The Bookseller

by Cynthia Swanson

  I sigh and place the magazine on the seat next to me. I can’t concentrate on it anyway; perhaps the next passerby will get more out of it than I can.

  I pull a postcard from my handbag. It shows an aerial view of Honolulu, a range of high-rise hotels on the beach, one taller than the next, like the rows of tall books Frieda and I keep on a bottom shelf in the shop—the art and travel books, those too big for the regular stacks.

  This card is the last one I will receive. My mother says as much.

  Dearest Kitty,

  This is the last time I will write to you from here. We are packing to leave, and we board the overnight flight on Wednesday evening. I must say I am a bit apprehensive about flying. Who knows what all those Communists are doing these days, and where they are? Who is to say they are not in some ship in the Pacific, just waiting for us? Your father says the idea of the Russians shooting a plane out of the sky, especially one full of tourists, is preposterous. I suspect he’s right.

  What gloomy thoughts! I hope that by the time you see me, I will be all smiles again. Certainly I will—how could it be otherwise, when I will be seeing my girl after much too long a separation?

  All my love,

  Mother

  I read and reread the card until finally I hear an announcement that the Los Angeles flight is landing. I rush to Gate 18.

  Eagerly, I stand by the window at the gate as the airplane taxis. I can see my parents as they descend the stairs from the airplane and walk across the tarmac. I jump up and down and wave through the big pane windows. Mother sees me and waves back. She is wearing her navy blue coat and matching hat, which she holds against her head in the wind.

  “Kitty!” My mother’s hug, after she comes through the doorway, is exuberant. I hold her tightly, breathing in her perfume—Chanel No. 5, which she’s worn for as long as I can remember. I wonder if she still feels that rush of warmth when she holds me that I feel when I hold Mitch and Missy. (Who knows how it would feel to hold Michael? Or if I will ever get an opportunity to hold him at all?) I wonder, as my mother and I cling to each other, if holding one’s child is always so warm, so powerful—even when one’s child is grown. I suspect it is.

  Reluctantly, when I sense that people will probably start staring at us soon, I release her. Then it’s my father’s turn. He’s wearing a suit and tie for the special occasion of airline travel, his clothing a bit rumpled now after the overnight ride from Honolulu and the layover in Los Angeles. His buttons press against me as we hug. His shoulders, curved from years of hunching over an assembly-line table, straighten gallantly in my embrace.

  We all three hold hands, me in the middle, as we make our way to the baggage claim—childish, I know, but I am more than overjoyed to see them. I’ve never been as elated in my life to see someone as I am to see my parents at the airport this afternoon.

  Suddenly, I wonder if the self in my other life missed my parents this much when they went on this trip. For that matter, did they go on the trip at all? Surely, they must have; it’s something they’ve talked about doing for years, ever since Uncle Stanley and Aunt May moved to Honolulu more than a decade ago.

  “Well, that long delay was unexpected,” my mother says as we wait for the luggage to come around on the carousel. “But worse things have happened. Did you hear about Tuesday’s Honolulu flight?” She shakes her head. “Not the Russians, but Mother Nature can be equally as dreadful. I almost didn’t get on the plane when we heard the news, but your father reminded me that it’s a long boat trip from Hawaii to the mainland.” Her eyes light up, and she changes the subject. “Tom, there’s my train case—don’t let it get away.” My father reaches for it, and then both of their suitcases come round, one right after the other. “Lucky!” my mother says triumphantly, as my father heaves the large bag. I take the midsize one, and she clutches her train case.

  We go outside to hail a taxicab. “We didn’t plan to get here so late.” My mother glances at her watch. “Goodness, it’s nearly suppertime.”

  “It’s all right. I expected to have supper with you.” Noticing how tightly I’m gripping her hand, I try to relax, loosening my grasp but not letting go. “But I thought you’d get a few hours to unwind first.” I shrug as a cab pulls up in front of us.

  “I hope you didn’t plan to cook.” My father hands his bag to the cabbie and holds the taxi’s back door open for my mother and me. “Because I want nothing more than a steak at the Buckhorn.” His look is wistful. “You can get all the mai tais you want, but you can’t get a good steak to save your life in Hawaii.”

