The Bookseller

by Cynthia Swanson

  I make my way down the hallway and enter the room at the end of it. It is indeed an office, large and sunny, with a picture window on its east wall and a drafting board positioned beneath the window. Pencils and drafting tools overflow a metal tray attached to the board’s right side. In the corner of the room is a small liquor cart, with a row of clean tumblers, several shot glasses, and an array of bottles—some clear glass, some green, all about half full—arranged neatly on its surface. The bottles and cut-glass barware catch rays of sunlight coming through the window.

  A cherry desk sits in the middle of the room, with a telephone in one corner, two photograph frames in the opposite corner, and a blotter in the middle. There is a business-card holder next to the telephone, holding a stack of cards. I pick up the top one. “Andersson Architecture and Design. Lars Andersson, President,” it reads. “Commercial, Business, Residential.” I smile, remembering what Lars said years ago about planning more business-related structures than homes; I wonder if the third descriptor on the card is merely wishful thinking. The card shows an address in downtown Denver and a telephone number. I memorize the number, and then tuck the card in the pocket of my bathrobe, absurdly thinking that perhaps this small slip of paper will make its way back with me to the real world, where I might be able to dig deeper into the identity of Lars Andersson.

  I lean over and study the picture frames. The first shows an eight-by-ten photograph of me. If it were real, and not simply a prop in my dreams, it would have been taken within the past few years; I can see the familiar lines around my mouth and eyes, the ones I see every morning in the mirror in the real world. I note a slight restraint in my face, as if I were hoping that I could smile sufficiently to look warm and friendly in the photograph, but not so much that the lines would noticeably deepen. My hair is smoothed down and curled under. I am wearing an indigo dress with a boatneck, pearls, and a matching pillbox hat. Very Jackie Kennedy, I think; in this dream world, clearly I am modeling myself after the First Lady. I let out a small laugh. I do like the Kennedys, and I did vote for Jack. I still believe firmly in his capabilities, despite the fears everyone has lately that he has no idea how to handle the Communists, and we’re all going to be blown to bits before the year is out. Regardless of my admiration for her husband, however, it would be out of the question in my real life for anyone to confuse me with Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy.

  I pick up the other photograph frame. It is intriguing for the simple reason that it contains no pictures. Just three separate slots where pictures could be placed. Were these slots for photographs of the children? If so, why did Lars take the photographs out? And why three instead of two?

  “Mama!” I hear Mitch shuffle down the hallway, and then he appears in the office doorway. “We’ve been waiting prayers for you,” he says accusingly. “Daddy said to bring you this, and to carry it carefully.” He holds out a mug that is three-quarters filled with coffee—almost black, as I like it, with just the slightest touch of cream. I smile and take a sip, enjoying the faintly sweet taste. Evidently, Lars also knows that I like one lump in my coffee.

  “I’m sorry, darling. Tell Daddy I’ll be right there.”

  “Okay.” He takes off down the hall.

  Chapter 4

  I wake again to the yellow walls, to Aslan, to home.

  “Lovely dream,” I tell him. “But I’m not sure where you were, buddy.” I scratch behind his ears. “You know, you may be there,” I speculate. “It seems to be a rather large house. Maybe you’re hiding in the basement.”

  I smile as I rise and begin my day.

  Midmorning at the shop, while Frieda is in the ladies’ room, I try calling the telephone number I’d memorized, the one on Lars’s business card. I dial it furtively, feeling like a child sneaking a cookie from the jar while her mother is out of the kitchen. I have no idea what I’ll do if someone comes on the line. But an operator’s recorded voice tells me the number is not in service.

  Next, I try Lars’s residential number from eight years ago, the number he provided in his letter. Calling this number is a long shot—but it’s worth a try, if for no other reason than to know whether the number is still in use. If it is, I expect I’ll just hear the telephone ring indefinitely; the chances of him answering are slim, this time of day. Surely he would be at work at this hour on a weekday. Nevertheless, my palms are sweaty, dialing this number for only the second time in my life. After I have dialed, I place my left index finger on the telephone hook, ready to hang up immediately if there is an answer. But I hear the same recorded voice, telling me this number is not in service either.

