Kitabı oku: «The Secret of Lost Things»
The Secret of Lost Things
Sheridan Hay
FOR
MICHAEL,
my own tempest
“…for experience, the only true knowledge…”
Herman Melville, The Confidence Man
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
PART TWO
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
PART THREE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
PART FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
AUTHOR’S NOTE
About the Author
Praise
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
I was born before this story starts, before I dreamed of such a place as the Arcade, before I imagined men like Walter Geist existed outside of fables, outside of fairy tales. My time at the Arcade would have gone very differently but for him, for his blindness. His eyes were very nearly useless when I met him, and were it not for his condition, I would never have known about Herman Melville’s lost book. Walter Geist’s blindness is important, but it’s my own, with regard to him, that remains a lasting regret. It’s the reason for this story. If I start with my own beginning you will understand how I came to the Arcade, and how it came to mean so much to me.
I was born on April twenty-fifth, never mind what year precisely; I’m not so young that I care to put my age about, but not so old now that I forget the girl I was.
My birth date, however, is significant in another sense. April twenty-fifth is Anzac Day, the most important day of commemoration on the Australian calendar. It is the day when Australians pin sprigs of rosemary to their breasts to remember those lost to war, to remember that first great loss, at Gallipoli, where rosemary grows wild on the beaches. “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance,” says Ophelia, once she’s lost her mind to grief. “Pray you, love, remember.”
It was April twenty-fifth on the island state of Tasmania, when my mother saw stalks of spiky rosemary pinned over hearts, the day she walked to the free public hospital to give birth to me, walked through the crowded Square trying to avoid the ragged annual parade of veterans and gawking locals. That hardy plant stayed in her mind through a difficult labor, not as the symbol of loss, for she was gaining me, but as an emblem of memory.
Anzac Day, then, determined my name—Rosemary. And given along with my name, the occupation I practice here—to remember. After all, memory is a kind of obligation, perhaps the last duty owed anyone.
I have only one other name. My last—Savage. And Mother too gave me this name, only Mother. She brought me home to the small flat she rented above the shop off the central town Square. Remarkable Hats was the only store of its kind on the island of Tasmania, and we grew up in that shop, Mother and me. But like a pair of goldfish, we grew only so much as the bowl allowed. We came to fit it, but we lived in a bowl of separateness, a transparent wall between us and the rest of the town. Mother had come from the mainland, she was an outsider, and everyone knew that “Mrs.” Savage was a prefix that didn’t disguise one single defining fact: there wasn’t a husband in sight.
But disguise, in a way, was Mother’s business. Hats, after all, can cover up a good deal of what one might not want revealed. Hats can even grant a measure of acceptance to a woman who’d appeared from the mainland to establish a small, decent business—pregnant, without an apparent partner.
“It’s hats that saved us,” Mother often said. “That’s why I call these hats remarkable. They made me unavoidable to respectable people.”
It was imagination that saved us. Hers, in particular. And I like to think imagination was her gift to me.
Remarkable Hats made Mother something of an arbiter of taste in our town as well as wise to vanity. She could guess the hat size of customers within moments of laying eyes on them. The measurements of regular customers she memorized, along with a characteristic that, to her, matched the circumference of their head.
If she saw our prosperous and ambitious landlord, Mr. Frank, in the Square she’d say: “That Mr. Frank, no wonder he’s a nine-and-three-quarters. With all those big ideas, he certainly needs the space.”
Or she’d mention that Mrs. Pym, the florist, had been trying on hats to wear to the Cup: “Of course, Rosemary, nothing I had was right. Pym is one of those five-and-a-halfs. Practically a pinhead. No room in there for a thought, let alone a decision.”
Hats were oracles, divining rods to behavior, and while Mother’s way of judging her fellow Tasmanians was often accurate, matching the opprobrium of a small town with her own brand of snobbishness did little to relieve our isolation. Of course, isolation itself worked on our imaginations, our illusions, separating us even more. We were only glancingly acknowledged, and never included. I helped in the store after school. Friends were discouraged, if they’d ever been interested, or more precisely, curious.
We had each other.
“Better to do well in school,” Mother advised. “Keep up your reading.” And she’d tap her temple with her index finger for emphasis. “All your future’s there beneath your hat.”
She didn’t mention my body. She never did, except in the most perfunctory way, imparting only biological information. As Mother knew firsthand, bodies caused trouble.
She did have one close friend, Esther Chapman, a mentor to me and the owner of Chapman’s, the only shop in the village that sold books. Miss Chapman (I called her Chaps from early on) helped to educate me, taking me to any theater that made its way to our small town, favoring the rare Shakespeare troupe that occasionally washed ashore in Tasmania. Chaps taught me to read before I started school, endowing my purposes with words she would have said, quoting from her favorite play. Chaps held that books were essential, whereas hats were a kind of ephemera, a fancy, objects that ultimately wouldn’t provide Mother or me with security.
She worried for us.
“Books aren’t lumps of paper, but minds on shelves,” she urged Mother. “After all, hats aren’t books—people don’t need them.”
“Tell that to a bald man in the summer,” Mother teased back. “Or to a plain-faced woman.”
But Chaps was right to be concerned.
By the time I finished school, Remarkable Hats was mostly remarkable in that it was still in business. Hats were no longer fashionable, no longer the article of differentiation between decent people and ill-bred ones. Hats went the way of gloves and stockings. Eventually, even regular customers were infrequent, not immune to the whims of fashion or mortality. The town itself was waning.
Mother’s own health had been in steady decline for some time, linked as it was to the dwindling business. She was a small woman, and dark, and she grew thin and pale with worry. As I grew older, Mother diminished. In the absence of customers, Mother had me try on hats after school. I had the height, she liked to tell me. It cheered her up.
