The Return of the Black Widowers

by Isaac Asimov

  He turned to Manfred and said, "Mr. Manfred, how do you justify your existence?"

  Manfred did not seem surprised at the question. He said, "If there's one person who shouldn't have trouble justifying his existence, it is someone whose business it is to purvey books. Books, gentlemen, hold within them the gathered wisdom of humanity, the collected knowledge of the world's thinkers, the amusement and excitement built up by the imaginations of brilliant people. Books contain humor, beauty, wit, emotion, thought, and, indeed, all of life. Life without books is empty."

  Halsted muttered, "These days there's movies and TV."

  Manfred heard. He said, with a smile, "I watch television also. Sometimes I will see a movie. Just because I appreciate a meal such as the one we have just had doesn't mean that I may not eat a hot dog now and then. But I don't confuse the two. No matter how splendid movies and television may seem, they are junk food for the mind, amusement for the illiterate, a bit of diversion for those who are momentarily in the mood for nothing more."

  "Unfortunately," said Avalon, looking solemn, "Hollywood is where the money is." "Of course," said Manfred, "but what does that mean? Undoubtedly, a chain of hamburger joints will make more money than a four-star restaurant, but that doesn't convert hamburger to Peking duck."

  "Still," said Rubin, "since we are discussing money, may I ask if you consider yourself a self-made man?"

  Manfred's eyebrows lifted. "That is rather an old-fashioned phrase, is it not?"

  "Right," said Rubin, with a stir of enthusiasm. "I maintained exactly that over the cocktails. It is my opinion that nowadays it is impossible for anyone to be a truly self-made man. There is too much routine government help."

  Manfred shook with silent laughter. "Before the New Deal, that was not so. The government in those days was a highly moral and neutral referee. If a large corporation had an argument with a small employee, the government's job was to see that both sides had only the help they could afford. What could be fairer than that? Of course the rich always won, but that was just a coincidence, and if the poor man didn't see that, the government sent in the National Guard to explain things to him. Those were great days."

  "Nevertheless, the point is that you were poor when you were young, were you not?"

  "Very poor. My parents arrived in the United States from Germany in 1907 and brought me with them. I was three at the time. My father was employed at a tailor shop and made five dollars a week to begin with. I was the only child then, but you can imagine how it improved his economic position when he later had three daughters one after the other. He was a Socialist, and a vocal one, and as soon as he became a citizen he voted for Eugene V. Debs. This made some people, whose views on freedom of speech were strictly limited to freedom of their speech, feel he ought to be deported.

  "My mother helped out by part-time work in between babies. From the age of nine, I delivered papers in the morning before school and had odd jobs after school. Somehow my father managed to accumulate enough money to make a down payment on a small tailor shop of his own, and I worked with him after school. Once I turned sixteen, I didn't have to stay in school anymore, so I quit at once to work in the shop full-time. I never finished high school."

  Rubin said, "You don't sound like an uneducated man."

  "It depends on how you define education. If you are willing to allow the kind of education you pick up for yourself in books, then I'm educated, thanks to old Mr. Lineweaver."

  "This Mr. Lineweaver gave you books?"

  "Only one, actually. But he got me interested in books. In fact, I owe nearly everything to him. I couldn't have gotten my start without him, so that maybe I'm not a self-made man. And yet, he didn't give me anything. I had to work it out for myself, so maybe I am a self-made man. You know, I'm honestly not sure."

  Drake said, "You've got me confused, Mr. Manfred. What was it you had to work out for yourself? A puzzle of some sort?" In a way.

  "Is it a well-known episode in your life?"

  Manfred said, "There was some mention in newspapers at the time, but it was a long time ago and it has been forgotten. Sometimes, though, I wonder how fair the whole thing was. Did I take advantage? I was accused of undue influence and who knows what, but I won out."

  Rubin said, "I'm afraid, Mr. Manfred, I must ask you to tell us the story in detail. Whatever you say will be held completely confidential."