  Quickly I pull the telephone book from the shelf under our checkout counter. I scan the business listings, looking for architectural firms with the name Andersson in them. There are none—not even an Anderson, the more typical spelling. And certainly no Anderssons.

  I try the residential listings. Nothing for Lars Andersson or L. Andersson. Imagining myself as Mrs. Andersson, I even look for Katharyn Andersson and K. Andersson, thinking that perhaps our telephone is in my name. But no such luck.

  I cannot think what else to do. My fingers drift into my dress pocket, finding my mother’s daily postcard. I don’t know why, but today I decided to carry my mother’s words with me throughout the day, instead of filing them, as I have been up until now. I don’t need to glance at the card to remember the picture on the front—a smiling hula dancer, her dark hair held back from her face by a gardenia crown, her grass skirt covering her long legs. Mother’s words on the back—those, too, I have memorized.

  Dearest Kitty,

  I have been thinking about you all day today. I hope you are well, darling. You know, Aunt May keeps asking about you—whether you are happy, whether you have everything you want in life. And I tell her that of course you do. Of course. I tell her that if there was anything my Kitty wanted that she didn’t have, she’d find a way to make it so. I believe this, darling. You can do anything you want. You can be anything you want to be.

  I hope you know what I am trying to tell you.

  Love,

  Mother

  “What, Mother?” I whisper aloud to the quiet shop. “What are you trying to tell me?”

  Is there somewhere else I should look? Some clue I am missing?

  I consider my personal ad, think about the newspaper in the fall of 1954. If I saw the paper from those days, would it give me a clue?

  I need to do some research,” I tell Frieda when we have our coffee break at ten o’clock. It’s not truly a break, because we don’t close the shop. If anyone came in, of course we would attend to the customer. But if no one is there, we settle on our stools behind the counter, sip our coffee, and have a chat. Sometimes we talk about business, sometimes about what we’re reading. Sometimes we fall into idle Pearl Street gossip—who we saw coming out of the Vogue with whom the night before, what other shopkeepers are doing to attract business to our little street, how unkind it was of the city to take our streetcar line away.

  Frieda blows on her hot coffee. “What kind of research?” she asks.

  I feel myself blushing. “It’s about a person. A . . . man.” It sounds so foolish, saying it.

  Frieda has a gleam in her eye. “You’re holding out on me! Did you meet someone new? Where? When?”

  I shake my head. “It’s nothing like that.”

  Desperately, I want to confide in her. For over twenty years, I’ve kept almost no secrets from her. But besides being silly, this just seems so . . . personal. Like it belongs to no one else. Just me.

  “It’s just someone I heard about,” I tell her. And then, hastily, I lie. “An author. He writes historical books.”

  I know this will detach her interest immediately. Frieda can’t stand history. In the eleventh grade, despite my efforts to tutor her, she nearly flunked America: Columbus through the Great War—without a doubt the easiest course I’ve ever taken in my life. But Frieda is all about the moment.

  “Anyway, I’m goin
g to take an early lunch and go to the library downtown, if it’s okay with you.” I drain my coffee cup and rise from my stool.

  She waves her hand. “Certainly. I have nowhere else I need to be.”

  I walk over to Broadway and take the bus downtown, to the big central library that just opened a few years ago. In the research section, I ask the librarian to set me up with microfilm of the Denver Post from October 1954. It takes a while for her to find what I am looking for and set it up on a microfilm machine for me. I wait, browsing the stacks, thinking that the library is both the bookstore’s enemy and our friend. They have everything here—why would anyone ever need to buy a book? On the other hand, there is nothing like the library to awaken a reader to the endless possibilities of the written word.

  Finally, I am settled in with the microfilm I requested. I turn the hand crank gradually, scanning the pages until I reach the personal advertisements in the back of each day’s edition.