I’d find her dozing on her stool behind the high serving counter in the afternoon. She said she could only rest in daylight, that she was most comfortable in the opened store, and that nights were spent endlessly waiting for day. When I finally discovered how deeply in debt we were, Mother’s insomnia was all at once explained.
Late morning one April day, a few months after I’d finished school, I came down the back stairs which joined our small flat to the shop, and found Mother collapsed behind the counter. Her breath was halted, her face the livid color of a bruise, as if she’d been beaten.
Mother died a day later, in the same free hospital where she’d given birth to me. By grotesque coincidence then, it appeared that the town, the state, and the whole of Australia commemorated my private loss publicly, the day I turned eighteen. Anzac Day. I didn’t consider the rosemary pinned to lapels an admonition to remember.
I would never forget.
Mother’s funeral was a short, unsentimental proceeding the following week. I stood in disbelief at the copper door of the mock tomb, a deco affair, that housed the crematorium, set on the highest hill above town. Five old regulars were good enough to come. Both men respectfully held hats to their chests, while the women thoughtfully appeared in Remarkable chapeaus. I thanked them along with Chaps, now my unofficial guardian.
The service was impoverished. Mother and I possessed no religion, save the worship of imagination, of living a kind of fiction, which death, in all its realness, had made a mockery of.
Afterward, we gathered awkwardly in the parking lot outside the tomb until the regulars departed solemnly in their cars, single file, down the steep road. I watched them grow smaller as they separated at the crossroads, the town below just a handful of scattered red tiles, haphazardly thrown across low green hills, without order or pattern, carelessly. It was a narrow, ugly spot on an island of tremendous beauty. The village had never seemed smaller or more unremarkable.
“She’s gone, Chaps,” was all I could manage, feeling short of breath.
The funeral director approached after a while, handing me Mother’s ashes sealed inside a wooden box.
“You said you wanted the simplest one, Miss Rosemary. And this here is the simplest. It’s a native timber, Huon pine. Tasmanian heartwood. Very strong and durable.”
He rapped the box with his knuckles. I winced. Chaps knew him, and, helpfully, the one funeral director in town who wasn’t too unctuous was also the least expensive. But he was nervous for his line of work, and oddly unpracticed in handling grief. He chatted away, not oblivious to my distress but perhaps made so anxious by it that he sought to fend it off with information.
“My supplier told me once that Huon pines can live a thousand years. Practically forever. Isn’t that something?” He went on: “The wood has a very distinctive perfume, too—strong.” He sniffed. “It’s usually found on the west coast of the island—”
“Yes. Thank you,” Chaps said, cutting him off. She took me by the elbow and tried to lead me toward her car. I appeared fixed to the spot.
I held the box of Huon pine with both hands spread beneath, unable to move. The box was warm and smelled faintly corrupt. My eyes began to tear, the water on my face as startling to me as to the nervous director.
Chaps finally pushed me to her car and drove me to her little house. I couldn’t get out, or really move at all, so we set off again, driving in silence down long Tasmanian roads all the way to the coast.
“The ocean,” Chaps said by way of explanation when, eventually, the paved road ended in sand and the sea stretched away, white-capped and vast, before us.
Chaps rolled down the windows so I could smell the salt and feel the pure, fresh Roaring Forties blow their way west to the bottom of the world, to the end of the great globe itself. My throat choked in the cleanest air that exists and I tried to catch my breath. Staring at the ocean, I felt at once surrounded and alone. Between me, there on the Tasmanian island, and ice-covered Antarctica lay nothing but empty, open sea, unpeopled and unknowing. I bent over the Huon box, but couldn’t utter a word until night came in, cold and complete, carried across the Great Southern Ocean by those same prevailing winds.
“What will I do?” I finally breathed aloud.
Chaps, who always had an aphorism to hand, was silent.
CHAPTER TWO
For nearly every year of my early life I went with Mother to Sydney, on the mainland, to buy hats and the materials milliners use to dress hats. We made sure to spend my birthday in the city; it was, of course, a public holiday. At first, we stayed in a boardinghouse in Surrey Hills, on Sophia Street. Mother had known the landlady, Merle, before she’d moved to Tasmania, when she lived a life I know nothing about. Her own life before mine.
Merle was a fat, angry woman with small eyes and dyed hair. She resembled a magpie, all black and white and on the lookout for morsels. Her rooming house was cheap, smelled of boiled vegetables; and until I was five and old enough to go with Mother to suppliers, I was left there with Merle for several hours.
Those early hours away from Mother are circumscribed in my memory by a shortage of breath. I can’t have actually held my breath, but the sensation of breathlessness is attached to Mother’s absence like a keepsake. Afraid to upset an invented balance that would result in Mother’s continued nonappearance, I stayed as quiet as possible in the stale-smelling sitting room. Her return was marked with great intakes of breath and tremendous exhales: life restored to the small cadaver I’d become.
“That’s the quietest child I’ve ever seen, Mrs. Savage,” Merle would say, tutting, and shaking her big, smooth head.
“It’s not natural to be so good. I’m happy to watch her, she’s no trouble, but it’s like she only exists for you.”
“I’m all she’s got,” Mother said, often.
“Next year, Rosemary love, you can come with me and do the rounds,” Mother promised. “I don’t want to leave you any more than you want me to.”
So began annual encounters with haberdashery and notions, with felt workrooms full of rabbit pelts and beaver furs, with polished wooden heads and metal blocks (screws protruding from their necks), devices that formed crowns and shaped hats. The storefront shops were bright and cool, but the workrooms behind them were vaporous and warm, the air thick with condensation from steam used to mold and clean hats.
Every supplier indulged me. I was distracted, entertained with bright buttons and lengths of silk ribbon while Mother placed her orders and reviewed new styles. Like a bower bird, everything that sparkled caught my eye. I was served triangular sandwiches, and drank milk from a frosted glass with a striped paper straw. I was a small sultana, my treasure counted in the currency of trifles.
