in St. Anne on Friday afternoons to wait for Dad and Grandpa Chaz to arrive on the Michigan Central Train from Chicago; back into a past where the four of us would play tombola (a kind of Italian bingo, usually played at Christmas) or Vudú (Grandpa Chaz’s favorite, in which you place a curse on one of the other players and make that person do funny things—trumpet like an elephant, or hold his finger on the tip of his nose—till something happens to remove the curse; back into a past where Mamma would sit on the edge of the double bed in the crowded bedroom she shared with Dad and tell me stories about Bobo, a boy my age who understood the languages of all the animals and who was once elected Pope after a dove landed on his head in Rome. She would kiss me good night, and in the morning I’d wake up in the narrow loft bed in the living room.

  In 1995, St. Anne was still more or less what it had been when I was growing up—a sleepy little lakeside town that had once been populated by missionaries and by French traders who ministered to and traded with warring Indian tribes: Miami, Iroquois, Potawatomi. There was a settlement at the mouth of a river, which was founded after a schooner, the Acadia, heading for the fort at St. Joe had been wrecked in a November storm. The crew managed to bring the lifeboat into a natural harbor, liked what they saw, and named the settlement after St. Anne, the patron saint of sailors and protector from storms. The captain, Captain Ignatius Duval, thought it could rival the port of Chicago. That didn’t happen, but a lot of Chicago people kept their boats in St. Anne, in three different marinas—the Municipal Marina on Water Street and two marinas on the north side of the river.

  You had your rich-out-of-sight on the bluffs along the lake, to the north—Old Chicago Money, New Chicago Money. I didn’t know if the Swifts and the Armours still had summer homes here, but in the old days, Martha Swift had taken sailing lessons with us, with Toni Glidden and me, back in 1972, the first summer without Mamma, the year Apollo 16 landed on the moon. The Swift estate had stretched almost half a mile along the lake. I had no idea who lived there now, or if it even existed.

  Of course, I knew Ben Warren, who lived in a fifteen-room “cottage,” and a couple other collectors, and I’d been invited to parties where most of the guests kept their watches on Chicago time (Central) instead of local time (Eastern).

  South of St. Anne you had your summer people renting cottages up and down the lake. You had your ordinary people, and small African-American and Italian communities. The Simpson Boat Factory was the biggest “industry,” with lots of customers from Chicago. And the Whirlpool factory farther north, and a couple of tool and die places, an art supply outlet, and a gasket company.

  Inland you had orchards—peaches and apples—and vineyards. Berrien County, one of the six richest agricultural counties in the United States, produces strawberries, blueberries, grapes, peaches, apples. The world’s largest open air produce market is located in Benton Harbor. And out on the edge of town and beyond, east, along the St. Anne River, there were still a few people living off the grid, hunting and trapping for a living.

  It was late, but Vitale’s Italian grocery store on Water Street—at the center of a small Italian community anchored by the boat factory and St. Joe’s Catholic Church—was still open. Signora Vitale asked about Mamma, as she always did—as if Mamma were waiting for us back at the Loft. She spoke to me in Italian. Her southern Italian accent was a little difficult to understand, but not impossible. I answered her in Italian. Dad picked o
ut a big steak and a couple bottles of Lachryma Christi del Vesuvio, the southern Italian wine that Signora Vitale always recommended and that Mamma liked, made from grapes grown on the side of Mount Vesuvius. On his ascent into Heaven, according to Signora Vitale, Jesus had looked down on the Bay of Naples and wept tears of joy. The lava tracks on the side of Mount Vesuvius were left by the falling tears. I picked up a plastic container of Kalamata olives.

  We took Schoolcraft instead of LaSalle Road and drove past traditional shingle-style “cottages,” past a couple of new Palladian villas, past some houses so far back from the road that if you glimpsed one, you were probably seeing a carriage house. Farther north the bluffs were higher and the houses smaller, and you’d get glimpses of the lake, between the houses and through the trees.

  I always enjoyed the crunch of the gravel under the tires on the long drive. There were ten houses along the drive, all on the south side except for Mrs. Ogilvie’s house at the end, on the north—a big house with a tower. The Loft, the last house on the south, was actually built over a garage. It had a large kitchen-living area, and two bedrooms, a loft bed in the living room, a deck, and a view of the lake.

  We unloaded the car and carried our stuff up the stairs. I always enjoyed the rituals—hauling our gear up the steep stairs, stowing it, setting up the kitchen, and listening to the waves.

  We’d forgotten to get charcoal, so we pan-fried the steaks and drank some wine in glasses with yellow flowers on them. And then we washed the dishes and sat out on the deck for half an hour, finishing the bottle of wine, reading, and listening to the waves. We were both tired and turned in early.