  Manfred said, "So Mr. Gonzalo told me, sir, and I accept that." But, for a moment, Manfred's eyes rested on Henry, who stood, with his usual air of respectful attention, at the sideboard.

  Trumbull caught the glance and said, "Our waiter, whose name is Henry, is a member of the club."

  "In that case," said Manfred, "I will tell you the story. And if you find it dull, you have only yourselves to blame." "But wait," interjected Gonzalo eagerly, "if there's some kind of puzzle or mystery involved, I figure you solved it. Right?"

  "Oh, yes. There is no mystery waiting to be solved." He waved his hands, as though in erasure. "No puzzle."

  "In that case," said Gonzalo, "when you tell the story about Mr. Lineweaver, don't tell us the answer to the puzzle. Let us guess."

  Manfred chuckled. "You won't guess. Not correctly."

  "Good," said Rubin, "please continue with the story, and we will try not to interrupt."

  Manfred said, "The story starts when I was not quite fifteen, just after the end of the war—the first one, World War I. It was Saturday, no school, but I still had papers to deliver, and the last stop on the route was an old mansion. I left the paper in a little hook on the side of the door, and once a week, I rang the bell and a servant came out and gave me the money for the papers and would hand me a quarter as a tip. The general payment was a dime, so I was always grateful to this particular place.

  "Saturday was collection day, so I rang the bell, and this time, for the first time I could remember, out came old Mr. Lineweaver himself. Maybe he just happened to be near the door when I rang the bell. He was about seventy and I thought he was just another servant—I had never seen him before.

  "It was a bitterly cold day in January—1919, it was—and I was inadequately dressed. I wore the only coat I had and it was rather thin. My hands and face were blue and I was shivering. I wasn't particularly sorry for myself, because I had delivered papers on many cold days and that was the way it was, that's all. What could I do about it?

  "Mr. Lineweaver was perturbed, however. He said, 'Come inside, boy. I'll pay you where it's warm.' His air of authority made me realize he was the owner of the house, and that scared me.

  "Then, when he paid me, he gave me a dollar as a tip. I had never heard of a dollar tip. Next he brought me into his library— a large room, with bookshelves from floor to ceiling on every wall, and a balcony with additional books. He had a servant bring me hot cocoa, and he kept me there for almost an hour, asking me questions.

  "I tried to be very polite, but I finally told him I had to go home or my parents would think I was run over. I couldn't call to reassure them, for, in 1919, very few people had telephones.

  "When I came home, my parents were very impressed, especially with the dollar tip, which my father took and put away. It wasn't cruelty on his part; it was merely that there was a common coffer for the earnings of the entire family, and none of us could hold out any of it for themselves. My allowance for the week was exactly zero.

  "The next Saturday, old Mr. Lineweaver was waiting for me. It wasn't nearly as cold as the week before, but he invited me in for hot cocoa again. When he offered me another dollar, I followed my father's instructions and told him that it was too much, and that a quarter would be enough. My father, I'm afraid, had learned from life to distrust unexplained generosity. Mr. Lineweaver laughed and said he had nothing smaller and that I must take it.

  "I suspect he noticed the curious looks I was giving the books, for he asked if I had any books at home. I said my father had a couple, but they were in German. He asked if I went to school and, of course,
I said yes, but that as soon as I was sixteen I would have to quit. He asked if I went to the public library, and I said that I did sometimes, but what with the newspaper delivery and the tailor shop, I didn't really have much chance to do so.

  "’Would you like to look at these books?' he asked, waving his hands toward the walls.

  "'I might get them dirty, Mr. Lineweaver,' I said diffidently, looking at my hands, which were black with newspaper ink, of course.

  "He said, 'I tell you what. On Sundays, when you have no school and the tailor shop is closed, you come here after you've delivered your papers and you can wash your hands and stay in the library as long as you want and read some of those books. Would you like that?'

  " 'Oh, yes,' I said.

  " 'Good,' he said. 'Then you tell your parents you'll be spending the time here.'