Foy’s supplied all the biggest department stores with accessories. The notion display room was lined with a wall of slim wooden drawers, built half a century before, that opened to reveal a collection of bric-a-brac: zippers, buttons, samples of fur and skins, silk flowers, sequins translucent as fish scales, glass beads, dye samples, feathers from unimaginable birds, sweets and fruit made from wax. The wall of drawers held hundreds of brilliantly colored trinkets designed to trim hats, to dress lapels or shoes or belts. Ornaments came from all over the world: marcasite stones from Czechoslovakia, brilliant as metallic diamonds, and rhinestone pins, direct from France, were stored in deep lower drawers, pirate’s chests unearthed.
I used to imagine that the endlessly varied objects contained in the drawers appeared only moments before the knob was pulled and the drawer opened, as if conjured by my wish to see them. The wall of drawers appeared to my small self to hold everything; and “things,” of course, were the sum of the world.
Workroom girls told Mother I would be beautiful one day, “What with that hair,” they’d say. Mother looked dubious. My hair was thick and red, and seemed hardly to belong to me. I must have favored my father, and likely shared as well his green eyes and freckled skin, for Mother’s dark hair set off fathomless blue eyes, and her skin was flawless, the color of very milky tea. She was bird-boned and compact, her bosom high. It seems barely credible that I was her child, so little did we resemble each other.
At Foys, and at other suppliers, rabbit fur was pressed into fine felt: fur felt, for bowlers, fedoras, and the peculiarly Australian work hats with old-fashioned names like the Drover or the Squatter. The most expensive used imported beaver and were never worn to work but kept for best, for show.
In the very rear of Foys workroom was a dim adjoining chamber, piled with skins and smelling sharply of lye, frightening even to pass. I held a strange empathy for the mounds of lifeless pelts, waiting to be shaped into something purposeful. I had felt just as empty, as breathless, as those flayed furs during the hours Mother had left me with Merle. The other side of glimmering bric-a-brac was this grim sepulcher. Evidently, appearances deceived.
Yet Sydney made me happy. I loved the city. We were anonymous, and even then I had the sense that cities were yielding; that they moved over and made room. In the city, I wasn’t a girl without a father. I wasn’t outside of things. I wasn’t even Rosemary. In a city there is no one who can tell you who they think you are, who they want you to be. Once a year we were special and complete.
Here was the start of my scrapbook full of city scenes, any city, decorated with buttons and ribbon collected from suppliers, and painstakingly glued onto the oversized pages.
Peculiar to Sydney, in those days, was a single word written in chalk in beautiful, looping copperplate on street corners. Sydney was known for it, the word chalked at the feet of the inhabitants and visitors, like a letter consisting of a lone word, but personally addressed to each member of a crowd.
“What does it say?” I asked Mother, pointing to what I took to be scribble, the year I was five. The letters didn’t resemble any in the books that Chaps had given me.
“It says ‘Eternity’, love,” Mother replied, taking my hand. “A man has been writing that word in chalk for thirty years. It’s famous now. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t see it, written there on the street.” She put her arms around me.
“What does it mean?”
“We’ll never know it, Rosemary. It’s a word that means something going on always and forever. And you know, nothing does. Not a human thing, anyway. Everything ends eventually. That’s something you should remember, love.”
She looked absently up the crowded city street, staring past my face and into the distance.
“Remember, Rosemary,” she said. “Nothing lasts.”
It was weeks after Mother’s death before I slowed from the manic activity that marked the days following the funeral. A madness held me. I quickly closed Remarkable Hats, sold off the stock or returned it to suppliers for credit against accumulated debt. I was helped and advised by Chaps, and by Mr. Frank (the nine-and-three-quarters.) There was no other decision to be made. It isn’t true that he who dies pays all debts: I couldn’t preserve the store any more than could our life together. Mother and I had depended on a complex web of credit and postponed payments, revealed once she was gone as a great tangle of insolvency.
I cleaned the flat, the three rooms I’d lived in my entire life. I couldn’t tolerate the space without her; every article reflected her absence. I kept the only photograph I had of her, taken before I was born. After that, she’d always been behind the camera with me as subject.
Those first days I was a somnambulist, but it wasn’t like living a waking dream, even a nightmare, it was its opposite. My whole life up until her death had been the dream, and this reality—the one without Mother, the one where every object I thought mine was either sold or returned, where every thing familiar to me disappeared—had waited, hidden behind all I loved.
Suppliers were kind but businesslike. Only the girls at Foys sent a condolence card. I sold off the furniture and the contents of the flat, but after settling accounts, there was little money left. Chaps moved me into her spare bedroom and encouraged me to rest. As my mania subsided, stupor took its place. Chaps urged me to come into her bookstore, where I had worked before, usually stocktaking, during school holidays. Chapman’s Bookshop was cozy, safe; and the small tasks we performed together helped stave off a wave of terrible passivity.
“No one dies so poor that something isn’t left behind,” Chaps said one afternoon, as we unpacked a box of books together. “You are what your mother left, Rosemary. You’ve got to make good on that legacy. I know you will.”
Her talks became daily affairs. I just listened.
“You have to think of your mother’s passing as the way to get out. To escape. You have to begin your life,” Chaps would urge.
Esther Chapman took very seriously the opportunity to advise me. She’d always been a sort of maiden aunt, and I loved her. But after all I’d taken care of in the past weeks, after what I’d lost, I was languid with grief. Before Mother’s death, I hadn’t any idea of real despair, even while I’d been hurtling toward it for eighteen years.
Chaps was stoic, and that helped. She’d lost her own mother after a long illness, and lived in her childhood home. Her father—an Anzac, as it happens—had been killed in the Great War. When called a spinster, Chaps would say: “And far better off that way, not that it’s anyone’s business.” She shared a smilar social position to that of Mother (invisibility), and their recognition of this was what had first made them friends. They were oddities, marginal and not exactly respectable. For her part, Chaps was too well read to be considered entirely proper. Books had made her unreasonably independent.
