Love, Death & Rare Books

by Robert Hellenga

  “Do you think you’ll look back on this moment, sitting here, and realize that you were happy?”

  “I think so, but ‘happy’ is not the right word. It’s hard to believe it right now.”

  “I think Mom was happy too. She was happy, and I tried to spoil it. I couldn’t just let her be, and…” But she started crying before she finished the sentence.

  “Maybe the word we’re looking for is olbios, ‘fortunate,’ or eudaimon, ‘flourishing.’”

  “How about ‘blessed’?”

  “That’s better.”

  Saskia continued to cry. Augie reached over and put his hand on the top of her naked thigh. She put her young hand on top of his old one, and then after a minute or so she stood up. The rest of us stood up too and put our arms around her. It was awkward at first. There were too many of us. We had trouble adjusting our arms. And then all of a sudden it wasn’t awkward. Our bodies, slippery and shining with sweat, wanted to press together, to touch each other, as if each body wanted to touch as much of the other seven bodies—or was it eight?—as possible. As if we were trying to confirm the four-color map theory. Or maybe disprove it.

  Everyone’s flesh touched everyone else’s. Old flesh, withered and dry; young flesh, nubile and firm; mature feminine flesh, ripe; and middle-aged masculine flesh, hard and firm. As if we were becoming one body. We gave to each other what we needed to give to Olivia, but we didn’t stay that way long. It was too intense and suddenly we became self-conscious.

  “It’s getting hot. We need to get out of here.”

  The big thermometer read 170 degrees. It felt just right, beyond mellow. Saskia closed the vents on the stove. We wrapped our towels around ourselves.

  “Baruch dayan emet,” I said as we stepped out of the sauna into the middle of fall. “Blessed is the true judge. That’s what should go on her tombstone.”

  XXV. THE CEMETERY

  (October 2011)

  I drove Saskia to O’Hare on Saturday, October 15. By the time we got to the Illinois state line, she’d pretty well convinced herself that she was making a mistake, that she didn’t want to leave Nadia, who was starting her senior year at U of C; but when I asked her if she wanted me to turn around, she laughed and said “no.” We stopped at the Lincoln Oasis for a bite to eat. Her flight wasn’t till eleven o’clock. We sat next to each other in the International Terminal till she thought she’d better go through security. I couldn’t go with her any farther so we hugged each other and tried to keep from crying. I waited in the terminal till her flight was called, and then I drove to the Quadrangle Club in Hyde Park to spend the night. Dad’s tombstone was in place, and I wanted to see it in the morning.

  I was at Oak Woods Cemetery when it opened at eight o’clock on Sunday morning. Five minutes later I was standing at Dad’s grave on Sunset Drive.

  Charles Johnson, Jr.

  1931–2009

  Spine a little darkened and

  faded in places.

  Corners square

  but rubbed through.

  Front internal hinge cracked.

  Binding somewhat loose.

  Some foxing throughout.

  I had plenty to say, but I kept my mouth shut. I’d come to listen.

  What did I want? What was my agenda? What was I trying to accomplish? What did I want to happen? Why was I here? What was I listening for?

  I suppose I was listening for the kind of approval I’d heard all my life. From Dad, from Mamma, from my teachers, from Grandpa Chaz too. I suppose I wanted a sign of some kind. Dad would be pleased that I’d finally married Olivia, and I thought he would approve of the new shop even though he’d advised me to sell everything and live life instead of reading about it. And I thought that he and Grandpa Chaz would approve of the decision—which Adam, Carla, and I had made at a “visioning” session shortly after Olivia’s death—to donate Grandpa Chaz’s Americana to the Ogden Collection at St. Anne, a tax-deductible gift that would really put the Great Lakes Study Center on the map—and that would offset our taxable income for the foreseeable future.

  But I was listening for something more too, not a voice from beyond the grave, but for something not quite me, something distinct from my own imagination. “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear,” Dad liked to say when I wasn’t paying attention while he was explaining the issue points in one of his Modern Firsts, or an unusual cancel in a nineteenth-century novel. I could almost hear him say it now. Almost. But not quite. I was paying attention, and I had ears to hear, but the only thing I could hear was the early morning rush of traffic on Cottage Grove.

