by Min Jin Lee
Most of the shops on Madison sold clothes, and strangely, Casey didn’t care to look in them. Everything looked expensive and forbidding. Lately, she’d been revolted by her own clothing expenditures; she was in a perennial state of buyer’s remorse. On the corner of Seventieth Street, she rested at the flashing DON’T WALK sign. A few feet away was a rare-book store.
The box air conditioner propped on the lintel of its front door hummed steadily, dripping water onto the street pavement. Sleigh bells tinkled when she opened the door. From somewhere in the shop, oboes played on the radio. Illustrations from loose book pages, framed handsomely long ago, hung on yellow-painted walls.
An older man wearing a pea green–colored golf shirt greeted her.
“Good morning.” Fluffy white hair seemed to fly about the sides of his otherwise balding head. The frames of his eyeglasses were lapis blue, and the color matched the large face of his wristwatch. He was a very pale man, and the bright spots of blue on his face and wrist made him look younger, almost comic. He was perhaps seventy-five or eighty years old.
“That’s a remarkable hat,” he said. His voice was youthful and warm—it was a happy voice, and Casey felt comforted hearing it.
She touched her cloche—she’d hand-blocked the linen hat herself, sewn small red silk flowers on its left side.
“And your dress. My, my. Tremendous.” His voice was filled with pleasure.
Casey glanced down at her ivory flapper-style dress. It had two crimson lines flowing vertically across the front and back, and draped over her shoulders was a cranberry-colored silk cardigan from a thrift store. On the weekends, her fanciful clothes resembled period costumes nearly.
“Daisy Buchanan,” he said, referring to the coldhearted girl from The Great Gatsby.
“Yes. I guess so,” she answered. His comment was like a private wink. She hadn’t been aware of it, but he was right. Her hat and dress were things that a character like Daisy might wear. When Casey made up hats, she never thought of herself, but imagined a more interesting woman. It hadn’t occurred to her that she’d dressed like a character from a story. “Well, if she were Korean, that is,” she said, feeling self-conscious.
He looked at her quizzically. “Her ethnicity would hardly matter,” he remarked sternly, as though he wouldn’t back down on this point. “No doubt there must be many Korean Daisys or Beatrices or Juliets.”
Casey blinked, not wanting to disagree with an old man. It seemed disrespectful. Where was Beatrice from? Was it Dante? There was so much she hadn’t read. Jay used to say this often.
“Joseph McReed,” he said cheerfully. “You can call me Joe or Joseph. I answer to both.”
“Oh. . .” She smiled, feeling shy suddenly. He had her father’s first name.
Joseph limped carefully across the hardwood floor with his aluminum walker. He wore faded corduroys and tan-colored Hush Puppies. His left shoe looked far too big for his withered ankle. When he finally reached one of the glass-fronted bookcases, he scanned the spines of the stacked volumes and pulled out a small, fat book. “Yes,” he said, appearing pleased with himself. He pressed the book close to his chest with his long, mottled hands. Casey worried that he might fall over now that his hands were no longer on his walker. Liver spots dotted his creased brow, and the crinkles around his eyes deepened pleasantly when he smiled.
“Look, look.” He waved the book like a child with a toy.
To keep him from having to walk to her, she went to where he stood.
Joseph was grateful for this. He never took any kindness for granted. He moved nearby to his library chair beside his walnut desk, piled high with books and newspapers, and with his right hand motioned her to sit on the wing chair opposite his. Casey glanced at her wristwatch, then sat down. She had some time before catching the train.
Joseph was still holding the book close to his chest, hiding the cover with his two hands as if he were playing peekaboo. He looked at her with great concentration, then sprang the book from his tight embrace.
“You’re going to like this, I bet.” He handed her a copy of Jane Eyre wrapped crisply in conservator sheeting.
“Oh. . .” she said with a sigh. She opened the cover, and in it was a three-by-five index card: “1st American Ed., Excellent Condition, sm. ink stain on the back cover. $5,000.”