Judging by photographs in her neat house, with age, Chaps resembled her own mother. Both had pigeon-breasted bodies, small gray heads, large light eyes full of candor. I set my only picture of Mother beside one of Chap’s mother in the living room. The silver frame wasn’t terribly old, but there was something timeless in Mother’s photograph. Black-and-white, it had been taken when she was around eighteen, my age exactly at the time, but taken by whom I would never know. Her youthful face looked out at me vivid with the secrets of her past, her future, and, I fancied, more alive than I was in that same unformed moment.
At the end of that first month, sick with my own drowsy sorrow, I took the Huon box outside Chaps’s tiny house and sat in the neat square of her garden, bordered with flowers that repeated themselves on three sides. The orange, red, and yellow heads worked against melancholy; their unopened leaves, like little green tongues, reproached me. I picked a few red ones, Mother’s favorite color, and put them on top of the box.
I knelt down to inspect a large, open leaf, an almost perfect circle. A silver drop of water balanced on its surface, shiny as a ball of mercury. Carefully, I picked the leaf and spun the bead of water inside its green world—a tiny ball of order, isolated and contained. Focusing on the drop relieved an increment of anguish, about the same size, near my heart.
“Help me,” I prayed to the water drop. “I want Mother. I want it all back. I want my life.”
Chaps arrived home early from the shop. I heard her fussing with the kettle, making tea in the kitchen. She called through the little house.
“I’m out here, Chaps!” I replied.
“Ah, I wondered, dear,” she said, coming outside. “Lovely here in the garden. What are you doing on your knees? You look as if you’re praying to the flowers.”
“It makes me feel better,” I said, embarrassed. “They look so happy, with their bright faces. They smell like ants, though, these flowers…”
“Nasturtium is their variety, and I’m sure I don’t know what ants smell like.” She raised her eyebrows. “But I’ve no doubt you do.”
The tea kettle whistled and she went in briefly to turn it off and brew the tea.
“I see you have her ashes with you,” she said, coming out with a tray.
Perhaps she considered a talk about the maudlin nature of my attachment to the Huon box, but let it go. She sat down on a wrought-iron chair, after laying the tray on the matching table.
“I’ve something to talk with you about,” she said, growing serious.
“I know what you’re going to say, Chaps.”
“You only think you know,” she said, pouring out two cups.
“You’re going to tell me again that ambivalence is fatal,” I said to the leaf.
She had been saying such things all week.
“You’ll tell me to give sorrow words. You’re going to say that I must choose, decide, begin to make my way. You’re going to suggest I bury these ashes—”
“Well, I certainly would say all those things,” Chaps cut in. “And have said all those things, but that’s not what I have to tell you.”
She sat up straighter, filled with the drama of surprise. She hesitated, then took a deep breath.
“I bought you a ticket today. An airplane ticket. I want no argument about it—I had the money saved. Guess where you’re going?”
I stared at her, unable to answer. Did she want me gone? Was she sending me away?
“Can’t guess,” she said. “I thought it would be easy.”
I was silent.
“You love cities, but the only one you’ve ever been to is Sydney. It’s not to there, so don’t consider that one.”
I couldn’t imagine what she’d done, or what I’d done to want her rid of me. I had no money for school. I had no means to travel. I had nothing, so far as I could see, but her affection for me, a box of ashes, and a black-and-white photograph of someone I had loved more than life.
“Come on, why don’t you guess?”
I couldn’t guess. I had that new, hurtling feeling again, the rapid and unpredictable movement of events coming toward me, like getting into a car after a lifetime spent walking. I thought I’d just stay in Tasmania with Chaps, that she’d teach me the book trade. That I’d live as she did, quietly and in my head.
“I’ve bought you a ticket to…” she paused dramatically, and with an uncharacteristic flourish.
“New York!”
I dropped the leaf, sat back on my heels and, after a confusing moment, burst into tears.
“Now, now. I’m not throwing you out, my dear Rosemary.” Chaps bent across and patted my shoulder, my back. She was awkward with affectionate gestures. Her voice remained firm.
“Out of tears, plans!” she said, and handed me the handkerchief she kept folded and tucked inside the sleeve of her cardigan. I never carried one.
I wiped my eyes and nose.
“There now, dear. If you really think about it you’ll see you’re ready to go. The best is not past. Your mother’s death is a break in your life but your life is not broken. You can mend it by living it, by living a different life than either you or your mother imagined.”
“I have imagined it though, Chaps,” I said, thickly. I had, but I was afraid. More than I’d ever been. “I want to leave and travel. I want to discover things, to know things. But I’m frightened. And now you’ve gone and sorted it out for me. You’ve taken away my excuse.” I blew my nose on her handkerchief.
“I’ve done nothing but make the decision for you about where to start, Rosemary. And that was easy because of your scrapbook, all those pictures of New York, of cities. I thought you must have always intended to go there, making a fetish of the place, collecting up clippings and things since you were small. All I’ve done is give you a push. I’m sure your mother would have done the same thing.”
Chaps herself became a little teary. But she was vehement, too.
“You have to get away, Rosemary. You must go abroad! It’s what I would have done, my girl, in a minute, if I’d had the chance.”
Her filmy gray eyes locked on mine. Chaps could be fierce. “It never came for me, Rosemary. The chance to really make a break, to leave and not look back. Now you must go. You must begin! It’s what your mother would want for you, my dear Rosemary. What I want for you. A larger world. You know now where to start. We’ve a couple of weeks left together to arrange everything.”
