by RJ Ellory
People like this. Lost people perhaps. Lost enough to find the little bookstore down a narrow sidestreet a short walk from Ellington and West 107th.
She welcomed them, all of them, because she was still idealistic enough to think that a book could change a life.
And thus her first thought when the old man in the expensive but tired-looking topcoat had mentioned her father was that he had come to reminisce, to select a book perhaps, to consume a few minutes of their lives shooting the breeze and skating the differences. And then her second thought, her third and fourth and fifth also, was that this man – whoever he was – might be the key to understanding something about her own past that had been forever a mystery. The urgency she felt could not have been explained any other way; he represented a line to the shore, and she grasped it with both hands and pulled with all she possessed.
‘You are busy?’ the old man asked her.
Annie held her arms out as if inviting him to survey the crowds that were even now jamming their way into the store. She smiled and shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not busy.’
‘Then perhaps I can take a few minutes to show you something.’
He collected his package from the stack of hardbacks as he came towards her, and when he reached the counter he set it down and untied the string that bound it.
‘I have here,’ he said quietly, ‘something that may intrigue you.’
The brown paper unfolded like dry skin, like a fall leaf once again unwrapped from its own multi-hued chrysalis. Within the package was a sheaf of papers, and on top of the papers a blank manila envelope. The old man took the envelope, and from within it he drew a single sheet of paper. He handed it to Annie.
‘A letter,’ the man said.
Annie took it, felt the coarse and brittle texture of its surface. It felt like the page of an age-old volume, a first edition left somewhere to hold its words in breathless perpetuity. At the top of the page, faded now but still legible, was a scrawled heading. From the Cicero Hotel it read.
‘No longer standing,’ the old man said. ‘They tore it down in the sixties and built something strange and modern.’
There was something clipped and too articulate in his voice, something that made him difficult to place.
Annie looked up at him and nodded.
‘It’s a letter your father wrote,’ he went on. ‘He wrote it to your mother. See …’
The man extended his hand, then his index finger, and the index finger skated over the letter and rested above the words Dear Heart.
Annie frowned.
‘He always started his letters that way … it was a token of his affection, his love for her. Shame, but I believe the letters never actually reached her …’
The old man withdrew his finger.
Annie watched it go like a train leaving a station with someone special on board.
‘If there was one thing your father knew how to do,’ he whispered, almost as if for effect alone, ‘it was how to love someone.’
And then the old man nodded towards the letter, and the hand with the index finger made this small flourish, like someone introducing a minor act in vaudeville.
‘Proceed,’ he said, and smiled.
‘What’s your name?’ Annie asked.
The man frowned for a second, as if the question bore the least possible significance and relevance to the matter at hand.
‘My name?’
‘Your name?’ she repeated.
The man hesitated. ‘Forrester,’ he said. ‘My name is Robert Franklin Forrester, but people just call me Forrester. Robert is too modern for a man my age, and Franklin is too presidential, don’t you think?’
He smiled, and then he bowed his head as if a third person had made a formal introduction.
Once again she felt a twinge as he smiled. Was there something too familiar in the way he looked at her?
She was possessed then, compelled to consider something that at once excited and terrified her. She found herself scrutinizing his face, looking for something that would serve to identify who he might be. She shuddered visibly and turned her eyes back to the letter.
Dear Heart,
I am lost now. More lost than I ever imagined I could be. I am sorry for these years. I know you will understand, and I know that your promise will stand whatever happens now. I trust that you will care for the child, care for her as I would have had I possessed the chance. I feel certain that I’ll not see you again, but you are – as ever – in my heart. I love you Madeline, as I know you love me. Love like ours perhaps was never meant to survive. A moth to a flame. A moment of bright and stunning beauty, and then darkness.
Always, Chance.
Annie frowned; she felt her heart tighten up like the fist of a child. ‘Chance?’
Forrester smiled. ‘He called her Heart, she called him Chance … you know how love is.’
Annie smiled as if she understood. She did not question the feeling, but nevertheless the feeling came. She believed – all too unwillingly – that she did not know how love was.
‘He died soon after,’ Forrester said. ‘I believe, though I could never be sure, that even though she never received it, it was in fact his last letter to her.’
Annie held the page in her hands, hands that were even now beginning to tremble. Emotion welled in her chest, a small, tight fist in her throat, and when she looked back at Forrester she saw him blurred at the edges. Blurred through her own tears.
‘My dear,’ he said, and withdrew a silk handkerchief from his pocket.
He handed it to her and she touched her lids gently.
‘I did not mean to upset you,’ he said. ‘Quite the opposite.’
