Albert shook his head. “I haven't seen any pictures."
Henry looked around again. On the slant of the wall near Albert's head was a map of Europe. There the visual politics was greatly simplified by geographic swaths of color: Germany ranged in pink from Baltic Russia to the Rhine, the Austro-Hungarian Empire bulged in green from the Adriatic to the Black Sea, and the yellow of the Ottomans reached from the Persian Gulf to well beyond the Aegean. Henry imagined for an instant the young woman—she would be young, wouldn't she?—turning from the letter she was writing on the desk to check the map.
He said, “What do you think happened to her?"
Albert's face fell to a flat expression of resignation. “She must have died. This room was sealed up. Look behind you—where I broke through. That was a door. It's still locked—and whoever locked it was not content with that. They put lathing over the wood and plastered it. I felt like Carter entering the tomb of King Tut. But I knew it was here. I could tell from outside that there had to be a room here. And I figured, if they were going to tear it all down anyway, I might as well see what was in it.” Albert's eyes scanned the shelves as he spoke.
Henry asked, “Who owns it all?"
"Well, the house belongs to a fellow named Rogers. But he's not even here. He lives in Florida. Herb Stanley, the builder, hired me to clean it out so they can tear it down. Everything I take out is mine. Only, they start ripping the place apart tomorrow, so we have to get this all out of here today. Pronto. Now."
Henry winced at the thought. “Why tear it down?"
Albert shrugged. “To build a bigger one. It's too small."
Henry said, “It's big enough for me ...."
Henry knew Albert was no happier at the thought than he was. Albert's tone hardened again. “Well, if you have three or four hundred thousand dollars handy, you can probably negotiate something."
Henry had little to answer that. “Damn!"
Albert heaved his shoulders again in resignation. “I see it every week. But not with something like this in it. This is a time capsule. I haven't seen anything like this in all the years I've been hauling trash. You see bits and pieces, but never like this. It's a tiny museum."
Henry took a breath. Behind him, by the break in the door, was a broad chair with wide, flat arms. Henry rose from his knees before sitting there to survey the room.
This was the chair she must have used when she read the books. He turned. A slender brass floor lamp with a flowered shade was directed down at him from behind.
Henry said, “What's your plan?"
Albert sighed unhappily.
"Junior's off getting some boxes at the liquor store now. I figured we'd pack it up as best we can and then load it into your van—it's dry in there, right? No rust holes in the roof yet—and then we can sort it out later. The furniture's not much. The shelves are homemade. Just this little desk and that Morris chair you're sitting in."
Henry's hands gripped the flat oak of the arms. “Morris chair? It has a name?"
Albert nodded. “After William Morris. It's a recliner. I've seen them before. You could drop the back down and take a nap, if you had the space to do it. We can get this room cleared by lunchtime if we get snappy about it, and then you can see if you can sell some of these books. I'll get rid of the furniture on my friend Bernie."
Henry ran his hands over the wood, caressing it, and nestled himself further in the chair.
"I always wanted a chair like this ... to read in."
Albert said, “Better to nap in."
Henry squinted at Albert. “I'd like the chair. I'll buy the chair for whatever Bernie will pay."
Albert waved him off. “You've got no room for it where you live."
Henry shook his head and turned. “I'll figure something out—and I want this little lamp, too."
Albert sighed with resignation and then yelled for his helpers. They were both on the front porch smoking, and their voices mingled with the fresh air from the window. Henry was guessing that Albert had his own thoughts about the chair. But Alice did not like him bringing things home. She had put an end to that many years ago.
When Junior returned with the boxes in his father's big truck, Henry began the packing with Albert while the others finished with the downstairs. As they worked, Henry learned that the house had been occupied until recently by an elderly couple who had bought it in the 1940s. Prior to that, Albert knew nothing.
Henry carefully released the map from the plaster and folded it with the letters. The dry inkwell, the pens and the pencils, the hardened gum eraser, and even the small blotter with the name of an English maker of jellies on the back were put into a box together with an assortment of clips, bookends, and a brass letter opener emblazoned with the name of a Boston stationery company now long gone. As Henry packed the books, he resisted the urge to look into the titles he had never seen before. The Roycrofter books were packed separately so that the dried and powdering leather would not mark anything else.
More of the door was broken away to pass the desk and the chair through. Only when the chair was lifted from its dark corner did they see the rosewood box, its lid unclasped over the bulging of its contents. As hands grabbed the chair through the opening, Henry knelt and lifted the box, wary of opening the lid further and spoiling his instant hope for what it contained.
Albert stopped his packing and grunted with impatience.
"Go ahead."
Henry raised the lid slowly, enjoying the small drama. The cream yellow of the letter paper appeared new. The blue ink of the handwriting had not faded or darkened.
Albert said, “Attagirl."
Henry asked, “Why here?” His hand waving at the floor.
They both stared at the box as if its contents were inexplicable. Henry used a finger to tip the upper edges of the pages without removing them. A moment passed, with only the sound of the fellows downstairs moving over the old floors.