“That was my favorite book in high school.” She wanted to ask, How did you know?
His dark green eyes had brown flecks in them. His blond eyelashes were short and feathery, and the papery skin around his eyes were heavily freckled from the sun. Maybe he was even older than eighty. He was much older than her father, but with white people she had a hard time dating them accurately, because they acted more youthful than the Koreans she knew who were about the same age.
“Every bookish girl in the world is Jane Eyre,” he said. “Every girl who wants to be good, anyway.”
“But I’m not bookish,” Casey said. She had read some old books from a short list made up by Mrs. Mehdi, her favorite librarian from the Elmhurst Public Library, and a few that Mary Ellen Currie had recommended over the years, but the problem was that when Casey liked a book, she’d habitually reread the same one. It was hard to explain why she did this exactly, but to her, the books she liked were better on the second and third readings. Virginia Craft had read everything, including Dante in Italian and all those volumes of Proust in French. Jay had read dozens of Shakespeare’s plays. He could recite Shakespeare’s sonnets and chunks of Baudelaire’s poetry. Casey had read only Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. And as for poetry, which Ella and Jay adored, she understood almost none of it. She was an econ major, and she had read about twenty Penguin classics on her own without any real instruction as to how to read them. However, she enjoyed hearing her friends’ opinions on books, and she admired how confident they were about their likes and dislikes. When her friends talked about books, she asked lots of questions. Those conversations were like good lessons to her. Her friends who’d gone to private schools and majored in comp lit and English seemed to possess the ideas inside books and felt free to argue with them. Before walking into this bookshop, Casey hadn’t realized just how much she’d coveted her friends’ authority and ease with literature.
Each morning, Casey read the Bible, and on the subway she reread her same books like a little child with a favorite storybook. She was not an intellectual or an aesthete like Virginia; she was more at home in front of a sewing machine or standing behind a counter. At Kearn Davis and at Stern Business School, no one she knew read novels, and at Sabine’s she’d met salespeople who were writers and artists, and they didn’t talk to her, pegging her as a girl who liked to wear over-the-top hats and expensive shoes. And they weren’t wrong, exactly. Many of the people she’d met with Wall Street jobs wanted to possess fancy things, eat in new restaurants, and go away on exclusive trips, and artists she’d known expressed contempt for those things. Casey didn’t feel she belonged in either camp.
She cradled Jane Eyre in her hands. Her high school copy of it was somewhere in the middle of her book pile in Unu’s apartment. There was no need for this old book. Yet she wished to put it in her purse, to go through it alone, the way she wished she could stare at a good painting by herself without the bustle of a museum crowd.
Joseph looked at the girl in the hat. She had such a sad expression on her face, and he wanted to make her happy. He closed his eyes and raised his arms dramatically. He waved his hands—hocus-pocus—like a circus magician in the direction of Casey’s handbag.
“In your bag, you have a worn paperback of Middlemarch.”
“What?” she said out loud. The zipper of her bag was closed. “How?” she asked.
Joseph burst out laughing, unable to contain himself. “We wait at the same bus stop on the corner of Seventy-second and Lexington. Until last fall, from Mondays through Fridays, you wore office clothes, and on the weekends, you wear sublime hats and extravagant dresses. Nowadays, I don’t see you during the week. But o
n Saturdays when I see you on the bus, you are always reading. Sometimes I worry that you’ll get hit by a car because you’re not paying attention. This year, you read Thackeray, Hardy, and Eliot. Either you’re a slow reader or you read the same books over and over. Last year, you read Anna Karenina for a long time. You’ve read some of the Americans: Cather, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Sinclair Lewis. Nothing past 1945, almost. Almost never anyone French.”
Casey opened her mouth but felt confused as to what to say. Was she in danger?
“I love Madame Bovary and Cousin Bette,” she said finally, her statement sounding like a question.
