Love, Death & Rare Books

by Robert Hellenga

  “You want to know about real evil?” Augie leaned forward, as if about to impart confidential information, but I thought maybe his back was hurting, or his shoulders.

  “He was a real bastard, Eddie the Clutching Hand. Bought half a dozen good horses and insured the hell out of them. Then he bought half a dozen hackers, locked ‘em in his barn, doused them with kerosene, and set the whole place on fire to collect the insurance he took out on the Thoroughbreds. That’s real evil. Eddie—Eddie, my uncle—told him he’d kill him if he ever harmed another horse. And he did. That’s the only way you can deal with some guys.”

  The temperature got up to 160, plenty hot for me. Augie told me to adjust the baffles on the stove that transfer the hot exhaust right to the rocks. We sat quietly for a while, the temperature stable at 160.

  “Eddie used to put his hand on my shoulder,” he said to Olivia, putting his hand on her shoulder, “and it was like he was saying, La vita non è inesauribile? Non è bello essere vivi?”

  “That’s what Gabe says too,” she said. “He must’ve heard it from you.”

  Palm Sunday is the longest service of the year. The weather was lovely and we processed around the church. After the procession, Olivia was confirmed. After the sermon, the bishop called the candidates by name and asked them to stand and repeat their baptismal vows. Sarah, Olivia’s sponsor, walked with Olivia up to the bishop. The bishop laid his hands on each candidate in turn, in accordance with the ancient entry rite into the Church. He dipped his right thumb in the Chrism and made the Sign of the Cross on Olivia’s forehead, and Olivia, along with seven teenagers, was sealed with the Gift of the Holy Spirit.

  XX. THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS

  (June 2011)

  We attended Saskia’s commencement on June 11. Afterward, at the Medici, Saskia tried to persuade her mother to see her doctor again, but she didn’t have any more luck than I did. Olivia said she couldn’t go till after the wedding. Saskia and Nadia were going to take the train down on Friday for the Grand Opening.

  Olivia slept in the backseat on the way home. In the morning, Pentecost Sunday, she read the Old Testament lesson—Genesis 11:1–9, the Tower of Babel. “You’ve got to admit,” she said afterward in the car as we were going over the LaSalle Road Bridge, “the Book of Genesis has got some great stories: the fall, the murder of Abel, the flood, the sacrifice of Isaac.”

  “In my opinion,” I said, “none of these stories reflect well on God. Think about the Tower of Babel: human beings cooperating, working in concert toward a common goal, and God can’t stand it. He’s frightened. ‘Let’s go down and mess up their language,’ he says. ‘If they all speak the same language, there’s no telling what they could do. What they could do.’”

  “But Pentecost repairs the damage,” she said. “The Holy Spirit descends into the apostles and enables them—and others in the crowd—to speak in tongues and in foreign languages.”

  “But who caused the damage in the first place?” I asked. “And when it was over, could the disciples speak languages they hadn’t known before? Could they speak Greek? Persian? Hittite? Assyrian? Sumerian? I don’t think so.”

  “I’ll have to ask Sarah,” she said.

  “Maybe we should slow down a little,” I said. Olivia had missed two appointments with her doctor at Bernard Mitchell, and in fact had taken all her appointments off the table till things got settled at the shop, till she’d fine-tuned the software and optimized the website for mobile apps and tweaked the metrics that would track key performance indicators. And now she had a deadline coming up to get the manuscript of Varieties off to Johns Hopkins.

  “I’m alive, Gabe. I don’t want to slow down.”

  “You’re like Booker,” I said. “Always straining at the leash.”

  “Booker doesn’t need a leash,” Olivia said, “and neither do I.”

  In a short ceremony on the night before the opening, Reverend Sarah blessed the shop and the rare book room and the cataloging room and the reference library, and the office, and the eight hundred or so used books from The Warehouse that Olivia had put together in the front. It was late, and we were exhausted, and in the morning Olivia felt feverish, achy. I brought her some ibuprofen and persuaded her to stay in bed. I’d been half awake for almost an hour, listening to the news, which was not good—roadside bombings in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Chicago Teachers Association gearing up for a strike, a congressman posting pictures of his penis on the Internet.