Henry thought out loud. “Her father ... ‘Dear Papa,’ they all say. He might have placed them there. He might have sat in the chair to read them as they arrived."
Albert muttered, his thoughts on that distant past, “He might have put them there before he sealed the room."
Henry placed the box securely under his arm, pressing the lid shut and closing the clasp. The rug was rolled, baring the wide pine boards and revealing a brighter yellow beneath.
Henry asked, “What about the wood? Can't they save the wood?"
Albert shook his head. “That's up to the contractor. They might save some. My job is the trash."
By noon, the room was as empty as the others. Henry's van was loaded, and he drove back to Brookline in slow traffic with his mind happily lost in the Edwardian Age of Robert Chambers, Ellen Glasgow, and Edith Wharton.
Many years before, still in high school, Henry had read a book by Jack Finney called Time and Again. His memory of the book came back strongly as he drove. That book was an account of a time traveler, a passage from the present to the past—from the 1970s to the late-nineteenth century in New York—but the discovery of the little room beneath the closed gable in Dedham was as near to traveling through time as Henry ever expected to experience. He was happy for the escape. He was happy for the chance just then to be gone from this time he was living in.
When finally he sat alone in the van, behind his father's house with the motor off, he opened the box, unable to wait any longer. The first letter on top, still creased from having been folded square, was dated April 5, 1915. The heavy commercial black lettering which topped the sheet with the name of the Biltmore Hotel in New York City only served to exaggerate the delicate beauty and curve of Helen Mawson's pen line in blue ink.
Dear Papa,
You are still angry. I know. I can see your face as you read this. But it was Mama's wish. The money was for me to spend in just this way. When you are finished scowling, I know you will be happy that I have arrived safely. I am staying at the Biltmore because it is so close to the sta
tion.
Please don't worry about the price. They have smaller rooms for butlers and maids, and I have talked my way into one of those. I will be careful with my funds.
There are several shows I want to see before I leave. The Ziegfeld Follies are the biggest sensation just now. And there is a Sherlock Holmes play which I will see for you and tell you all about. The city is just too marvelous for me to find enough words. Imagine, a hundred times over, our puny Washington Street. They build what look like the honeycombs of gothic bees wedged between columns of marble and all pulled like taffy into the sky. And merchant signs sprout everywhere, like a million gaudy flags of every color and size. Conjure a whole city of businesses turned on end so that a citizen never need travel beyond the clink and whir of the elevator. Then multiply it countless times. Boston is so pitiful by comparison. Why, certainly the automobile cars you hate so much will be obsolete in no time. We will all be taking the elevator!
I went directly to the Woolworth Building, and it is even more incredible than I imagined, not only scraping the sky but piercing the gloom of evening like an ancient sword. The clouds move from its path as it soars, and the earth tilted beneath my feet as I stared in wonder. See the postcard I have enclosed.
You must come, someday, and see this place. You cannot think that you would make Mother happy by staying home. Her spirit is in me. I must fly.
Dearest love,
Helen
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Chapter Five
He had expected some difference. He had prepared himself for the moment and assumed there would be some visible mark of the time since he had seen her last. He was not prepared to find Morgan as if he had just left her the day before and she had only changed her outfit. Her honey brown hair was still cut short—to compensate for the “big head,” she had once said. The agate brown and gray in her eyes was clear, almost polished. The running shoes she was wearing brought her eyes up almost to his. Morgan had always liked the Kate Hepburn-style pants and loose shirts with wide collars that Henry had only seen before in old movies. He even remembered her saying once that she was born a generation too late.
She opened the door of her apartment as the door of the elevator folded back. There was no hallway necessary because the apartment occupied the entire floor.
She did not hesitate, as he did, and hugged him with more than polite friendship. She was not wearing perfume. She never had, that he could remember. He had always liked that. She smelled sweet to him without it.
"Thanks. Thanks for coming. I just got here myself. The weather has been so good that I stayed on the Cape for a few extra days. I needed the time.... How are you doing?"
As usual, he had little to tell her. His life was far less eventful than her own. It had always been his part to listen to her stories, not the other way around.
She said, “You've been living by yourself too long, you know. Men who live by themselves change in the wrong ways."
He was uncomfortable with one fact he could not escape. He was still very much attracted to her. Time had not altered that.
He said, “Have I changed that much?"
"Yes. You look thin. You aren't eating well enough. You look pale. You need sun. And don't tell me you can't afford to spend weeks on the Cape like I do. You can still get out. Get some fresh air. Exercise. You still have your health. I can see that. You should take advantage of it while it's still yours."
This was the mother in her. It had come up before.
He answered, “I suppose I'm indoors too much."
She would not let the thought go. “You don't have a girlfriend, do you? I can tell. Men look so much healthier when they are spending time with a woman."
That was a fact of life he could only blush over.