  Yes, my ad is there. I ran it for a week, from Sunday, October 10, until the following Saturday.

  I smile ruefully, reading about my younger self, the self who still had hope for that part of her life.

  I wonder what that self would think of me now. Would she be surprised that eight years have passed, and I have not changed all that much? That I still bop around my house listening to popular music in the morning? That I still root around in my closet for something to wear and leave a mess of clothes all over my bedroom, like a teenager? Would my thirty-year-old self tsk-tsk me about that? Would she be surprised that her personal ad got her nowhere, did not change her life one iota?

  I don’t know. But I do know that nothing in my personal ad gives me any idea what happened to Lars Andersson.

  I browse the remaining pages slowly. At first I feel discouraged by the lack of information in my ad, but after a while, I get immersed in that world that was. Hurricane Hazel smashed into North Carolina on the fifteenth, working its way up the coast and taking down homes and businesses in its wake. In England, dockworkers were on strike. On the front page of the Saturday, October 16 edition is a photograph of a woman with a little boy on her lap. Tragically, the boy was killed by a self-inflicted wound from a handgun left unattended in the home. The caption informs me that the photograph is of the boy with his mother, taken some months before the accident. A prizefight, reportedly “the greatest match ever offered in Denver” took place on October 19 at City Auditorium Arena. The Trinidad Junior College homecoming queen and her attendants are shown in a photograph on October 20. They look carefree, joyous, and very, very young.

  And then, in the October 21 edition, I come across the death notices.

  Andersson, Lars, 34, of Lincoln St., Englewood. Cause of death: cardiac arrest. Survived by sister Linnea (Steven) Hershall of Denver, one niece and one nephew. Preceded in death by his parents, Jon and Agnes Andersson. Services Friday at ten o’clock at Bethany Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Church, Denver. Interment immediately following at Fairmount Cemetery.

  Chapter 5

  So. There you go. Now I understand what happened. Lars Andersson did not stand me up, after all. Lars Andersson could not have stood me up, because he was not alive to do so.

  Walking out of the library and slowly heading for the bus stop, I am not sure what to do with this information. I feel a terrible sadness for this man I never met—this man I’ve now met in my dreams. And I have to smile at my ridiculous imagination—at my crazy mind, which has come up with an entire dream life for myself with this person.

  This man who, purely by a stroke of bad luck, I never got to see face-to-face.

  I am almost eager to go to bed that night, curious what might happen and what I might dream. Laughing at myself, I pour a generous shot of whiskey just before bedtime, thinking it might put me to sleep sooner.

  To my surprise, my dream places me not in the split-level house, but in a darkened restaurant. The tablecloths are checkered; the walls and linoleum floor are a deep red. The restaurant is crowded, and I can see several couples waiting for tables near the hostess stand. Judging by the hustle and bustle of the place, I think it must be a weekend evening.

  To my right is Lars, in a suit and tie, looking respectable and happy, his left arm draped possessively around my bare shoulder. I am wearing a sleeveless forest-green dress made of broad silk; I can feel its slipperiness on my back and across my ribs. We are seated at a booth, facing the restaurant’s entrance. The other side of the booth is empty.

  “Welcome back,” Lars says, his bright eyes gazing into mine. “You seemed to go off to dreamland there for a few minutes.”

  I smile awkwardly. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I must have been daydreaming.”

  “Imagining a more carefree lifestyle for yourself?” He grins.

  My smile fades. “What makes you say that?”

  He shrugs. “I don’t know. Doesn’t everyone do that sometimes?” His smile is wistful. “Especially you and me.”

  What in heaven’s name does that mean?

  From speakers somewhere above our heads, there is music playing. The clear, lusty voice is unmistakable—it’s Patsy Cline, one of my all-time favorite vocalists. Despite the fact that most of her songs are about heartbreak—or maybe it’s because of that—I love Patsy’s cadence, her musical approach. I love the way that you know, just through her songs, that whatever the reason for your sadness, Patsy would sympathize with you. If you could sit down with her over a drink in some smoky cowboy bar and talk about it, Patsy Cline would assure you that it—whatever it is—would be all right. She would pass a handkerchief to you and order another round. She’d tell you she’d been through the same thing, and worse, and she’d come out the better for it.