  "I did and, for ten years, I was there faithfully every Sunday except when I was sick or he was away. Eventually, when I grew older, I came by on Saturday afternoons, and even on a few weekday evenings.

  "He had a wonderfully wide variety of books for me to choose from, and was strong on British fiction. I read Thackeray and Trollope and puzzled over Tristram Shandy. I remember being fascinated by Warren's Ten Thousand a Year. It was a mixture of humor and incredibly reactionary politics. The antihero was Tittlebat Titmouse and there was a very effective villain named Oily Gammon. I eventually learned, from my reading, that 'gammon' was a slang term equivalent to our present slang term of 'boloney.'

  "I read Pope, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Coleridge— didn't like Wordsworth or Browning, for some reason. There was lots of Shakespeare, naturally. I wasn't strong on nonfiction, but I remember trying to read Darwin's Origin of Species and not getting very far. There was a new book, Outline of History by H. G. Wells, that fascinated me. I read some American writers, too. Mark Twain and Hawthorne, but I couldn't stay with Moby Dick. I read some of Walter Scott. All this was spread out over years, to be sure."

  Trumbull, at this point, stirred in his seat and said, "Mr. Manfred, I take it this Lineweaver was a wealthy man."

  "Quite well-to-do, yes."

  "Did he have children?"

  "Two grown sons. A grown daughter."

  "Grandchildren?"

  "Several."

  "Why did he make a surrogate son of you, then?"

  Manfred considered. "I don't know. The house was empty except for servants. He was a widower. His children and grandchildren rarely came to visit. He was lonely, I suppose, and liked having a youngster in the house, now and then. I'm under the impression he thought I was bright and he certainly enjoyed my pleasure in the books. He would occasionally sit and talk to me about them, ask me what I thought of this book or that, and suggest new ones I might read."

  "Did he ever give you any money?" asked Trumbull.

  "Only that dollar a week, which he handed me without fail each Saturday. Eventually, I dropped the paper route, but he didn't know that. I kept on delivering his paper every day. I'd buy it myself and deliver it."

  "Did he feed you?"

  "The hot cocoa. When I stayed through lunch, a servant would bring me a ham sandwich and milk, or the equivalent."

  "Did he give you books?"

  Manfred shook his head slowly, "Not while he was alive. Never. He wouldn't give me one, or let me borrow one. I could read whatever I liked, but only as long as I sat in the library. I had to wash my hands before I walked into the library and I had to put each book back on the shelf in the place where I had got it before taking another."

  Avalon said, "I should think Mr. Lineweaver's children would resent you."

  "I think they did," said Manfred, "but I never saw them while the old man was alive. Once he said to me, with a little chuckle, 'One of my sons said I must keep an eye on you, or you'll take some of my books.' I must have looked horrified at the insult to my parents. Would that be the kind of son they would bring up? He laughed and tousled my hair and said, 'I told him he didn't know what he was talking about.' "

  Rubin said, "Were his books valuable?"

  "At the time, it never occurred to me that they might be. I had no idea what books cost, or that some might be worth more than others. I found out, eventually, though. He was proud of them, you see. He told me he had bought every one of them himself. I said that some of them looked so old he must have bought them when he was a little boy.

  "He laughed, and said, 'No, I bought many of them in secondhand bookstores. They were old when I got them, you see. If you do that, sometimes you can pick up some very valuable books for almost nothing. Triple devil,' he said. 'Triple devil.'

  "I thought he was referring to himself and how clever he was to find these valuable books. Of course, I didn't know which ones might be the valuable ones.

  "As the years passed, I developed an ambition. What I wanted was to own a bookstore someday. I wanted to be surrounded by books and sell them till I had made enough money to build a library of my own, a collection of books I wouldn't have to sell and that I could read to my heart's content.

  "I told this to Mr. Lineweaver once, when he questioned me. I said I was going to work in the tailor shop and save every cent till I had enough to buy a bookstore—or maybe an empty store and then buy the books.

  "Lineweaver shook his head. 'That will take a long time, Bennie. The trouble is I've got children of my own to take care of, even though they're a selfish lot. Still, there's no reason I can't help you out in some sneaky way that they won't be able to do anything about. Just remember I own a very valuable book."