  Unlike my mother, with her frequent postcards, my father wrote to me only twice from Honolulu. What his communication lacked in quantity, it made up for in quality; he wrote letters, not postcards, pages and pages describing his favorite holes at the golf course, the hike he took with Uncle Stanley up a mountain called Diamond Head, the surf on the beaches on the north side of the island. And the food; he told me all about the meals he’d been eating, the fruit salads and grilled fish and sweet rolls. In both letters he remarked that while the Hawaiian food was “interesting,” he missed eating “good old-fashioned red meat.”

  Now, however, at his mention of going out to eat, I let my face fall slightly. “I have a delicious home-cooked supper planned.”

  “Do you now? What a shame.” He shakes his head dramatically as he climbs in after my mother and me, a little smile playing around his lips.

  I grin, too. I can’t get a joke over on him; he knows me too well. “Now, Dad, you didn’t let me finish,” I chide him affably. “My supper is planned for tomorrow night.”

  He takes my hand. “That’s my girl.” Looking up, he informs the driver to take us to his favorite steak house.

  The Buckhorn Exchange is the oldest restaurant in Denver, dating back to 1893. It is also one of the most famous; there was an article about it in Life magazine some years ago. I remember my father proudly showing me the glossy magazine page and saying, “Look, honey, Denver is on the map now!” The editors, I suppose, took note of the Buckhorn’s long history, its delicious steak dinners, and its Western ambience. In its small, darkly paneled rooms, old photographs line the walls, and saddles and horse memorabilia are spread about. There are rustic tables and chairs for dining, and comfy velvet sofas in the lounge. It’s kitschy, but my dad loves it. “Ah, home!” he says as we are seated at a table in the back room. “Back in the wonderful, wild, wild West.”

  Supper is marvelous. We linger over cocktails, followed by two bottles of wine—much of which, I am ashamed to admit, I drink myself. My parents are alive with stories of Hawaii. “It was exceptionally beautiful,” my mother says, her voice hushed, as if describing a cathedral. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Flowers as big as dinner plates. Palm trees everywhere. Brand-new, high-rise hotels cropping up everywhere in Waikiki. And the ocean . . . you should have seen how blue the ocean was . . .”

  “And the girls,” my father says. “You should have seen how gorgeous the girls were.”

  “Tom!” Lightly, my mother punches his upper arm.

  He’s teasing, of course. He’s never had eyes for anyone but her. Once, when he and I were watching a beauty pageant together on television, he told me that if Miss America walked into the room and offered to run away with him, he’d send her packing. “Even if she had legs to the moon, she couldn’t hold a candle to your mother,” he said, his eyes luminous. “Not when your mother was her age, and not now, either.”

  I remember feeling a bit melancholy, wondering if anyone would ever adore me like that.

  After dinner, my father has the hostess call another cab to take us home. The wine has gone to my head; vaguely, I hear my dad saying something like, “We’re living it up—this is the last night of vacation!” I climb into the backseat of the taxicab, sitting in the middle. How safe I feel, snuggled between my parents, and how easy it is to nod off in the secure little haven that they create for me.

  Chapter 25

  A
nd then I’m singing to my children.

  Lay thee down now and rest . . . May thy slumber be blessed . . .

  I’m in the boys’ room, a space I haven’t previously occupied in the dreams. The room is, predictably, painted blue, somewhere between the hue of the sky and that of a king’s royal robe. Side by side are twin beds, with blue-and-red-plaid coverlets on them and matching shams that are currently on the floor, as the boys are in their beds and ready for sleep. Above Mitch’s bed are several small framed prints of ships and trains—no doubt painstakingly selected by yours truly—as well as an assortment of crayon sketches on the same subjects, most likely done in his own hand, taped beside the framed works. His bedside table is piled with picture books; his bed is crammed with stuffed animals of every sort. In the center of the bed, Mitch sits in rumpled splendor, his covers already disheveled despite the fact that he has likely just been tucked in.