  I had work to do at the shop, and I’d had a condolence call from Olivia’s editor at Johns Hopkins, who thought that between the two of us we could deal with the rest of the copy editor’s queries. I thought so too and was anxious to get started. But instead of going straight home, I drove back into Hyde Park and had a cup of coffee at the Medici. I walked down Fifty-Seventh Street to have a look at the old shop. Looking through the dirty windows was like looking back for traces of my old life. But the shop was still empty. I walked down Blackstone, past the Davises, past the Gridleys, past the Harringtons. The ginkgo in front of the Harringtons had dropped its leaves, but the maple trees were still showing yellow and red and orange. It was nine o’clock in the morning. Mrs. Al-Dajani was sitting in the sun on the steps of our old house, on the east side of the street, enjoying a cigarette, and it made me think of Olivia and Dad smoking in the warming house; it made me think of Olivia and Father Gregory lighting up in front of the administration building at Cardinal Newman College; it made me want a cigarette myself. I wasn’t sure what I was doing, or what I wanted to do.

  I stopped in front of the house to admire Grandpa Chaz’s crabapple tree, which was turning from orange to bronze. Mrs. Al-Dajani looked at me. Curious. A large dog was curled up in a spot of sunlight next to her. I wasn’t sure she’d remember me, but she did. “Mr. Johnson,” she called out.

  “Mrs. Al-Dajani,” I said. “You remember me?”

  “Of course.”

  “I just had a cup of coffee at the Medici,” I said, “and thought I’d walk through the old neighborhood. I was out at the cemetery earlier. My father’s grave. My grandfather’s too. And my grandmother’s.”

  “Of course,” she said again. “You were all in the bookstore business together. And now you live in a wonderful house on the lake. We hear all about you from Nadia Talhouni.” She stubbed her cigarette out on the step and cupped the butt in her hand. “My grandchildren won’t allow me to smoke in the house,” she said, smiling.

  “You know Nadia?”

  “Of course. We know all the Jordanian students. And Saskia too—your daughter, or your friend’s daughter. She speaks very good Arabic. Better than our son. We were very sorry to learn of her mother’s death.” She said something in Arabic and then translated: “May her spirit remain in your life.”

  “I took her to O’Hare last night,” I said. “She’s going to stop over in Paris for one night, so she won’t get to Amman till tomorrow morning. Nadia’s parents will meet her at Queen Alia Airport. We’re going to meet up in Rome at Christmas and then go to Florence to see my mother.”

  “Florence is lovely at Christmas,” she said. “And now you’re on your way back to Michigan and you thought you’d like to see your old home.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I like to imagine that you’re happy in this house.”

  “Very happy,” she said. “My husband just left. He’ll be sorry he missed you. My lazy granddaughters are still asleep.”

  “You have three children,” I said. “If I remember correctly.”

  “A son and two daughters. Our older daughter’s two girls are here for the weekend while their parents are taking a little vacation. With another couple. They all live in Elmhurst. Our other daughter lives in New York.
Our son’s a surgeon in Minneapolis. They’ll all be here for the holidays.”

  A girl, about thirteen or fourteen, came out on the porch in her pajamas, letting the screen door slam behind her.

  “Nina,” her grandmother said. “This is Mr. Johnson, who grew up in this house.”

  “Good morning,” I said. “Nina was my mother’s name.”

  Nina rubbed her eyes.

  “Go upstairs and tell your lazy sister it’s time for breakfast.” To me, she said, “Would you like some coffee? I’ve already made it. This morning I’m making a traditional Jordanian breakfast for the girls. Would you like to join us? Za’atar. Thyme and sesame seeds, with some labaneh—strained yogurt.”

  I said that I would but that I didn’t want to impose. But of course she wouldn’t accept that as a good reason. The dog, Omar, followed us into the house. A very large dog. I thought Arabs didn’t like dogs, but what did I know?

  There was a grand piano in the large bay window, and a very large doll house on a rectangular table. Nina wanted to show me around. There was a stack of New Yorkers too, on a coffee table, and an Arab-language newspaper.

  In the kitchen, Mrs. Al-Dajani poured small cups of bitter coffee from a thermos and offered a plate of sweets to counter the bitterness.

  The girls stopped petting Omar long enough to ask for cereal instead of za’atar, but Mrs. Al-Dajani just laughed at them, and they ate the za’atar without complaining—flat bread dipped in olive oil and then sprinkled with a mixture of thyme and sesame seeds and then toasted, dipped in some kind of yogurt. It was delicious.

  “I used to eat breakfast here every morning,” I said to the girls. “I used to sit right where you’re sitting. My mother was Italian and just drank coffee in the morning, coffee and milk, but she always fixed eggs for me and my father, and my grandfather. Soft-boiled or poached. Never fried, except on holidays.