New York was a fantasy. It was Sydney multiplied, which was all I could imagine then of a great city from the peculiar vantage of Tasmania. It was true I had kept a scrapbook of images since I was small, and many were of New York, but that fact was secondary to the freedom the pictures represented. Liberation was in the very scale of the city: a goldfish bowl one could never grow to fit. I had postcards of tall buildings sharp against the sky, of the magnificent interiors of train stations and libraries illuminated by slanting shafts of light. Spaces between pictures I had filled with bits of ribbon, buttons, and flakes of colored felt.
I hadn’t consciously imagined traveling to New York, or to any other city but Sydney, while Mother was alive. But Chaps had guessed the shape of my deepest wish: I thought my father lived in a city. I didn’t know where. A place free and anonymous and far away. The opposite of Mother. Father could only be foreign. Unknown and mysterious.
My father was a city; the scrapbook my attempt to make him real. In the absence of an actual photograph, any one of the faceless men in the postcards or newspaper clippings of cities could be him. Many of the images were old street scenes, and Mother used to say, “Look at all the men wearing hats! Those were the days to be in business!”
She never guessed at my real interest—I didn’t know it myself. My father was in a city, any city, and I was collecting evidence, clues to his existence. He had long before suffered a sea change.
As Mother gave me no tangible detail of him to build upon, my fancy was as real to me as any fact. She barely knew him, and what she did know she’d kept to herself, would keep to herself, forever.
How much Esther Chapman did for me, letting me go as she did! As a reader of fables, she must have recognized that I would need one of my own. An antidote to catastrophe. My world had been emptied of all its contents, save her, and she knew a city would be the cure to the small life I had lived, the one I’d lost.
But it was myself I was calling into being.
CHAPTER THREE
I arrived in New York late at night, unprepared for a life I only dimly suspected might be found there. A storm caused the plane to land roughly. I never saw my destination; clouds covered the city, the ground visible only moments before the plane’s wheels struck it. I felt myself land hard, as if thrown to earth.
I had three hundred dollars. In my suitcase, underneath my clothes, lay my scrapbook and Mother’s photograph. At the airport, with tears on her cheeks, Chaps had pressed upon me two presents: a green stone necklace (the color of my eyes) which she assured me was an amulet against further heartbreak, and a small book—her very favorite, she claimed—wrapped in her store’s bluish paper. I couldn’t bear to open the package, the Chapman’s Bookshop paper as dear and familiar to me as the wallpaper in my childhood bedroom, in fact, its surrogate. I told Chaps that I would keep her parcel intact, waiting for the day that I desperately needed a present. I didn’t doubt it would come, and for the moment, travel was gift enough. The necklace, though, I put on immediately. A guard against heartbreak couldn’t wait.
Mother’s ashes were covered in an orange scarf at the bottom of a carry-on I was reluctant to put down.
My arrival was not auspicious. The rain continued, veiling the city, and when the taxi I took from the airport tried to deposit me in front of the residential hotel Chaps had booked, it appeared to no longer be in business. I couldn’t have known it, but I had arrived in the final year of a difficult decade for the city. New York itself was stirring from years of financial hardship, and many inexpensive hotels then housed residents permanently courtesy of the state.
Terrified, I agreed to an additional fare and the driver took me further downtown to a hotel he knew was cheap and, he said, safe. The Martha Washington Hotel for Women had a dingier address (29 East Twenty-ninth Street or 30 East Thirtieth street, depending on the entrance), but it was open, with a room vacant at the right price. There was little evidence that it had once been an impressive establishment, even prosperous, with many rooms. Built in 1902, the hotel was now dilapidated. More than seven decades after it opened, the upper floors were closed off for repairs that would never eventuate. The restaurant had been shuttered for thirty years.
A woman sat behind the battered reception counter watching a tiny black-and-white television, connected by twin earplugs. She was striking and dark, about sixty, with aristocratic features. After I had her attention, she explained the hotel requirements in heavily accented English: payment a week in advance, linens changed once a week, no guests in the rooms, no smoking, no cooking, no noise.
I had no intention of breaking any rules. I was barely eighteen years old, absent Mother and country, soaking wet, and so bereft that I sagged inside my damp clothes, shrunken and childlike.
I paid the taxi driver, handed over one week’s rent and staggered to my room at the end of a shadowy corridor. I took the Huon box from my bag and placed it beside my pillow.
“Come back,” I said aloud to Mother, my voice thin and trembling. “Come to me here.”
It was hours before I slept, kept awake by sadness, by anxiety, and by cars passing on the avenue, their headlights flashing in the room like counterfeit lightning, tires plashing into potholes where rainwater pooled.
A hot June sun appeared the following day, the weather surprisingly steamy. I spent that early summer week trying to stay out of the dun-colored room as much as possible. The room was fetid by early afternoon. A single, clouded window, with bars across it, faced the bed. I had to keep the window closed against the street noise and also because this wing of the Martha Washington was downwind from an Indian restaurant on the next block.
At first, I shared a grubby bathroom with two women along the same corridor, although they might as well have been phantoms. They banged around slamming doors and drawers, but I never once saw either of them except from behind—in retreat. They soon disappeared altogether, a fate I feared awaited every fresh arrival to the city. If I sat in the room during hot daylight hours I felt I had been sealed into my predicament, held inside a shrinking box, with no escape but sleep. I woke early, claimed the bathroom first, and promptly ventured out. My life depended on it.
The dark lady of the reception desk appeared to live at the Martha Washington. I heard her speak Spanish to a stern man I gathered was the owner, and I called hello to her each day as I left to investigate the city, as much to speak aloud as politeness. But after several days without acknowledgment, I stopped. She was either too intent on the television or hard of hearing. Or perhaps she simply didn’t care to answer.
