Grimm's Last Fairy Tale

by Becky Lyn Rickman

  Hemingway responded with a wet-nose nuzzle and then ran off to lie among the biographies.

  Maggie turned on the computer, anxious to go back to the shelves and retrieve the night's orders. Once more she found herself afraid that there might not be a message today and equally afraid that there would be. These occurrences were creating a dangerous anticipation inside of her heart.

  Once she compiled the list of orders, she went back and took her time, allowing whomever time to find the perfect passage for her. As she sought the books, she began to panic. What if nothing was there when she got back to the desk? She shrugged it off and finally returned to her desk. Tears that she could not explain poured from her eyes. There was a book. She looked. She read:

  "I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone forever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own, than when you almost broke it eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that this love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to London. For you alone I think and plan. -- Have you not seen this? can you fail to have understood my wishes? -- I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine.

  I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice, when they would be lost on others. -- Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating in, J.G.

  Maggie knew this passage all too well. After all, she was an Austen, and this was from her favorite Jane Austen offering, Persuasion. Only it was Captain Wentworth—F.W. and not J.G.—and it was Bath, not London. This passage, though one of the most intensely passionate in literature, did not lend any clue to the "whom" that was haunting her. Haunting. Odd that she should think that word rather than stalking or sneaking or harassing. Everyone knew of her love of Jane Austen and that Persuasion was her favorite. So the list of suspects was not narrowed down.

  She dialed the phone to her sister, Lizzie, the one who actually got to be named after a notable Austen character, and asked if she were pranking her. By the tone in her voice, Maggie knew that Lizzie had no clue what she was referring to. There was also a hint of delight in Lizzie's voice at the prospect that Maggie might have a secret admirer. Everyone wanted to see Maggie happily paired off to a nice man of her equal; everyone, that is, except Maggie.

  With a mixture of school-girl crush and aggravation, she went about her dusty business at the bookstore until her tasks were complete and her workday was at an end. As she went to lock up, she noticed Hemingway was not around and knew instinctively that she was locked back in storage. Hemingway often escaped the world to the solitude of the storage unit and would sneak in when Maggie had the door opened and was otherwise occupied.

  "Hemingway, you little tramp! Get out here. I've got to go home now."

  The frisky feline walked a little too slowly out of the storage room and rubbed Maggie's legs a few too many times.

  "Fine! I forgive you. Just don't go in there again. You know how it vexes me!"

  Maggie made her way to the front of the store, gave one last glance around to make sure all was in order and opened the door to leave, then suddenly did a double take. There was a book on her desk! A second message in the same day! Was her admirer getting a little bolder or just getting a jump-start on the next day? Maggie turned on the light again and looked to see what literary nugget was left for her this time.

  Billows of thought came rolling over my soul, and the voice faded out of my hearing! Fifty-three! Break my heart! Oh, my lost darling! Just her age who was so gentle, and lovely, and all the world to me, and whom I shall never see again! How the thought of her carries me back over wide seas of memory to a vague dim time, a happy time, so many, many centuries hence, when I used to wake in the soft summer mornings, out of sweet dreams of her, and say "Hello, Maggie!" just to hear her dear voice come melting back to me with a "Hello, Jacob!" that was music of the spheres to my enchanted ear.

  Mark Twain! A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court! But he had used her name and age and now disclosed his own! Jacob. She knew no one named Jacob. Who was this gentle creature wooing her? Maggie decided maybe it was time to retrieve, shake the dust off of, and try on something she had not worn in a very, very long time. It was a smile so genuine that no calamity could wipe it off her face. She twirled in the parking lot and then drove home to the boys.

  Maggie couldn't wait to get home and turn on the computer and investigate everyone Jacob. But her plans were delayed when she received a call that one of her elderly friends needed a ride to the emergency room. She knew this would mean hours of sitting and waiting and though her heart went out to this woman, it meant she would have to waylay her sleuthing.

  In the waiting room, she read through two full Highlights for Children and three People magazines and now knew so much more about the inhabitants of the Babylon that was the entertainment world than she ever needed to know.

  At last she was able to return her friend to her home, make her a small meal and visit for a bit, and now was on her way back home and to the computer.

  "Boys, tonight is not the night to stretch across the keyboard. Mommy's on a mission!" There was a joy in her voice and a spring in her step and somewhere in the back of her mind she was subconsciously scolding herself for having to receive obscure and random love notes from a stranger in order to come to life, but there it was. She did not even know who Jacob was. She went to the local white pages online and found that there were about a thousand Jacob's in the county. So, feeling full of serendipity, she typed J-A-C-O-B in the Google search bar and came up with way too much information. This could take the rest of the week to go through.