  I brought Olivia a soft-boiled egg in an egg cup and strips of buttered toast and a glass of orange juice; Booker and I drove into St. Anne, parked across from the marina, and walked along the boardwalk to enjoy the boats with their funny names. My favorites—the two boats that Olivia and I had seen on our trip to St. Anne after Dad’s memorial service—Wet Dreams, a ketch from Watergate, Illinois, and Miss Behaving, from Orion, Wisconsin—were now docked next to each other, between At Last (Chicago) and She Got the House (Chicago). And I thought about the story I’d told Olivia—about the couple we’d seen silhouetted in the window of one of the condos on the St. Anne Peninsula, on the other side of the marina. And I wondered what had become of them. And I wondered what would become of us.

  As I entered the shop, I wondered if God would object to the work we’d been doing: working in concert toward a common goal. Had we frightened God? Because we’d been too happy? Or because we’d been too busy to think about being happy? Working twelve- to fourteen-hour days. The shop full of young people—young people in love—Adam and Carla, Saskia and Nadia on weekends, laughing and joking, drinking beer at a table out in the corridor. And Booker, sticking his nose into everything.

  The depot itself was quiet, like a cathedral, the only sound the brrr of the big espresso machine at Innkeepers. The counter people moved silently—priests preparing for the early morning mass.

  Amy Marckwardt, a St. Anne’s student in a blue shirt and a white apron, was watching me from behind the counter, meeting my gaze, as if she had a secret she wanted to communicate.

  She brought me an espresso without asking, though Innkeepers wasn’t open yet. “I saw your books in the window,” she said.

  “Find anything you fancy?”

  “I might ask my grandmother for something. I have all the Beatrix Potter books, but I’d like to have a first edition.”

  Hmmm. Ten thousand dollars, I thought. But you never knew. Well, I probably knew. “You know,” I said, “that Beatrix Potter couldn’t find a publisher for her stories, so she published them herself.”

  “Maybe I’ll try that,” she said, “with my stories.”

  I drank the coffee, put the cup and saucer back on the counter, walked down the concourse, and crossed the aisle to admire the first editions of familiar children’s books in our display window: The Tale of Peter Rabbit and The Story of A Fierce Bad Rabbit; the Pooh “Quartet”: When We Were Very Young, Now We Are Six, Winnie the Pooh, and The House at Pooh Corner. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Little House on the Prairie with the original Sewell and Boyle illustrations. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz with all twenty-four color plates, like the one I’d given to Saskia on her birthday a few years back—before Charlotte’s Web but after the Pooh books. These were titles that I’d hand-sold when I started working in the shop after Mamma went away, and I has a strange sense that I’d circled back to the beginning of my life as a bookseller.

  I deactivated the alarm and entered the shop. The books were on the shelves. Every book inventoried and shelved according to the semi-rational taxonomy we’d used on Fifty-Seventh Street. Olivia’s website was a knockout, an invitation to a feast. The new software had passed every test, though it was hard to imagine all our data stored in a cloud. Olivia tried to explain, but I couldn’t get past the image of lateral filing cabinets floating around up in the sky.

  Olivia had left her mark on the shop. I’d thought it was a bad
idea and we’d had a proper quarrel, but the result was summoning: seven Jefferson bookcases to your left as you entered the shop held paperbacks and hardbacks, used: “The Modern World in 100 Books,” “100 Scientific Classics,” “100 Great Novels,” “100 Great Poets,” “100 Great Children’s Books,” “100 Great Cookbooks,” “100 Great Mysteries.” Nothing over $10. Delilah would keep us supplied with books from The Warehouse.

  Olivia had left her mark on me too: I didn’t think twice about sitting down at the computer on our partners desk in the office and typing in our URL and summoning up our unpublished website from the Cloud, like a medium summoning a spirit from the Great Beyond. The site was not live yet, but I cycled through home, about us, our staff, our history, catalogs, browse inventory, ask a question, and contact us.