The labyrinthine city waited. It anticipated me. I was swallowed whole, surrounded by a populace buzzing and purposeful, a remedy for grief and a goad to it. I was utterly alone, and lived at first without the imposition of order, too scattered and overwhelmed to effect any. I recognized no vista. No building was familiar, apart from the iconic Empire State and the Chrysler (motifs of my scrapbook), but even those were unrecognizable from my altered perspective on the ground. I forgot to eat, and an entire day would pass before I spoke out loud. Even then it might just be an acknowledgment of thanks, or a plain request: “Could I have milk in my tea, please?” My own voice was alien and took my ear strangely. No one addressed me, no one knew my name, and my anonymity was at times a raw joy in my chest, freedom at its most literal, while at others, a source of paralyzing fear. I didn’t know then that this was how deep emotion most often comes, from opposite directions and at once, when you are least aware and farthest from yourself.
I did know profound dislocation, and had to remind myself that the young woman I caught sight of in store windows was me. She had no family. No one expected her home. Yet she existed. There she was reflected in the glass, her wild red hair on end as if with fright.
I needed money and I needed work. I had to know who I might become. I walked and walked around the immediate neighborhood, tracing a large circle, the Martha Washington and Twenty-ninth Street the fixed foot of my compass. I was searching for something I recognized, apart from what I found in my own face, for a sense of the familiar in the unaccustomed.
By odd happenstance I had landed at the eastern edge of New York’s garment district. The streets surrounding the Martha Washington were known for their small accessory suppliers, and tiny storefronts displayed crowded windows full of hats and caps, wigs and handbags, sparkling appliqués and notions of all kinds. It was as if Mother had herself selected the location of my first residence without her. There was a looking-glass quality, almost antipodean, to my immediate location. Mother and Remarkable Hats, the Foys workroom, were far away on the other side of all things, and yet in New York I was surrounded by their emblems.
I ventured farther downtown and actually walked passed the Arcade on several occasions without realizing what it was—the largest used-book store in the city. I hadn’t heard of its reputation for housing lost things: books once possessed and missed or never possessed and longed for. I hadn’t read Herman Melville; only his famous name was familiar (just another on the rather limited stock list at Chapman’s Bookshop). And I knew nothing whatsoever of the value of rare manuscripts. I fancied bookstores were generally similar to each other, in their way. But the Arcade was of an altogether different order; and because then I was in every sense lost, once I was inside, it proved irresistible.
The Arcade’s charm is oddly absolute, but that day it was also intensely personal. Walking into the store, I had walked into an image from my postcard collection, into a picture pasted in my scrapbook. I was inhabiting space I thought imaginary. In this way, I had the distinct impression that I had conjured the Arcade up, had made it appear, a whole cloth woven from unexpressed need.
From the unimpressive entrance, the ceiling rises in an enormous curve toward the rear of the store, a sweep of space that lifts one’s eyes upward in search of another firmament. Of course, there isn’t one; the ceiling is just a deep, dusty dome, like the inside of a skull. (Both are vaults, both repositories of knowledge). How could so slight a portal reveal so impressive a space? It occurred to me that I had been tricked into entering.
Understand, the Arcade is itself a city; itself an island. That bookstores are such places is always hoped for, but the Arcade is like the original wish behind such hopes. In that first visit New York was made actual. The Arcade was population, mass, was the accomplishment of a city. Books were stacked like the teeming New Yorkers, invisible inside their buildings, but sensed as bees in a hive. The hum of life issuing from the crowds that filled the city I had begun to experience, but in the Arcade that buzzing life was made calculable in things. Chaps always told Mother and me books were minds on the shelf. Here it was true: books didn’t seem inanimate; a kind of life rose from the piles heaped on tables before me.
I moved toward a laden table and placed my hand upon the closest stack, listening, waiting. I recall it exactly. An opening, a beginning. I must work here, I thought. I will. Less an act of confidence than of will. I surprised myself.
I looked around in the soft, faded light. I wasn’t startled by the Arcade’s shabby randomness, by the small areas of order within a more general chaos; by its filth, its quiet, and its occasional bursts of jarring sound. Or by the precariousness of book stacks which seemed to lean, without regard to gravity, toward some apprehended but unseen center. I was at home. Dust filtered what sunlight made its way through two dirty windows. Huge, dim lights hung by heavy chains above customers’ heads, bent in concentration.
Turning to the entrance, I checked that outside on the avenue it was actually a sunny, ordinary day in late June. Inside, it was cool and obscurely timeless.
I edged along goat-track passages winding between stacks, only navigable foot in front of foot, a few inches at a time, trying to avoid piles of titles stacked and leaning against spine-out-only shelves. I stopped before a raised platform, an oasis of space amid the clutter. A small man stood behind its oak railing, elevated higher than even the tallest customer. He was pricing old books, but his compelling gestures suggested a priest at a lectern. The brass name plate that faced the store from his oak desk shone: GEORGE PIKE, PROPRIETOR.
His gestures were practiced and repetitive. A stack of volumes sat to Pike’s left. He took a book from the top of that pile, frowned, ran his eyes over the binding, checking for rips or nicks. Then, quickly and elegantly, he flipped to the title page, his eyes scanned the copyright, his thumb fanned rapidly along the edges of the entire book. Reaching the end, he closed the volume, only to reopen it at the first page. He took a pencil from behind his ear and lightly scribbled in the upper-right-hand corner, tracing a looping filigree. He returned the pencil above his ear and rubbed his index finger beneath his nose. He then unfrowned his forehead, set the volume to his right and, having priced the book, immediately reached for another at his left.
He repeated these actions as a single gesture, without variation. It was unconscious; a rough magic. There seemed no moment for contemplation, for the weighing of competing possibilities. Pike alone appeared the arbiter, the heart of the enterprise.
I had made my pledge to work in the Arcade, Pike was evidently its captain. I wanted proximity to such mastery, such certainty. I seized upon the existence of the place like a buoy floating in the middle of the sea.