  First up, Jacob's meaning: as a boy's name the meaning of Jacob is "he who supplants".

  Next up, supplant: 1. to take the place of (another), as through force, scheming, strategy, or the like. 2. to replace (one thing) by something else.

  Maggie thought of the empty slots on the bookshelves and her subsequent thoughts of the empty places in her heart and her desire to have them filled. Was Jacob, whoever he was, trying to do just that?

  Jacob--Jacob Black, a character in the popular Twilight series.

  Jacob--also known as Israel, father of the 12 tribes in the Old Testament.

  This was getting nowhere. Then, as she turned to leave her computer, a book caught her eye. Grimm's Fairy Tales. Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm. Maybe it was the ghost of Jacob Grimm, she mused. She giggled, fed the cats and then hit the road to what she hoped would be sweet sleep.

  Chapter 5,

  in which a literary battle of wits ensues, some things are

  revealed and others are not

  When Maggie awoke, she was not feeling as blissful as she had the last couple of days. She occasionally suffered from sleep apnea and this had been a particularly bad night. She labored her way through about half of her oats and even her shower didn’t bring her to life.

  She arrived at the bookstore more tired than she had left it the day before, doubting that any messages could turn her outlook around. Days like this—days when she would have rather stayed in bed—brought up old resentments of having to work in the first place. It was not that she was at all lazy or wanted to lie around watching TV. Maggie had aspirations. She wanted to spend her days pursuing dreams that had long been on the back burner due to raising children, the one dream of hers which had been fulfilled. As much as she loved being a mother to many, she had forgone many things and made many sacrifices to do it and now was the time to accomplish these ambitions. The men who had not known how to love her t
he way she needed to be loved—exclusively—had left her with no income, no retirement, no social security and had saddled her with the need to work to meet her most rudimentary needs. She had worked so hard raising her children and had thoughtlessly counted on having a man to care for her as she got older. Her thought was that she could do these things when the kids were grown.

  Instead, she mourned over the lives her husbands had chosen to live that had left her struggling to care for herself. She attributed the stress-damage ravages that her body was enduring to these immature men and that left her feeling even worse about herself and her inability to forgive, forget, and move on.

  So it was an altogether rotten day she was facing and it was seasoned with bitterness. She gave no thought to romantic messages or secret admirers and quite frankly was in no mood for them today. Why should she give the time of day to anyone who might be interested in her? History had proven all her romantic dreams utterly futile. The truth was, Maggie had often said, much to the chagrin of those who loved her, that she could never respect anyone that could love her.

  As she returned from the stacks with the last of the previous night’s sales, she approached her desk with a sincere hope that there would be no message today. It would not be received well in her hateful state. Unfortunately, not only did her admirer ignore her wishes, but, like all men, felt that he could somehow fix her. She had no way of knowing that he believed that he had it within himself to counteract all the pain that was eroding her core.

  She closed her eyes just before she got to her desk and gingerly set the books down. Then, slowly, painfully, she opened her eyes to find this passage:

  "How beautiful you are! You are more beautiful in anger than in repose. I don't ask you for your love; give me yourself and your hatred; give me yourself and that pretty rage; give me yourself and that enchanting scorn; it will be enough for me."

  She loved this passage. This was from Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Now Maggie was really beside herself. Whoever this was, he was able to know how she felt in her heart. She was an uncomfortable blend of indignant, afraid and angry, though she could not discern which one held the controlling share.

  These feelings, with painful rapidity, morphed into a bitterness that love was once again either mocking her or attempting to intrude into her life. She also felt that it was more than likely doing so with a hope that it could not only impose, but would also find the accommodations appealing and decide to stay. She screamed out, completely unaware beforehand that she would even do so, “Enough of this! I can’t handle it! I demand that you show yourself now! Who are you? I need to know!”

  Hemingway made her way to the front of the store and plopped herself down at Maggie’s feet, sensing her anguish and wanting somehow to make it better. She purred and writhed in an attempt to distract Maggie from her suffering. It worked, but only temporarily.

  “Oh, Hemingway, is it you? Are you somehow doing this? I can’t imagine how without opposable thumbs.” Maggie was momentarily relieved of her dark thoughts. Once Hemingway saw the fruition of her efforts, she jumped up and onto the science fiction shelf and licked herself into another nap.

  “O.K., I am calm now. Who is doing this? Is there anyone there? Please show yourself.”