The air of the rooms was stale. Morgan pulled back curtains and opened windows to the morning light as she gave him a tour of the books in each room, and he got the pleasure of watching her move again. He had forgotten how graceful she was. Even her small movements had poise.
Because the apartment covered the entire top floor of the building, light seemed to arrive from every direction. The books filled the interior walls. He had always been good at estimating quantity, but his quick count became mired by the size of the collection spread over so many rooms in such a variation of shelving. In the room they called the library alone, the only one without windows because it filled the center of the space, there were over four thousand volumes in oak shelves lining all four walls.
Several times he had to remind himself to breathe as his eyes absorbed the titles and authors. As Morgan pointed out the last group in a small study by her bedroom, he knew the total would be well over ten thousand volumes. The majority were average octavo size in hard cover, and almost all published after World War Two. The bulk were fiction, which had been Heber Johnson's specialty. Most astonishing to Henry's eye was that they all looked brand-new, even a copy of Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, which Henry pulled off a shelf at random, published in 1955. He guessed that nearly all the books were first editions. A quick check established that those separated out in the center library were signed, representing the work of Heber's clients.
It occurred repeatedly to Henry that he could live off the sales of a collection like this for the rest of his life.
In the past, when he had delivered books from the auctions, he set the boxes in the vestibule of the building, at Morgan's request. He wanted to see the apartment, but Heber had been alive then, and Morgan thought it best to avoid a meeting. Now he was glad for another reason. He knew he would be dreaming about these shelves for years.
"Please” was the first word he found to use. “Do not donate these to a library. They'll store them badly in boxes until the spines are warped. They'll rip off these precious dust jackets and discard them like wastepaper. They'll mark the spines with irremovable white labels and then put them out for uncivilized, unwashed, rude students to paw over as they pick their noses and sneak Cheez-Its out of plastic bags in their pockets."
Morgan laughed. She had always laughed at his melodramatic rants against the “Goths and the Visigoths,” as she called them.
She said, “They'll be in a special collection, catalogued separately and kept exactly as they are. They're even interested in the shelving. Heber had it all custom-built by a local woodworker, and Miss Crist, the librarian, thinks they can install it all together in the space they've made available. I've spent a lot of time negotiating this. Don't worry. You know I wouldn't let Heber down."
She made tea for him as he began to look more closely at the titles. He had brought one of his usual small notebooks and pulled a pencil from his shirt pocket. She handed him a clipboard with a fresh legal pad and a pack of pencils newly sharpened.
By noon he had finished only half of the living room. He had stopped looking for reader's marks. There were none. He had stopped checking the publishers’ copyright notices. They were always first editions, unless they were much older titles, and then they were the better reprints from major publishers. Through the years, they had kept no trash.
Remembering the remark she had once made, he thought it was funny that she had what appeared to be a complete collection, up to the 1990s, of the works of John Updike. She shrugged innocently when he pointed this out, as he looked carefully at a copy of The Poorhouse Fair, trying to remember the point of difference between the first and second printings.
Thankfully, the books were not in alphabetical order, but rather collected by period and kind, or some other interest. All of George Duggan's books were there, each signed to both Heber and Morgan, with an inscription. When Henry pulled Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird off the shelf, he did not expect the signature inside. He had never seen one before.
Was she giving that away as well?
Yes. Everything.
But she had taken the clothbound Le Morte D'Arthur by Malory from his hand when he had slipped it down from an upper shelf. It was the
Rackham illustrated edition, Henry's favorite, and was out of place beside an older set of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
"Not that. It was Heber's. He received it on his twelfth birthday, from his grandfather. I'll be taking it with me for my son's children."
There was no time to ask if he could sit and leaf through it now. She put it back.
He had taken a short break and become quickly engrossed in the first chapters of Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts when she tapped him on the shoulder where he sat on the floor.
"I actually did something like that once,” she said. “In 1961, on my summer break in college. The only flight I could afford was to Lisbon. We started hitchhiking there and made it all the way across Spain and France and down the boot of Italy to Sicily. I was a classics major, remember, so I wanted to see it all. It took me the entire three months. At that time, you couldn't go where Fermor had walked back in 1932. Fermor did it before Hitler and Stalin. But now, with the Iron Curtain gone, you could retrace his whole trip."
He asked, “You weren't alone?” Imagining a young Morgan with her thumb out beside an ancient road.
"No. Girls didn't do those things alone then. There were three of us. Two classics majors and a language major."
Henry had never traveled beyond an occasional train ride to New York. The thought occurred that he'd give up twenty years of his life to have been on that journey with Morgan.
She put a plate of neatly divided roast-beef sandwich down on the floor next to him, along with a beer.
"You still drink your beer, I hope."
He had tried to convince her years ago that there was a difference between tap and bottled beer. He had not been successful.
After that she left him alone while he worked. Several times the phone rang and she stood in the kitchen and spoke just beyond his hearing.
Again, he caught sight of her, lying on the couch in the living room with her arm bent and her palm against her cheek with a book open. Henry had always liked the sight of a woman reading a book.
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