“Excuse me, sir. My name is Rosemary Savage,” I said to Pike, my own accent peculiar, nasal in my ears.
He was unaccustomed to interruption. I went on hurriedly, shocked at my own boldness, at how sharp was the desperation that prodded me forward.
“I have worked in a bookstore before, Mr. Pike. And I must work here.”
He looked up from his task to register my temerity. Raised eyebrows were the only indication of affront on his rather unremarkable face. He was an anachronistic figure. His striped waistcoat, his shirt bunched above the elbows by arm bands, suggested a man that hadn’t altered his style of dress in decades. He wore a waxy-looking mustache, a darker shade than his whitish-gray hair, and he ran his finger over it before lowering his eyebrows to return his gaze to the book in his hand.
“You must work here?” he said in an odd, thin voice. He appeared to address the book in his hand rather than me, asking the cheeky thing if it really had the gall. “Do you imagine this an infrequent request?” he asked the book.
I didn’t know what to say. Too much was already at stake. I looked up at him and calculated that his platform was a good twenty-four inches higher than where I stood. It was designed to meet the floor at an angle, masking its height and disguising its purpose. It was a stage. I guessed Pike a full head shorter than my own five feet ten, but recognizing this didn’t reduce his stature. He loomed, flanked by books.
But I had given Pike my future, and I wonder now if he saw this himself. There was a long pause as he made his way through his litany of gestures. His movements seemed the process by which he could figure the book’s price, winding himself up to calculating its value.
He set the volume to his left.
I waited. He drew a long breath.
“What we want here is the mild boredom of order. Don’t try to be too interesting, girl.” He read me as easily as the book he had put down.
“Find the Poetry section and begin to shelve what remains on the floor.” He waved his hand in a shooing gesture. “You’re probably ripe for poetry,” he added, in a lower voice.
Was he hiring me on the spot?
“Order by poet, mind you. Only by poet. Don’t give a damn about editors and translators—that’s all a charade. You will shelve by poet or you will not be employed by George Pike. Remove all anthologies! Alphabetical, that is all. There are a few things that should be predictable.”
I had followed this breathlessly, even while it didn’t appear to be directed at me. Had he said “ripe”?
“Ah, yes, sir. Mr. Pike…ah, alphabetical, of course.”
“Find Poetry and my manager will assess your competency shortly.”
He picked up the next unvalued volume to his right.
I hurried deeper into the Arcade and found the Poetry section halfway down a tower that leaned dangerously toward the public toilet, in a far corner. Quickly I began the task of rearranging books that had apparently never been shelved in any order. The section began at eye level. Above it appeared to be books on Occult Practices. The juxtaposition of subjects struck me as deliberate, only accidentally alphabetical. To reach the shelf I had to lean across a tall pile of books on the floor, awkwardly moving volumes around, my arms stiffly extended. I decided to take handfuls off the shelf and sort them while sitting on the floor. This too proved pointless, as I had to constantly reorder each section, accomplishing only what amounted to tidying up. Was this a test of my patience, of my real interest, a practical lesson in the overwhelming nature of bringing even the slightest amount of order to the Arcade?
After half an hour I’d barely managed to complete a single shelf, and was standing with my back to the aisle, wresting another few volumes off the shelf, when I had the sensation of being watched. I heard a sibilant whisper and turned, promptly dropping the books in my hand.
An albino man of uncertain age was no more than two feet from me, his pale eyes moving involuntarily behind pince-nez glasses. From the first it was his eyes. His eyes could not be caught. He stepped back and knocked over several books I had set aside. Ignoring his clumsiness, he took in my surprise with practiced unsurprise. I had never seen anyone like him, nor any face more marked with defensive disdain.
“Walter Geist, the Arcade’s manager,” he whispered, turning. “Follow me, girl.”
I picked up the books I’d dropped, forced them onto the shelf, and caught up with him as his stooped shoulder disappeared around a corner stack.
As I trailed behind his quaint figure, I had the fleeting fantasy that this man was what someone would look like if he’d been born inside the Arcade, never having left its dim confines. Pigment would disappear and eyesight would be ruined beneath weak light, until one lay passively, like a flounder on the ocean floor.
In fact, as I walked behind him, Geist’s white ears reminded me of delicate sea creatures suddenly exposed to light, vulnerable and nude. There was a shrinking quality to him, a retraction from attention like an instinctual retreat from exposure. I was fascinated and repulsed in equal measure, a contradiction that was never to leave me. As I follow him there in my memory, I feel again that charge to his strangeness, a shock that compelled.
He led me to a small office in the very rear of the store, built high into the corner of the vast ceiling like a reef. I followed him up a narrow flight of wooden stairs, the handrail loose and broken.
“Wait here, girl.”
He indicated the patch of landing at the entrance to the office.
“My name is Rosemary, Mr. Geist. Rosemary Savage,” I said, tired of his anonymous address. I extended my hand then, thinking it appropriate, brave even, as I had seen Americans do. His hands remained clasped behind his back. He entered the office and reemerged holding several forms.
“Please fill these out. Print only.”
He handed me a pen and stood examining the activity on the floor below. From that high landing the chaos of the Arcade was fully evident, with the exception of Pike’s platform, where he moved as if choreographed, a small flicker of concentrated activity. I leaned over the rail, following the inclination of Geist’s head, to see what drew his attention. An obese man sat on the floor in a cul-de-sac made by piles of books, his legs splayed out like a toddler’s. He was turning the pages of a large photography book with one hand, his other hidden beneath the heavy covers opened across his lap. Even from the landing I could tell the images in the book were nudes.
“What are you looking at?” Geist asked me.
“Ah, just looking down where you were,” I said nervously.
“I don’t mean that,” he said. “What do you see?”
I described the fat man studying the photographs.
“Arthur!” Geist called down from the landing. “You should be shelving.”