“Very fine books,” Joseph said approvingly. He felt energetic. “Though Flaubert is superior to Balzac, of course.” He tipped his head to the side and adjusted his blue eyeglasses.
Casey smiled, not saying anything. She’d read only one book each by those authors.
“But you often return to Middlemarch. Last Saturday, you were reading it. I figured you’d probably still be in it.”
“But I never noticed you,” she muttered; then it occurred to her that she might have hurt his feelings. She’d been ignored before in places, and she hated to think she had not paid attention to him. She didn’t feel afraid of him exactly, but this had never happened to her before. She’d never thought of herself as someone to observe.
Joseph sensed her anxiety. “You mustn’t be frightened, dear. I’m a harmless old man. A cripple, really. I’m just nosy about what people read on the bus. My wife, who passed away last year, used to say that my staring was beyond rude. She said it was a sickness, can you believe it?” He giggled. “And you always catch my attention because of your beautiful clothes.”
Casey glanced at her dress and high-heeled Mary Janes. “I look silly, I know. I think this is how I put up with working all the time. To amuse myself and—”
“No, no, dear. Not at all,” he cut her off, seeing that she looked embarrassed, then regretted having done so, because he was, in fact, exceedingly curious about what she did for a living. Was she an actress? “You look lovely. My wife wore the most beautiful hats in the world. It was her great indulgence, and I’m very pleased when I see women wearing them.”
“I. . . I didn’t see you at the bus stop, I can’t remember. . .. You’re right, I am always reading as I wait. I have so little time to read—”
“No one notices old men,” he said, smiling. This was something he’d started to understand in his early sixties: You’d be invited to fewer things, that young people didn’t want to be around you, and middle-aged people didn’t think you had much to offer. What humbled Joseph was that he had been no different when he was a young man.
Casey felt bad. Her oldest friend was Sabine, and she was only in her early forties.
“It’s all right,” he assured her. She wasn’t the kind of girl who’d intentionally snub anyone. “I had plenty of lookers once. Now it’s your turn.” He laughed as though he’d amused himself with a litany of charming memories. Joseph crossed his arms and puffed out his chest in pride.
They both laughed.
“You can have Jane for two thousand five hundred, because you finally walked into my shop. I never thought you would. Daisy has come to my party,” he said.
Casey smiled. She glanced at the yellowing index card and flipped to the back cover. The ink stain was negligible, faded to the color of wine.
“You see, I’m retiring this year, and I’m letting my inventory go slowly,” he said. “I’m closing after Christmas. Seven more months.”
Casey put Jane Eyre in her lap. She opened her purse and fished out her copy of Middlemarch. Feeling brave all of a sudden, she said, “Isn’t Dorothea Brooke such a fool?”—denouncing Eliot’s main character, whom Casey loved and disliked at the same time.
“Yes. Principled individuals often are,” he said. “But Eliot lets her have it. Dorothea marries old Casaubon. Now he’s the fool! I feel quite sorry for Dorothea. She’s just a young girl who believes too much,” he said. Dorothea’s husband, Casaubon, was a pedagogue who’d spent his life researching a big book that no one would ever read.
“Yes, but Casaubon has his tragedy, too,” she replied. “He had money and work, but not true love. You can’t live without that,” she blurted out.
“No, you can’t.” Joseph nodded in sympathy.
The book dealer looked hurt, and the sadness in his eyes made him look even older. What she’d said had upset him. Casey wished that she could afford to buy something.
“But Jane Eyre. . . she’s a much better heroine, isn’t she?” Casey said, picking up the rare book with her free hand.
A smile replaced his lonely expression. “Jane? Oh, she’s the brightest girl there is,” he said.
Casey nodded, remembering how much she’d loved the homely orphan who grew up to be a governess and fell in love with her tragically married employer, Rochester—how right Jane was to leave Mr. Rochester and how good she was to return to care for him when he was widowed and blinded. Its moral reminded her of Korean fairy tales her mother used to tell her and her sister when they were young—sacrifice and integrity were the only paths for good women.