  The thought came to her that she should try communicating in like manner. She remembered a passage that she deemed an appropriate response and scrambled to find the book. She blew off the dust, opened it up, lightly drew a pencil box around the sentence and left it on the desk. She went to the restroom and waited for her phantom to read from John Gilberts’ The Trespasser:

  “Imagination is at the root of much that passes for love.”

  She was not sure how long she spent in there with the door closed tight. Time no longer seemed to exist. When she felt prompted, she opened the door and tip-toed to the desk. There, she found:

  “I did not know the woman soul, that crowning gift of Providence to man, which, if we do not ourselves degrade it, will set an edge to all that is good in us. I did not know how the love of a woman will tinge a man's whole life and every action with unselfishness. I did not know how easy it is to be noble when some one else takes it for granted that one will be so; or how wide and interesting life becomes when viewed by four eyes instead of two.”

  It was The Stark Munro Letters by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Now Maggie was filled with righteous indignation. She would rid herself of this torment. She could come up with as many negatives about love as he could positives. The game was on. She found a copy of Adam Bede by George Eliot and opened the page and pointed to it with a highlighter:

  “. . . people who love downy peaches are apt not to think of the stone, and sometimes jar their teeth terribly against it.”

  This time, she put her hands over her eyes and began to count to 100, but only got to 36 before she heard pages flip and when she spread her fingers and looked, he had marked a different passage in that same book. Oh, he was good.

  “These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are: you can neither straighten their noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their dispositions; and it is these people--amongst whom your life is passed—that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love: it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people whose movements of goodness you should be able to admire—for whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible patience.”

  “Stop this now! Enough! Please, whoever you are, present yourself. Put an end to this madness!”

  She ran back to the far end of the building, to make sure the back door was not open and that someone had not sneaked in. When she arrived back at her desk, there was one more book than when she left, but it had not been opened. The mere sight of it took her breath away. Could this be? Could the silly speculation she had made in complete and utter jest actually be true?

  The book was a 1932 edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Then her eyes caught a glimpse of the computer screen and when she caught full vision of it, she saw that a Wikipedia page was open for Jacob Grimm. She plopped into her chair without thought and sat and read and wept without inhibition.

  Chapter 6,

  in which some very interesting background information is offered to you, the readers, and in which Maggie declines a very special offer

  This is what Maggie read:

  Jacob Grimm was the brother of Wilhelm Grimm and together they wrote dictionaries and more dark and graphic “fairy tales” than the diluted versions we read today. Wilhelm married and had children. Jacob remained unmarried.

  Maggie read on for a few minutes, learning more than she had ever bothered to before about these men, and then spun around in her chair and scanned the area with the irrational thought of actually looking into the eyes of someone who had been dead for nearly a century and a half. She had always believed in ghosts or spirits or whatever they were. She had experienced a few inexplicable occurrences. Nothing extraordinary, just objects moving in front of her. But now she was being challenged with the idea that someone was actually trying to communicate with her and it was testing everything she believed in.

  “Jacob Grimm? Is it you? Are you here with me?

  The door chimed and someone entered the bookstore, sending Maggie into a startled frenzy.

  “Oh, my word, you nearly scared me to death!”

  “Sorry, Miss, I thought I heard you talking to someone. I didn’t mean to sneak up on you.”

  “No, it’s O.K., I was actually just thinking out loud. What can I do for you?”

  “These flowers are for a Margaret Austen. Is that you?”

  He lifted the most exquisite bouquet she had ever seen and placed it on the counter in front of her.

  “Yes, it is me. I’m Margaret. Who in the world sent them?”

  “I can’t say, ma’am. But I can tell you the order was phoned in. There’s a card.”

  Maggie buried her face and breathed in deeply the fragrance which was just as overwhelming as the beauty of the bloo
ms. She reached for the tiny envelope and it read:

  43076, page 93, with all my love, JG

  “Thank you, sir. Here, let me give you a tip.”

  She handed him a few dollars and he took his leave. She studied the bouquet and then studied the card. What in the world could it mean? She guessed that the number was an inventory number and she looked it up in their database; she found that it was the very book that they had been sharing by George Eliot. She turned to page 93 and read:

  “How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? Or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections?”

  “How do you know me? Why are you here? Am I supposed to do something for you so that you can move on? I’ve seen movies like that—with people who need someone living to help them finish some sort of work they didn’t have the chance to complete. Is that what this is? Can you find a way to let me know?”

  Maggie looked on in astonishment as her favorite ink pen wrote on a scrap of paper, seemingly by itself.