  Michael’s side of the room holds nothing. No artwork on the walls, no toys on the bed, no books to look at if he wakes early and can’t get back to sleep. The only thing on his bedside table is his eyeglasses case. He is sitting up very straight in bed, his pillow carefully arranged behind him, his covers neatly pulled up on his lap. His eyes without his glasses are open but unfocused, and he is swaying slightly, silently.

  Both boys wear forest-green flannel pajamas with contrasting blue piping. But other than their attire and their vaguely similar coloring and features, they could not be more different.

  I am seated in a rocking chair between the beds. I have a sudden flashback to this chair in this same room, same position, but between two cribs, when the boys were toddlers. Even then, the contrast was stark. Mitch would stand up in his crib, leaping gleefully about, until I was terrified that he would fling himself out of the crib in his excitement. His crib then, like his bed now, was filled with stuffed animals. Some of the same ones, no doubt.

  Michael, on the other hand, would position himself quietly in the middle of his pristine, animal-less crib, not moving a muscle, while I sat in the rocking chair and read a bedtime story. Michael would not look at me, nor demand to see each page as I turned it, the way Mitch did. He’d stare at his feet in their fuzzy footed pajamas, betraying no emotion toward the story, Mitch, or me.

  Now I rock slowly, humming Brahms’s Lullaby. Mitch lies back under his covers and closes his eyes. In the light from the small, dimly lit lamp on the dresser his mop of blond curls gives off a faint sheen. His hair looks slightly damp, as if he has just been bathed, and I can’t resist leaning in to sniff the Johnson’s Baby Shampoo smell of his clean head. He smiles and opens his eyes, meeting mine. I love you, he mouths.

  I love you, too, I mouth back. Mitch closes his eyes again and snuggles into his blankets.

  I turn toward Michael. He is still sitting upright; his eyes remain wide open. I notice, for the first time, that his eyes are as strikingly blue as everyone else’s in the family. It must be the glasses, I decide, that make them appear hazy most of the time.

  I’m afraid to suggest that he lie down, because I’m quite sure that whatever he is doing is part of his nighttime routine. I don’t want to touch him, for fear of setting him off, but I feel like I ought to do something. I settle for pressing my palm against his bedspread, far from his body. “Sleep well, Michael,” I say quietly. “I love you.”

  He doesn’t move a muscle, or look my way. I turn off the lamp, leaving the room lit only by a nightlight plugged into an outlet near the rocking chair. Going out silently, I shut the door behind me.

  I meet Lars in the hallway, coming out of Missy’s room. “Sleeping?” he asks me.

  “Close.” Even though neither boy is asleep, I have an instinct that where they are right now is where each of them needs to be to get himself to sleep. I nod toward Missy’s door. “How about her?”

  “Fast asleep.” He smiles. “That bike riding takes it out of her.”

  “She’s getting good, though. They both are.”

  Lars does not respond, and I know what he’s thinking, because I’m thinking the same thing. About how I—mindlessly—used the word both. Because two of them are “getting good.” And one of them might never “get good.”

  “Want a drink?” Lars asks, as we make our way down the stairs.

  “Now you’re talking.”

  He goes to his office to pour, and I wait in the living room, sitting on the sofa. Like so many things in this house, the sofa is sleek and modern, new. Its fabric is a nubby beige tweed with a faint striped pattern. To liven it up, there are throw pillows in solid colors of orange, yellow, and cobalt blue.

  Lars returns with two glasses of Scotch on the rocks. Handing one to me, he sits beside me and drapes his arm over my shoulder, massaging it gently. “You look so tired, love,” he says, and the concern in his voice makes me tremble.

  I close my eyes. “I’m exhausted,” I admit. “I’m overwhelmed.” It seems ridiculous to say such a thing in a dream, but since it’s true, I may as well say it.

  “Well, it’s understandable,” he says. “There’s not much that’s more stressful than this.”

  I shake my head. “I guess I don’t know . . . quite what you mean.”

  He sips his drink. “I felt the same way, you know,” he says. “When it happened to me.” His voice lowers. “Mine weren’t together, of course, but . . . you know that mine were only days apart.”