Casey looked at the old book and stroked its cover. She handed it back to Joseph, but he didn’t take it from her.
“Two thousand dollars,” he said, wishing he could just give it to her, but he hadn’t made a sale in a week. He didn’t want to touch his retirement savings again to make rent. Summer was coming up, and sales were predictably slow then. It was his goal to have a good Christmas season to recoup his prior losses.
“That’s a very good deal,” he said.
“It’s an awful lot of money,” she said. If she’d had the cash in her pocket, she would’ve just given it to him. Money had always been a kind of burden to her. If she had it, she spent it, and when she didn’t have it, she worried about how she should live. She wished she had enough so she wouldn’t feel so anxious all the time. Would there ever be enough?
“Fifteen hundred,” he said, pursing his lips. “That’s less than what I paid for it.”
What made him think that she could afford a rare book? she wondered. Her old boss, Kevin Jennings, used to make fun of her fancy Princeton words and expensive clothes. Now and then, when she walked into shops, the salespeople thought she was a rich Japanese. Was that what Joseph thought, too? That she waited at an Upper East Side bus stop alongside the young heiresses on their way to jobs at auction houses, reading old novels and wearing showy dresses—of course, he must have thought she had money to spare. If she could spend a couple of hundred dollars on shoes, why couldn’t she buy a rare book?
No one had stopped by the store since she’d been there. The white-haired man had been kind to her, talked to her about books. She knew what it was like to have to make a sale.
“All right,” she said quietly. What she ought to do, she thought, is call Hugh Underhill and ask him to help her get an interview for a banking summer job that would pay a lot more than the market research job. But the Kearn Davis investment banking program would have been filled by now—it had to be. It was already May.
Casey plucked out her charge plate from her wallet, the one that had a two-thousand-dollar credit left. This would have been impossible to do in college, when she’d had to pay for things by cash or check. Curiously enough, Casey had never bounced a check, because that seemed like lying to her. She handed it to him.
“Oh, I’m so pleased,” he said. She’d gotten a wonderful deal. He liked the idea of her having it. Joseph wrapped the book in thin brown paper.
Casey took the package. “Thank you,” she said.
“I hope you will visit me again,” he said.
“Yes, and I’ll look for you at the bus stop,” she said.
Joseph checked her face. She didn’t look happy.
“Are you all right?” he asked, concerned.
“Yes, of course,” she answered. “I’d better be off.”
Outside the shop, the sh
arp ridges of the concrete pavement dug through the soft soles of her shoes. Casey hailed a taxi. She’d use her lunch money, because she didn’t want to be late. When she got to work, her manager, Judith, greeted her coolly. During her lunch hour, Casey went to Sabine’s office as usual to eat a cup of yogurt, and sitting there, she half listened to Sabine talk about the fall collection. Privately, she resolved to return the book to Joseph. Perhaps he would understand.
But the next morning, Casey left the book by her bedside table, and when her bus drove past the shop, which was closed on Sundays, she recalled how Joseph had walked over to the shelf to pick out that book for her. During the week, she went to school, and on Saturday morning, she spotted Joseph at the bus stop. He looked so jolly. They sat together on the bus until he got off across the street from his shop. He admired the hat she was wearing and told her funny stories about his wife, Hazel. She’d been crazy about hats and gloves. Casey couldn’t bring up the book.
The following Monday morning, Casey phoned Hugh Underhill at the office.
“Well, darling, hello there,” he said. “It’s good to hear your voice.”
“Hello, Hugh. . .” Casey laughed. He was indefatigable, impossibly buoyant. The last time she’d seen him was at her Kearn Davis send-off at Kuriya. Back in September, before school really got started. They’d spoken a few times since then but hadn’t gotten together as they’d planned. “Can you get me an interview for the banking program?” she asked.