“Just familiarizing myself with my inventory, Walter,” Arthur returned sardonically, his accent British and articulate.
He looked up at me and put a thick finger to his lips, indicating silence. Had I informed on him? Couldn’t Geist see what I had seen? Arthur returned to his nudes, his hand beneath the book’s cover moved rhythmically.
Geist stomped his small foot with impatience, and I noticed he was wearing elegant, polished boots, their smooth black shape nosing from his pant legs like the shiny heads of tiny seals.
“Mr. Geist, could I have something to lean on?” I asked, finding it difficult to write legibly without the support of a desk, and wishing to distract him, and myself, from Arthur.
“No,” he replied, his shifting eyes still directed over the rickety railing. He removed his glasses, placed them in his breast pocket, and continued to wait for me to complete the forms, his manner uncanny as his appearance.
Now that I was closer to him I could see Geist was younger than I at first thought, perhaps twenty years Pike’s junior, in his late forties. He was an unfinished version, a poor copy, of the masterful Pike, yet equally a creature from another time. Every feature was pallid. His hair was white and fleecy, the sheepish outcome of his soft face. His clothes were not as fastidiously kept as his boots, his trousers slightly frayed along the pockets. I completed the forms and handed them back to him.
“You will begin work tomorrow morning at nine,” he instructed without seeming to actually address me, a tactic he perhaps learned from Pike.
“You will finish for the day at six. Your responsibilities at the Arcade will, for the time being, be that of a floater. This means you do not belong in a specific section, as you have no expertise, but will float between tasks that are assigned to you. Do not concern yourself with assisting customers, you will only frustrate them with your ignorance.”
“I have worked in a bookstore before, Mr. Geist,” I said, defensively.
He replaced his glasses, lodging them in the wrinkles of his forehead and frowning to keep them in place—or frowning because he thought me impudent. He leaned in toward my face, and his nostrils twitched as he appeared to take in my scent.
“Not in this one, Miss Savage,” he said. “Please do not interrupt. You will receive a salary of seventy dollars per week. There are no advances on wages. Do you have any questions?”
“No,” I said, afraid to lose the opportunity.
“Good. There is one more condition of employment you must understand.” Geist’s pink ears shifted back delicately. “George Pike will not tolerate the theft of money or books. Immediate termination of employment will result if theft is suspected.” This last admonition was said in an emphatic whisper.
Later, I saw the statement printed in placard capitals on a sign in the women’s bathroom, and again over the clock all employees punched when the day began and ended. Another sign was located directly in the line of vision on the wall in front of the staircase that descended to the cavernous basement. Reading these signs was like being regularly rebuked, and so they paradoxically served to remind patrons and staff alike that theft was in some sense assumed.
George Pike himself called to me as, newly hired, I passed his platform on my way out.
“George Pike will not tolerate the theft of money or books!” he cried, characteristically speaking of himself in the third person.
Theft was a problem, as I would discover. The Arcade was regularly scouted by shoplifters; but more seriously, there had been several scandals involving ludicrously overpriced volumes whose provenance had been fictitiously embellished, resulting in what Pike defended as imaginative pricing. Scandals only increased the number of customers, both sellers and buyers. In other words, theft ran both ways at the Arcade.
“Why you stopped saying hello to me?” the dark lady of the front desk asked loudly when I returned to the Martha Washington. She had taken the wires attached to the television from her ears, and I could hear a tinny whining, the sound of cartoons speaking cartoon language.
“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to be pleasant. “But I stopped saying hello to you because you didn’t respond. I just gave up.”
“Don’t give up!” she said, enigmatically. “You just got here. That’s what can happen in New York. You give up. I know. I come to this country from Argentina. My brother, he own this hotel. My name is Lillian. Lillian La Paco. Still say hello, miss. You the only one who does.”
“All right, Lillian,” I promised. “I’m Rosemary,” and for the second time that day I stuck out my hand, only this time it was taken.
“Rosemary Savage,” I told her as we shook hands. “Nice to meet you, Lillian, and I’ll still say hello. I’m certainly not about to give up. I just got a job. My first proper job ever.”
“Ah,” Lillian said wisely. “Then you begin!”
“Yes,” I nodded, pleased with her pronouncement. “Yes, now it all begins.”
I went to my room at the end of the corridor and locked the door. I’d bought a pound of cherries from a street vendor to celebrate my employment, and I sat on the single bed savoring them. I felt optimistic; felt breath coming back into my flattened-out self.
Now that I had work, surely someone would notice if I died tragically at eighteen, having, say, choked to death on a cherrystone I might have neglected to spit out. I could stop fantasizing about what terrible things might befall me and write home to Chaps, reassuring her and myself. I could stop searching the streets for a sign. I had already found more than I could have imagined.
I pulled the Huon box from its silk scarf and recounted what had happened that day: how strange Pike was but how commanding; how bizarre Geist, and how I was already sure he disliked me; Arthur sitting with his nudes in the art section like a great obscene baby.
I missed Mother with an ache that could only be managed by a sort of separation from ache. A pain so deep that I came to observe its presence at a slant, sensing it crouched, and off to one side. If I could contain the pain in something like a transparent globe, it wouldn’t overwhelm me. If I didn’t look at it in its dark entirety, I could manage. Speaking to her helped. Chaps had told me I must give sorrow words.
I kissed the smooth Tasmanian heartwood, set it aside, and sat back against the pillows to relish more cherries. I spat a stone across the room, aiming at the metal bucket that served as a garbage bin, and heard a satisfying ping as it hit home.
“This is the beginning,” I told Mother. “Don’t you worry and I won’t either.”
I had a job to go to, and was expected at nine. They would know Rosemary Savage there, and notice me gone if I happened to disappear. I was an inhabitant of a great, perhaps the greatest, city. And what was more, I would always have books to read.
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