  I have absolutely no idea what we’re talking about, so I just nod and wait for him to go on.

  “He couldn’t live without her,” Lars says, his voice breaking. “He couldn’t go on without her. So he . . .” His lips tighten. “So he . . . didn’t.”

  I put my hand on his. “I know.” Of course, I don’t know, but I want him to keep talking. “Does it help . . .” I hesitate. “To talk about it?”

  He looks up. “It helps to talk to you about it,” he says. “It always has.” He swirls the ice in his glass. “You were so understanding and so . . . not shocked, when I first told you how . . . how horrendously things had gone for my family. Horrendously. There’s really no other word for it—and because of that, I didn’t share this story with many people in those days. But I knew from the start, when we first met, that I could tell you about it, and it would be okay.” He smiles, but his expression is forlorn. “It made me feel like I could tell you anything.”

  “You can,” I say softly.

  “She was so sick,” he goes on, entwining his fingers in mine. “Heart palpitations, coughing, chest pains. You know, she was probably the same as me, probably had an irregular heartbeat like I do, but back then, such things were not diagnosed. Still . . . it exhausted her, sucked the life out of her. Every bit of life she’d ever had. And she had had life in her, even though hers wasn’t easy. She worked so hard, they both did, and . . .”

  I squeeze his hand.

  “I was just glad she didn’t suffer long,” he says. “You know, in those days and in those times especially, and where we were—rural Iowa, of all places, and we hardly knew a soul and could barely speak English—well, she’d been having chest pains and she should have seen a doctor, but it’s not like her treatment options were plentiful.” He finishes his drink and sucks on an ice cube. “At least it was over quickly for her. There was nothing we could do for her.” He shakes his head. “My mother’s life was shorter than it should have been,” he says grimly. “Short and not so sweet.” He stands up. “I’m going for another,” he announces, holding up his glass. “You want one?”

  I hold out my glass to him, and he takes it and strides down the hall.

  When he returns with fresh drinks, I’m worried that he’ll let the story go and turn to some other subject. But he continues. “She’d only been buried a few days when he decided he couldn’t bear it,” Lars says. “Took a shotgun and went out to the shed. Linnea found him.” He takes a long swallow of Scotch. “Linnea was only sixteen years old, still just a girl. No one, no child, should have to face something like that.”


  Oh, no. Linnea had hinted at some of this, but she hadn’t told me any of these grim details.

  “What did you do?” I know I shouldn’t ask this question; certainly, I would already know what he did. I am hoping he is so involved in his story that he won’t register my asking.

  “I did what any big brother would do,” he says. “I took charge. We buried our father next to our mother. We sold everything we had, which wasn’t much. We got on a train going west, because neither of us ever wanted to see Iowa again.”

  “And ended up here.”

  “And ended up here. It was early morning when our train arrived at Union Station. We had only bought tickets as far as Denver. We would have had to buy another ticket and change trains if we wanted to go farther west. We didn’t, though. We got off the train and looked around; we saw the mountains in the distance and the sun shining on the buildings of the city just as it was waking up. And we looked at each other and decided that here was as good as anywhere else.”

  “You’ve come a long way since then,” I say. “And so has Linnea.”

  Lars nods. “We’ve been lucky,” he says. “Lucky that, after all the dreary, desperate jobs she and I took just trying to scrape out a living, Linnea found work in a bakery. Lucky that Steven walked into that bakery one day and liked who he saw behind the counter enough to return again and again, just to see her. And lucky that Linnea found Steven as appealing as he found her.”

  Oh, now I remember that story. I remember Linnea telling it to me, her eyes shining with a spark she still felt for her husband, even after all those years together. She told me about it the first time she gave me a wash-and-set, back in October 1954. Not in my real life, not when I’m Kitty. No, it was here, when I was Katharyn. It was the first time I went to see her at Beauty on Broadway. Lars was still in the hospital then, recovering from his heart attack.

  “And it was Steven who convinced you that you could do better than being a streetcar repairman for the rest of your life,” I say now to Lars. “Steven helped you apply for college.” I can feel my heart quicken, remembering this. Knowing this.