  "I said, 'I hope it's hidden away, Mr. Lineweaver.'

  " 'In the best place in the world,' he said. 'Do you remember your Chesterton? What's the best place to hide a pebble?'

  "I grinned. The Father Brown stories were new then, and I loved them. 'On the beach,' I said, 'and the best place to hide a leaf is in a forest.'

  " 'Exactly right,' said Mr. Lineweaver, 'and my book is hidden in my library.'

  "I looked about curiously. 'Which one?' I asked, and was instantly sorry, for he might have thought I would want to take it.

  "He shook his head. 'I won't tell you. Triple devil! Triple devil!' Again, I felt he was referring to his own slyness in not revealing his secret.

  "In early 1929, ten years almost to the day after I had first met him, he died, and I received a call from the lawyers to attend a reading of the will. That astonished me, but my mother was in seventh heaven. She felt I would inherit a great deal of money. My father frowned and worried that the money belonged to the family, and that I would be a thief to take it from them. He was that kind of person.

  "I attended, dressed in my best clothes, and felt incredibly ill at ease and out of place. I was surrounded by the family, the children and grandchildren I had never before seen, and their looks at me were the reverse of loving. I think they, too, thought I would get a great deal of money.

  "But they didn't have to worry. I was left one book—one— from his library. Any book I wished. It was to be my free choice. I knew he wanted me to have the valuable one, but he had never told me which one that was.

  "The bequest did not satisfy the family. You would think they could spare one book out of perhaps ten thousand, but they apparently resented my even being mentioned in the will. The lawyer told me I could make my choice as soon as the will was probated.

  "I asked if I might go into the library and study the books in order to make that choice. The lawyer seemed to think that was reasonable, but this was objected to at once by the family, who pointed out that the will said nothing about my going into the library.

  " 'You have been in the library often enough and long enough,' said the older son. 'Just make your choice and you can have it when the will is probated.'

  "The lawyer wasn't exactly pleased by that and he said that he would seal the library till probation, and no one could go in. That made me feel better, because I thought that perhaps the family knew which book was valuable and would remove it themselves. "
It took time for the will to be probated, so I refused to make the choice immediately. The family grumbled at that, but the lawyer held his ground there. I spent the time thinking. Had old Mr. Lineweaver ever said anything to me that was puzzling and that might have been intended as a hint? I could think of nothing but the 'triple devil' he used to call himself when he wanted to praise his own slyness.—But he only said that when he discussed the valuable book. Could the phrase refer to the book, and not to himself?

  "I was twenty-four now, and far from the innocent child I had been ten years before. I had a vast miscellany of information at my fingertips, thanks to my reading, and when the time came for me to make my choice, I did not have to walk into the library. I named the book I wanted and explained exactly where it would be on the shelves, for I had read it, of course, though I had never dreamed it was valuable.

  "The lawyer himself went in and got it for me, and it was the right book. As a book dealer, I now know why it was valuable, but never mind that. The point is that I had the lawyer—a good man—arrange to have it appraised, and then to have it sold at a public auction. It brought in seventy thousand dollars, a true fortune in those days. If it were offered for sale now it would bring in a quarter of a million, but I needed the money then.

  "The family was furious, of course, but there was nothing they could do. They brought suit, but the fact they had not let me enter the library and study the books lost them a great deal of sympathy. In any case, after the legal hassle was over, I bought a bookstore, made it pay through the Depression, when books were one form of relatively cheap amusement, and built things up to where they now are.—So am I a self-made man?"

  Rubin said, "In my opinion, this doesn't come under the heading of luck. You had to pick one book out of ten thousand on the basis of a small and obscure hint, and you did. That's ingenuity, and, therefore, you earned the money. Just out of curiosity, what was the book?"

  "Hey," said Gonzalo angrily.

  Manfred said, "Mr. Gonzalo asked me not to give you the solution. He said you might want to work on it yourselves."