  “You see those beautiful flowers in the yard? My grandfather planted those flowers. He dug up some bulbs from the side of the road in St. Anne, Michigan, where we used to go every summer, and then every three or four years or so he divided them, and then when he got too old to work in the garden, my dad planted some late-blooming varieties so we could still enjoy them in the fall.” Most of the daylilies were dead, but the late-blooming varieties were still displaying bright colors, and I thought for a minute that I had stepped outside myself and that I could hear them, red and yellow, purple and orange.

  “He planted that crabapple tree in the front yard too,” I added. “You’ll have to prune it in winter,” I said, “after the first hard frost.”

  “My husband’s very good at pruning,” Mrs. Al-Dajani said.

  “Are you happy in this house?” I asked her a second time.

  “We’re very happy here,” she said.

  “Then I’m happy too,” I said.

  “Would you like to see your old room? It was in the front of the house, right?”

  “I’ve seen what I needed to see,” I said. “I don’t need to see it.”

  I left the Al-Dajanis at eleven o’clock and drove straight home, picked up Booker at Ben Warren’s, sat down in my study, filled my fountain pen—the one with the green cap and the italic nib—and answered my mother’s letter. I told her everything, and by the time I’d finished, the sun was going down and I had a cramp in my hand. Booker and I drove in to the post office to mail the letter, and on the way back we stopped at the cemetery. No tombstone yet, but I could see it in my imagination. Marcus had written it out in Hebrew and told me to have the stone cutter call him if he had any questions:

  blessed is the true judge

  END

  Acknowledgements

  In July 2016 I attended the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar. I entered with one set of questions, and left with a very different set. When, on the very first day of the seminar, I showed a tentative financial plan for my fictional bookstore to one of the faculty, he said: “You have to know how to sell a hundred thousand dollar book. No one here has sold a hundred thousand dollar book.” I knew right then that I was in deep water.

  How do you sell a hundred thousand dollar book?

  Love, Death, and Rare Books explores this and other equally troublesome questions, and I would like to thank the faculty at CABS, as well as the following booksellers and librarians, who offered advice and encouragement along the way: Lorne Bair (Lorne Bair Rare Books), Bill Butts (Main Street Fine Book, Sharon Clayton (Seymour Library, Knox College), Jeff Douglas (Seymour Library, Knox College), Ken Gloss (Brattle Book Shop), Brad Jonas (Powell’s Books Chicago), Rob Rulon Miller (Rulon-Miller Books), Ernie Quist (Quist Antiquarian), Ben Stone (Stone Alley Books), Doug Wilson (O’Gara & Wilson, Ltd.).

  And finally, would like to thank my first three readers—my wife, Virginia; my long time agent, Henry Dunow; and my new editor, Joseph Olshan—for their encouragement and wise counsel.

  None of the above should be held responsible for any errors or misinformation in this novel

  About the Author

  Robert Hellenga was educated at the University of Michigan, the Queen’s University of Belfast, and Princeton University. He is a professor emeritus at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, and the author of seven novels and a collection of short stories: The Sixteen Pleasures, The Fall of a Sparrow, Blues Lessons, Philosophy Made Simple, The Italian Lover, Snakewoman of Little Egypt, The Confessions of Frances Godwin, and The Truth About Death and Other Stories. He lives in Galesburg, Illinois with his wife and a dog (Simone). Like several of his protagonists, he is the father of three daughters, plays country blues guitar, and has spent a lot of time in Italy.

  Image: Melencolia, Han Sebald Beham, 1500-1550

  Permissions

  The author is grateful for permission to reprint the following:

  “At Least,” by Raymond Carver, from Where Water ComesTogether With Other Water: Poems by Raymond Carver, copyright © 1984, 1985 by Tess Gallagher. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  Excerpt from “Circles of Doors,” by Carl Sandburg, from The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg. Copyright © 1969, 1970 by Lillian Steichen Sandburg. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

  We have not been able to identify the copyright holders for the following:

  Excerpt from Roderick Chisholm’s Theory of Knowledge, originally published by Prentice-Hall in 1966. The rights have reverted to the author, who died in 1999.

  Excerpt from Merrit Malloy’s “Epitaph,” from My Song for Him Who Never Sang to Me. Originally published by the Ward Ritchie Press (1975), and later by the Three Rivers Press (1988).

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Robert Hellenga

  Cover design by Colin Dockrill

  978-1-5040-6115-5

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