  By five o’clock, the concourse was full of people waiting for something to happen. The Gettysburg Address—in a display case on a small table in the atrium—gave them something to look at, and they began to file by, silently, like people filing by an open coffin at a visitation, pausing briefly to contemplate the mystery and then moving on.

  I guess that made me the undertaker.

  I wanted to shout at them: Talk among yourselves.

  At first, the different contingents—new money, old money, no money, African-American, the Vitale clan, summer people, new condo owners, townspeople, fruit growers, academics, Mayor Toni and the city attorney, several Caxton Club members and other collectors, a handful of antiquarian book dealers from Chicago and Ann Arbor and Lansing and Detroit. Adam and Carla were glad to shake hands with John King from Detroit and Brad Jonas from Powell’s in Hyde Park. These groups were like the circles in a Venn diagram, with only a tiny area—the Gettysburg Address—in common where all the circles overlapped. But once the waitstaff from Stefano’s arrived and began pouring glasses—not plastic cups—of prosecco and passing around trays of bread and marinated olives, prosciutto and thin slices of Parmesan cheese—the circles merged into each other till there was just one circle. The Gettysburg Address remained at the center, no longer a dead body at a visitation but a baby at a bris or a christening.

  Toni made the rounds, touching everyone on the shoulder. When she touched my shoulder, I said to her, “Toni, buy something, you got me into this.” And she said, “You want me to spend thirty-five K for the Gettysburg Address?” And I said, “Yes. Somebody’s got to, it might as well be you.” Though I already knew that Ben Warren was going to buy it for the college library. I was giving him a dealer discount, of course, even though he wasn’t a dealer.

  “How about Shipwrecks of the Great Lakes?” Toni said, touching my shoulder again. “The author lives in St. Joe. You should get him to give a reading here.”

  I was glad to hear a train pulling in, bringing Saskia and Nadia and a new contingent of commuters from Chicago. Booker started to moan. I refused to interpret it as a “sign” because he did it every time a train blew its whistle at ninety-six decibels, two longs, a short, and a long. Fortunately the freight trains had been routed east of town.

  “Where’s Olivia anyway?” Toni said. We listened to the train as it slowed to a stop on the other side of Duval Street.

  Saskia and Nadia were also on the train. Olivia must have met them at the station. I’d been worrying about her all day, but when she came into the shop, she didn’t look like someone with an “indolent” non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She looked like a million bucks—confident, stunning in an apricot-colored lace shift dress with a soft shimmer to it. Her hair was pulled back like a French woman’s, but her face didn’t have the hardness that you’d expect in a French woman. Her face was open and radiant, as if she had just come off stage and was ready to kick back and have a good time. She looked like someone arriving with good news, like someone who knew what she wanted to do next. I felt the same way, could feel exactly what she was feeling, could think exactly what she was thinking. We’re confederates, her smile said—accomplices, partners. Everything’s going to be okay. And she was right. I was unpardonably happy.

  A few minutes before six o’clock she tapped her glass of San Pellegrino with a spoon from Innkeepers. We were about to go online.

  She told people to open the browsers on their cell phones and their tablets and go to www.ChasJohnson&Son.com.

  People murmured.

  “Are you ready?”

  Standing next to her, I watched her finger hover over the publish button on her iPad screen, as if she were about to detonate a bomb. I held my breath, waiting for the explosion. She touched the screen, but not much happened. People stared at their smart phones and their tablets.

  “You’re going to have to refresh your screen,” she said, not breaking a sweat, “or close the page and reopen it. Pretty soon a collective gasp, or series of gasps, rolled down the corridor, like waves breaking on the beach. Some people (of course) had trouble, but Carla and Adam were there to help. I didn’t have my iPad with me, but Augie had his, and I looked on with him as he clicked on different links.

  “Here’s you,” Augie said, holding up his iPad, “in that red fedora. It suits you.” He was wearing a coat and tie, standing in his walker next to the Gettysburg Address, feeding bits of prosciutto to Booker. “You know,” he said to me confidentially, “all you had to do was sell a dozen books like this and you could have given me a decent price for my house.”