Annie looked at the page once more, and then back at the old man. They became one and the same thing – the old man standing beside her and the letter she held in her hand, and in that brief second they represented all she had ever wanted to know about her own history.
‘I came, you see, with an invitation,’ and then he smiled once again in that strangely familiar fashion.
Of her parents’ relationship Annie O’Neill knew little. Her father had died when she was seven, and in the years that followed, when she’d lived alone with her mother, Madeline, there was little said of him. Of course he would crop up in their conversations, perhaps her mother mentioning something about the shop, about a book they’d read … but the intimate details, the whys and wherefores of life before his death – these things went unspoken. Madeline O’Neill had been a woman of character, self-possessed and intuitive. Her intelligence and culture defied description, and time and again she spoke of things that Annie believed no-one could have known. She knew books and art, she knew music and history; she spoke the truth directly and without hesitation. She had been Annie’s life, a totality, a completeness, and for the years they had been together Annie could never have comprehended existence without her. But time marched, and it marched with foot-soldiers, and the footsoldiers carried weapons that weakened the heart and frayed the nerves. They arrived one evening a little after Christmas 1991, and they brought with them Madeline O’Neill’s call-to-arms.
After her mother’s death, after the funeral, after people she barely knew had come and gone with their words of sympathy and regret, Annie was left with almost nothing. The house where they had lived all those years was sold, and with the proceeds she bought ownership of the shop and paid a deposit on her apartment. Aside from that there was a box of papers and oddments beneath her mother’s bed which Annie knew were meant for her. Among those things was a book. A single book from all the many thousands that had passed through the family’s collective hands over the years. It was a small book called Breathing Space by Nathaniel Levitt. Printed in 1836 by a company called Hollister & Sons of Jersey City and bound by Hoopers of Camden – companies both long since vanished into the tidal wave of conglomerates – and Annie had no real understanding of its significance. The book came to represent her father, and thus she had nev
er investigated its significance, never searched out other works by its author. These things did not matter, and seemed in some way to challenge the memory of her father. Inscribed inside the cover were the words Annie, for when the time comes. Dad. and the date: 2 June 1979. It was a simple story, a story of love lost and found once more, and though the places and names and voices were dated, there was something about the rhythm of the prose, the grace with which the slightest detail was outlined and illuminated, that made the book so special. Perhaps it meant nothing of any great significance, but to that book she had granted character and meaning far beyond its face value. It had been left for her. It had come from her father. And though she would perhaps never understand the time to which he referred it didn’t matter. It was what it was, but most of all it was hers.
Nevertheless, it struck Annie O’Neill that for the first time in many years she was thinking of her father as a real person: a person with his own life, his own dreams and aspirations. What had Forrester said? That if there was one thing her father had known how to do it was to love his wife, Annie’s mother. And love seemed now such a tortuous path, such an unknown territory. Navigating the arterial highways of the heart. And even how it sounded. Falling in love. Surely that said everything that needed to be said. Like a headlong pitch forward into the hereafter. Why not rising into love? Hey, you never guess what happened? I rose into love … and man, was that a feeling. A feeling like no other.
Annie’s mother had always looked a certain way when they spoke of him. Annie would beg her to talk of him, to tell her what he was like, but there was something there, something so driven and powerful that seemed to prevent Madeline from expressing her heart. Losing her husband had devastated her, something that was evident in her eyes, in the way her hands tightened when his name was mentioned. Madeline O’Neill had possessed a strength of character that Annie had rarely seen in anyone else. Her wit and intelligence, her compassion, her passion for life, were things that Annie had always aspired to but always seemed to fall short of. It was that character that had made her mother so special to her father, of this Annie was sure, and from this single, simple fact she knew that her father also must have been a remarkable man to capture her mother’s heart.
Annie held the letter. From the Cicero Hotel. Why was he in a hotel? In a hotel and writing to his wife? She believed she had experienced more emotion in this single moment than she had in the last year. Emotion for her father, the man who had given her life, and almost as soon had disappeared from that life. Emotion also for her mother, for these few words seemed to say everything that could be said about the depth of their love for one another. There was a vacuum within her, as wide as the building within which she stood, and never had she discovered anything that could erase that emptiness.
She looked at Forrester. He looked back – unabashed, direct. He possessed a lived-in face, warm and generous. His features were neither clumsy nor chiselled, but somewhere in between. This was the face of a man who would reach the end of his life, sitting somewhere in a hotel lounge perhaps, or in a rocker on a porch stoop, and with unequivocal certainty declare that it had in fact been a life. A real life. A life of moment and significance, a life of loves and losses and calculated risks. Here, she thought, was a man who would never ask himself What if …? Sadly for her, but nevertheless realistically, the antithesis of her own quiet existence.