  I have all of Patsy Cline’s records. But I’ve never heard this twangy, melancholy song before. Like so much of her music, it’s about breaking up. She’s singing about how she would rather know now, would rather just get it over with, if her lover is thinking about leaving her.

  If you got leavin’ on your mind . . . Tell me now, get it over . . .

  “Is this a new song?” I ask Lars abruptly.

  “What, love?”

  “This song.” I frown. “This song that’s playing—is this a new release of Patsy Cline’s?”

  He smiles. “I believe it is. In fact, I think it was you who told me that this is a new release—just a day or two ago, when it came on the radio at home.”

  Is that so? I smile inwardly. Now my brain is making up an imaginary hit parade. How very talented of it.

  Lars looks toward the doorway, then glances at his watch. “They should be here any minute,” he says. “Bill is generally quite prompt.” He shrugs again. “I don’t know anything about the wife, though.”

  Unsure how to respond to this, I simply nod.

  Lars stirs his drink, then takes a sip. “Ah. Here they are.”

  He stands as a couple approaches our table. They are about our age, or perhaps a bit younger. The woman has jet-black hair, sleekly pulled back with a rhinestone headband. She wears a furtrimmed cape. Her companion is tall, much taller than Lars; this is apparent when Lars stands up to greet them. The man has that square-faced jock look about him, the type who was probably a football player in high school. The type who always wanted to go out with Frieda, though she generally turned them down. Frieda has never been much for dating anyone, actually, no matter how good-looking a fellow is. Sometimes it seems like she tries to force herself to get out there—like when she contacted some of my personal-ad castoffs all those years ago. But in general, dating is not a big thing in Frieda’s life.

  “Bill, meet my wife, Katharyn.” Lars turns toward me. I extend a hand over the table—it would be awkward to try to rise from the booth—and Bill takes it and clasps it tightly.

  “And this is my wife, Judy,” he says, releasing my hand. Judy and I exchange pleasantries. I am still trying to figure out who they are. Presumably business associates. Perhaps clients? I shake my head. This would be
easier if I knew such details, but since it’s a dream, I suppose it hardly matters what I say or do.

  After we’ve placed Bill and Judy’s drink order, and everyone’s food order, we settle down to chat. I learn that Bill is indeed a client. He wants to build an office building downtown, but it will be more than that; the idea is that it will house offices on the upper floors and small shops on the lower floor. This immediately piques my interest, especially the part about the small shops. Ought Frieda and I to be considering downtown? It has never come up in our what-to-do-next discussions. I wonder what the rent would be on such a place. Perhaps, if the men keep talking, I will be able to find out.

  “It’s a brilliant move,” Lars is saying approvingly. “It just makes business sense. We design it slick, we design it modern, but even so, we ensure that it’s accessible on a smaller scale. We make it appealing to both the businessman and the passerby—something for everybody, as it were. You’ll be at full capacity before you even open your doors, Bill. You’ll be turning away tenants in droves. You’ll see.”

  Bill sips his Scotch. “I absolutely agree, Lars.” He sets down his glass. “And I must say that, after too many discussions with architects who seem to be living in the Victorian age, I appreciate talking with someone who understands foresight as much as I do.”

  Under the table, Lars squeezes my hand in triumph. I squeeze his back.

  Judy slices herself a piece of bread and nibbles it without butter. “Enough business, boys,” she says. “You can talk about that any time.” She smiles at me, and I automatically smile back, although I am slightly ticked off. I actually wanted to hear more about the new building.

  “Judy, you are one hundred percent correct.” Lars nods at her. He’s no dummy; he must realize that to get the husband’s business, he also needs to chitchat with the wife. “Let’s change the subject,” he suggests.

  “Let’s,” Judy agrees gaily. “I want to learn about Katharyn. Where did you two meet?”