  I called to Saskia. “Bring this old man a glass of prosecco, will you. And a handkerchief to dry his tears.”

  She brought a glass of prosecco. When she left, Augie said, “How old did you say she was?”

  “Twenty-one. She’s got a boyfriend,” I said. “I mean a girlfriend,” I corrected myself. “Not exactly out of the closet, but the closet door is open. I already told you.”

  “I forgot.” Augie nodded. “Too bad.”

  Saskia and Nadia were both dressed in attractive white V-neck blouses that they wore over skinny jeans.

  Olivia joined us, pausing long enough before the display window to admire herself in the glass before turning and smiling a slightly different version of the smile she’d given me earlier, one full of promise.

  Toni was there talking with Sarah. “Buy something,” I said to them.

  About ten minutes later, Carla gave a shout. Someone had ordered a book online. “Somebody bought the Gettysburg Address,” she shouted, out of breath.

  The sale of the Gettysburg Address unlocked something in people’s psyches. The Gettysburg Address and the prosecco. More orders started coming in. Olivia, I knew, had asked a few friends to place orders, but there were some real orders too. Everything seemed like a bargain after the Gettysburg Address.

  “How does it work?” Toni asked me. “You just click ‘Add to cart’ and put a thirty-five thousand dollar book on your credit card?”

  “It all happens in the Cloud,” I said.

  “You can do it if you’ve got a fifty-thousand dollar line of credit,” Olivia said.

  “What kind of credit card has a fifty-thousand dollar credit limit?”

  “Ask Ben,” Toni said, “or Mrs. Marckwardt.”

  “But usually,” I said, “someone who’s going to lay out that kind of money for a book will have a conversation—several conversations—with the dealer first. And then probably send a check.”

  I was glad to see local people spending money. Olivia went back to the electronic cash register–computer at the front. Carla and Adam were entering sales on a couple of iPads in the main gallery. Everything was interconnected. I hadn’t really expected to sell many books, but Jonathan Krause, who had an antiquarian bookshop in Detroit, bought the first edition of Ring Lardner’s Regular Fellows That I Have Met that was in the window. Emily Perkins—I know her name now—laid out $3,700 for a first printing of The Sun Also Rises with “stopped” on page 18, a printing error or “issue point” that guaranteed that this was
a true first edition. It was going to be a birthday present for her husband and she wanted to leave it in the shop and pick it up later. “A bargain,” I said. “If it had a fine dust jacket, it would go for a hundred thousand.”

  “I’ve added it to my cart.”

  “You could just pay at the cash register,” I said.

  “It’s easier this way.”

  Anne-Marie was watching us. I turned to her: “It’s always nice to see you,” I said.

  “Likewise.”

  She extended a hand, and I shook it, and I understood that she was someone who had come into my life for a little while, just when I needed her, and I hoped that she felt the same way about me.

  “How’s your translation coming?”

  “Slowly,” I said.

  Reverend Sarah, always the good shepherd, joined us. We chatted for a few minutes until another woman came up to us—a grandmother whose name escaped me, though Olivia and I had been introduced to her after coffee at St. Anne’s. Sarah let me dangle for a few seconds before introducing us. Mrs. Marckwardt. She was interested in the children’s books and thought she might like to start a Beatrix Potter collection for her granddaughter. She wanted me to show her The Tale of Peter Rabbit that was in the window.

  “Does your granddaughter work at Innkeepers?” I asked.

  “Yes, she does.”

  “She pulled an espresso for me this morning before Innkeepers was even open. Going to be a writer?”

  She nodded. “Children’s books. I’ve read all the Beatrix Potter books to her a dozen times.”

  “The copy in the shop is the first trade edition, not one of the two hundred fifty copies privately printed for family and friends, but still very expensive. You might want to talk it over with your husband.”

  “I don’t have to talk anything over with my husband,” she said. “He has to talk things over with me! Besides, he’s dead.”