Annie smiled. She handed back the letter.
Forrester raised his hand. ‘No, it’s for you to keep.’
She frowned, but didn’t question how or why this stranger possessed the letter in the first place.
Anticipating her unspoken thought Forrester smiled. ‘Frank … your father and I, we shared a room together many, many years ago. I have been away, have recently returned to the city, and in preparing my things to move I came across this letter, some others also –’
‘Others?’ she asked.
Forrester nodded. ‘Other letters yes, all of them from your father to your mother … also I found some snapshots, old snapshots … even one or two of you when you were younger.’ Forrester smiled. ‘That was how I knew you were Frank’s daughter when I came in.’
‘You could bring them?’
Forrester didn’t answer her question at first. He merely nodded, and placed his hand on the stack of papers on the counter. ‘This is my invitation,’ he said. ‘Your father and I, we started something. We started something special here in Manhattan many decades ago. It was soon after he leased this store –’
Forrester raised his hand and indicated the room within which they stood.
‘I met him here, and here is where it all began.’
Annie placed the letter on the counter. ‘Where all of what began?’
Forrester nodded and winked as if imparting a tremendous secret. ‘The reading club.’
Annie frowned. ‘A reading club … you and my father?’
‘And five or six others … closet bohemians, poets, even some writers … and every week we would gather here or in one of the apartments and we would share stories and read poems, even letters we had received. It was a different time, a different culture really, and people wrote so much more … had so much more to say if the truth be known.’
Annie smiled. Here was a facet, an angle of her father’s life she had never seen before. He founded a reading club.
‘And as I am here for some time, weeks, months perhaps, I felt we should revive the tradition.’ Forrester smiled. He once again performed the small introductory fanfare with his hand, indicated the shelves that stood to all sides: literary sentinels. ‘After all, we have no shortage of material.’
Annie nodded. ‘You’re right there.’
‘And this,’ Forrester said, taking the sheaf of papers from its wrapping on the counter, hesitating for a second as if a little awkward. ‘Well Miss O’Neill, I thought that this might perhaps be the first subject of discussion.’
He handed the papers to Annie. She could smell their age, feel the years that had somehow seeped into the very grain of the pages. Perhaps it was her imagination, but it was almost as if her history was here, a history her father had been part of, and thus she might find something that would contribute to her own. An open door beckoned her and there was nothing she could do but walk right through it.
‘It is a novel I believe … at least the start of a novel. It was written many years ago by a man I knew for a very short time, all things considered. He was a member of the club, and while he was there he possessed all of us in some small way.’ Forrester smiled nostalgically. ‘Never met a man quite like him.’
He paused quietly for a second or two. ‘This is the first chapter … reads like a diary I suppose. I would like you to read it, and then next Monday I will come and we will discuss it.’
He smiled, and there was something so warm, so genuine about his face, that Annie O’Neill never questioned intent or motive or vested interest; she simply said, ‘Yes, of course … next Monday.’
‘So there it is … signed, sealed and delivered.’ Forrester held out his hand.
Annie looked at his hand, then up at his face, and his eyes were looking at the silk handkerchief that she still clutched in her hand. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Sorry …’ and returned the handkerchief to him.
‘It has been a pleasure,’ he said, and once again he bowed his head in that strange clipped European fashion.
‘Mr Forrester?’
He paused.
‘Could you … would you tell me about my father? I know that it seems a strange thing to ask but he died when I was very young … and … and well –’
‘You miss him?’
Annie could feel that tight fist of emotion again, threatening her ability to breathe. She nodded. She knew if she tried to speak she would cry.
‘I will come on Monday,’ Forrester said, ‘and you can ask me all the questions you like and I will tell you what I know.’
‘Could you … could you stay a little now perhaps?�
�� Annie ventured.
Forrester reached out and touched her arm. ‘I am sorry my dear,’ he said quietly. ‘There is, unfortunately, something I must attend to … but I will be here on Monday.’
Annie nodded. ‘You will come … you promise you will come.’
‘I will come Miss O’Neill … of that you can be certain.’ And then he turned, and Annie watched him go, and though there seemed to be a confusion of questions and noises inside her head she said nothing at all. The door opened, the breeze from the street stole in to gather what warmth it could, and then the door closed and he was gone.
Annie carried the sheaf of papers to the counter and set them down. She turned over the first blank page, and then started to read: