The Book of Illumination

by Mary Ann Winkowski

  I took a deep breath and glanced at the monks. “I’m here with a couple of … friends. An abbot and a monk. From the twelfth century.”

  “More ghosts?” asked Father Fran.

  That got their attention.

  “How did you know?” I asked.

  “Because it’s the only time you ever call me.”

  “I know. I’m awful. I’m sorry!” I said. “But do you have a couple of minutes?”

  “I have exactly twelve minutes before I have to get onto a conference call with Bishop Zuchowski. Fire away.”

  “Okay,” I said. “First of all, since I called you ‘Father Fran,’ I’m not sure they believe that I really am talking to a monsignor. Could you clear that up for me?”

  “Have you got me on speaker?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  He launched in, in Latin. He couldn’t hear the monks, but they could certainly hear him. Within minutes they were answering him in Latin, joined across the centuries in some kind of conversation, followed by an antiphonal prayer that was as familiar to the monks as it was to the monsignor in Cleveland. There were bob-bings and bowings and eyes closing and a few soft knocks with fists over their hearts. Their eyes were damp and their expression faraway when silence returned to the room.

  “How was that?” Father Fran asked.

  “Great,” I answered.

  “Good,” he said. “Is that all?”

  “No. The thing is, they don’t want to deal with me.”

  “Well, it would be hard for them,” he explained kindly. “That kind of thing—a straightforward relationship between a young woman and a monk, much less an abbot—it just wouldn’t have been done. They probably entered the order as young boys.”

  “I know,” I said, “and I understand all that, but the thing is, we’ve got something pretty big going on here, and they’ll only share what they know with … someone like you. Or someone above you. You’re not going to be in Boston anytime soon, are you?”

  “Unfortunately not.”

  “Do you know anyone here? Somebody I could call?”

  “Hmmm,” he said. “Let me give that some thought. I’ll have Rosemary get back to you.”

  “Is that your assistant?” I asked, and when he replied that it was, out slipped, “Oh, joy.”

  I was mortified, but he burst out laughing. “I know, I know,” he said. “But she’s a good soul. Besides, you wouldn’t believe how many calls I get now. I couldn’t have someone like you answering the phone!”

  This made me laugh, because he was right. I’d have his waiting room filled to bursting with sad sacks and hopeless causes, all wanting to bend his ear about something or other. In other words, people like me.

  “Thanks so much,” I said. “I really appreciate this.”

  “Anytime, dear. Can they still hear me?”

  I looked at the monks. They nodded. “Yes,” I said.

  “Now you listen to me, you two,” said Father Fran. “This young woman has a heart of gold. She’s been awfully good to me, and even better to Holy Mother Church.”

  I thought he was gilding the lily a bit, but I wasn’t about to interrupt.

  “So I don’t want to hear about any more nonsense. I know I can rely on you to treat her with the respect she deserves. She’s a person you can trust.”

  I was embarrassed now and staring at the floor. Father Fran and I said our good-byes and ended the call. I looked up.

  Rather than treat me with the respect I deserved, much less trust me, the monks had flown the coop. And in the spot where they had just been standing stood Sylvia.

  I was surprised that their hasty departure hadn’t at least messed up her hair. Sensing that she had just missed an occurrence of some importance, she asked, “What’s going on?”

  “Oh,” I whispered wearily, “nothing much.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  VOICES AND LOW laughter spilled out of the bindery and into the basement hall. Sylvia shot me a puzzled glance. I shrugged. We stepped inside to discover Chandler at the central table, showcasing his current work in progress: an early-edition piano score by Rachmaninoff, with handwritten notes by the composer in the margins. Sam was peering at something Chandler was pointing out on the manuscript.

  With him was a man I didn’t recognize. He was on the tall side, in his late fifties or early sixties, and he wore a suit so beautifully tailored that it had to have been made for him. His shirt was of the whitest white and his tie an elegant stripe of silver and cranberry. The silver matched his hair, which was fairly long, and his cheeks boasted a tinge of the tie’s cranberry, which I decided to attribute to a brisk, recent walk through the cool autumn air, and not a fondness for gin with his noonday meal.

  “Sylvia!” Sam said. “We were wondering where you were!”

  Chandler, deflated by our sudden appearance, didn’t seem to have been wondering. He looked as though he wished we would just go back to wherever we came from.

  A flush rose to Sylvia’s cheeks, and I would have liked to have been able to say: No, Sam has no way of knowing that we were just talking about him and no, you did not betray him by telling me about Ben.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. I’m sure she meant to convey delight and warmth, but it didn’t come out that way.

  “Well, we had to have our annual lunch at Locke-Ober’s,” Sam explained. “It wouldn’t be a trip to Boston without a bowl of JFK’s lobster stew, would it, Jim?”

  “Certainly not,” the man said amiably. He had a posh British accent.

  “James Wescott,” he went on, extending his hand warmly, first to Sylvia, and then to me.

  “Oh!” replied Sylvia. It came out like a strangled little cry. As she glanced anxiously between Wescott, Sam, and Chandler, I tried to provide her with a little time to collect herself.

  I introduced myself and asked, “How was Vermont?”

  This appeared to startle the well-dressed man. He didn’t respond immediately.

  “Oh, maybe I’ve got the wrong person,” I said, feigning confusion. “I’m sorry.” I glanced at Sam for help. “When we all had lunch on Saturday, with Julian …”

  “Julian Rowan,” Sam clarified, apparently for James.

  “Oh!” James said, smiling. “That’s right! Julian is here, isn’t he?”

  “Boston College,” Sam said.

  “Yes, of course!” This seemed to delight the Brit. My, he was a chipper fellow.

  “We were talking,” I went on, “about someone—I thought his name was James—who was at the British Museum.”

  “That’s right,” Sam confirmed. “You’ve got it right; that’s this James.”

  Beside him, the handsome Brit beamed and nodded.

  At last recovering her footing, Sylvia stepped in.

  “You mentioned in your letter,” she said, addressing Wescott, “that you might go up to Vermont. After you were finished with the Harvard conference. I used to work with Finny Winslow. We wrote to you last winter about that illuminated manuscript that he had.”

  Miraculously, I thought, Chandler’s phone began to ring, and he stepped away to answer it. I wondered if the monks were trying to give us a hand by stirring up a little electrical distraction, but no, we’d just gotten lucky. Chandler sunk into a sullen conversation with the person on the other end.

  “Yes, yes, of course! I remember now!” James said, nodding. “Did you ever get to the bottom of that?”

  “Not yet,” Sylvia responded.

  “It’s not here, is it?” James asked, his eyes widening. “I would just love to have a look at it.”

  Sylvia cleared her throat and then said firmly, “No. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure where it is these days.”

  No! I thought. Don’t tell him it’s missing!

  But on she went, calmly. “The executor’s not exactly—how should I put it?—well, books just aren’t his thing. There was some confusion, after he took over, about whether that particular title was one of
the ones he sent over here with the rest of Finny’s collection. I assumed it would be, naturally, but when the time came for me to log it in …” She paused and shrugged.

  Wow. That was good. She hadn’t even lied.

  “So, you work for the Athenaeum?” James asked her. “I’m a little confused.”

  “I’m a freelancer. I’m rebinding much of the Winslow Collection. Anza’s a bookbinder, too. She’s helping me. There’s a dedicated fund; it was established before Mr. Winslow died. I’m just working out of here until the job is done.”

  “I see,” James said. “A shame about that manuscript, though. Is there a chance he might have sold it?”

  “I suppose he could have,” Sylvia responded. “And one of his daughters, who lives out in the Berkshires, took some of the books. I mean, he gave them to her. I wasn’t close to his children, and toward the end, when he was very ill, there were a lot of family members in and out. You know what happens, when things get to that point.”

  “The vultures descend,” Sam said sharply.

  Sylvia nodded sadly.

  I wondered what Sam was making of all this. He knew that the book had been stolen, and he knew that Sylvia was if not exactly lying to his old friend James Wescott, then at least obscuring the truth.

  But what was she supposed to do, with Chandler right here? It was Sam who’d put her in this difficult position. Then again, he probably just missed the companionship of his former colleagues, and the familiarity of the bindery, where he’d spent much of his professional life. They’d been just down the street having lunch at Locke-Ober, we’d been talking about James during our lunch on Saturday, and probably on impulse, Sam had decided to bring him by. He probably didn’t stop to think it all through.

  “Oh well, I imagine it’ll resurface one of these days,” James said reassuringly. “They always do.”

  Not always, I thought.

  There was a moment of awkward silence. Turning to me, James skillfully restarted the conversation.

  “To answer your question, Vermont was magnificent! They tell me the leaves were a little dull this year, but from what was still left on the trees, I can’t imagine their being any more spectacular.”

  “Where were you?” I asked, grateful that we were now onto a neutral subject. I suddenly pictured James Wescott in a Vermont commune, beginning to remove his remarkable suit.

  “Near Woodstock,” he replied, and to the strange, spontaneous commune image, my brain now added mud, a beard, The Who, and a bong.

  Not that Woodstock, I said to myself.

  There was a message from Julian on my machine. He’d come to realize, following our lunch on Saturday, that he had no one but himself to blame for his failure to see a little bit of New England. The next few weekends were fraught with complications—visitors coming and going, college events that he couldn’t miss—so he was thinking about taking a drive out to the Berkshires later in the week, maybe Thursday or Friday. He knew it was short notice, and on top of that, a weekday, but he wondered if by chance I had any time. If so, might I be interested in coming along?

  I thought of his leg pressed unself-consciously against mine in the movie theater and immediately decided I would. Just as immediately, I concluded that I couldn’t, because, unbeknownst to Julian—and I would have to mention this sometime soon, if we ever got together again—I had a little boy. Damn! I mean, not damn about Henry, just damn about no date.

  A moment later, I had an inspiration. Friday wouldn’t work, because Delia and Nell were coming here right after Henry got out of school, but if I could get Nat to take Henry to the movies on Thursday night, and if she could also pick him up from after-school and also feed him a slice of pizza at some point and also hang around the apartment until I got back, which I would try to do on the early side, then maybe I could go! If Thursday worked for Julian, that is.

  It was the first of two inspired thoughts that came to me as I folded laundry, relishing the fact that Henry was occupied quietly in his room. I’d been stressing about the costume. For all my craftiness when it comes to books, I’m not good at costumes. At Halloween, when better mothers than I are sewing and stapling and making helmets and tiaras, we’re at Target buying the cheesy kind in the box.

  I think costumes are stupid. I hate costume parties. Masks, especially Mardi Gras masks, give me the creeps.

  Henry was already getting on my case about needing to get going on his costume, which we needed to finish in time for the Q and U wedding. He had no idea when this was, of course. Didn’t you get the invitation? he’d asked accusingly, as though not yet having received the all-important letter constituted a failure of some kind on my part.

  As for the costume itself, it had to have everything to do with the letter h. A guessing game with all of his classmates, each of whom had been assigned a letter, was going to precede the wedding.

  First he had announced that he wanted to be a Hunter with a raccoon Hat. I nixed that right away, because you can’t be a hunter without a gun, and to have a five-year-old carrying a fake rifle into a kindergarten party, especially here in Cambridge, well, it just wasn’t going to happen. With a slaughtered raccoon on his head? Not a chance.

  Because I’d said no to the hunter idea, Henry acted as though I had used up the one and only no to which I was entitled. But I surprised him. I said no again—this time to a devil costume, which would be all red, he’d told me excitedly, with horns and a pitchfork and a curly tail that pointed up to the ceiling, a tail with a spike on the end. What did that have to do with h? I’d asked him. That was the joke! he’d explained, fairly bursting with pride at his own subtle wit. He was Hot.

  Again, I’d had to disappoint him. The devil doesn’t get much airtime, as far as I can tell, in current theological instruction, at least at the kindergarten level; I suspected that this idea had more to do with the books of Maurice Sendak than those of the Old Testament. But a couple of older nuns were still at work in the school, running the one-room library and helping struggling students master their letters and numbers. I’d met them both—one was a rabid Red Sox fan—and I doubted that either of them would be offended by Henry’s sashaying up the aisle in red tights and pointy red slippers, which, by the way, I was going to be expected to make. Still, it was a Catholic school. Why take a chance?

  Henry was fit to be tied. He thought my ideas were inane. He could be Handsome, I’d teased him. We’d make him up like a movie star and he’d get all the girls. He didn’t see the Humor. How about Humpty Dumpty? Or a Horse? Harry Potter! He rejected each of these ideas on principle, the principle being: they weren’t his.

  Then I had a brainstorm. Ellie! She loved stuff like this! And she could sew! She was always bemoaning the fact that she didn’t get to participate in Halloween with her grandchildren. Pictures of them in their costumes, carrying orange plastic jack-o-lanterns presumably filled with candy, just made her want to cry.

  And not only that, we’d be killing two birds with one stone. With Halloween just around the corner, the costume might be able to serve double duty, sparing me the annual torture of the trip to Target, where Henry always got wound up into a frenzied panic, searching madly, and usually in vain, for the perfect costume. The good ones sell out early. Better mothers than I am keep track of when they go on sale, which I gather must be sometime in the summer.

  I finished folding the laundry. Now I felt guilty. He wouldn’t be little forever, and I should be thanking my lucky stars that he was excited and passionate and full of ideas and imagination. And I did. I adored this about him, even when it got us into trouble.

  But tonight, I was tired, hungry, and in need of a helping hand to get to the end of the week. To my great good fortune, I could probably count on four.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I LUCKED INTO a visitor parking place near the corner of Marl-borough and Clarendon. At night, most of the metered spots in Back Bay revert to being reserved for the use of the people who live around here and have residential sti
ckers on their cars. Miss the fine print explaining this on the parking signs, and you’ll come back to discover a hundred-dollar ticket on your windshield. Near the corners of some of the blocks, though, are one or two coveted spots marked “Visitor.” I’d never actually scored one of these before, so I thought this might be a good omen. Tonight, I was going to be lucky.

  Come to think of it, I already had been lucky. Thanks to an exhausting after-school walking trip to the playground on the Cambridge Common, nearly a mile away from St. Enda’s, Henry had practically fallen asleep into his plate of franks and beans. He’d dawdled lazily in the bathtub, had gotten into his Spider-Man pj’s as I ran down to the basement to throw a load of towels into the wash, and by the time I made it back up to his room, ready to usher him into dreamland with the next chapter of Redwall, he was out.

  He didn’t even wake up when I took the book out of his hands, lifted him off his quilt, and got him settled in under the covers. Max and Ellie, who were babysitting, were going to be disappointed tonight. There’d be no calls for reassuring drinks of water and no need to rock him back to sleep in their upstairs den.

  The skies had been unsettled all day, with occasional bolts of sunshine breaking through. But now, the gray heavens hung low. You don’t see stars in Boston, not often anyway—there’s too much light on the ground for them to be visible—but tonight, behind a somber ceiling of dense, gloomy mist, there wasn’t even the hint of a moon. The air, for the first time this fall, was actually cold. It was drizzling steadily, the wind gusting angrily and auras of fog surrounded the streetlights, all of this reminding me that before I knew it, Thanksgiving would be here.

  It was a little too late—nine fifteen—for one of my favorite bad habits: peering through the windows of other people’s houses. The best time to do this is right around dusk, when the occupants of a house first start to realize that it’s getting dark out and switch on their interior lights. Most folks don’t close their curtains right away, though, so in the fleeting minutes during which it’s brighter in the rooms than it is outside on the street, someone as curious as I am can catch thrilling, normally forbidden glimpses of chandeliers and paintings and wallpapered walls. As true darkness descends, though, people usually close their curtains. Tonight, possibly owing to the wintry dampness that was driving away autumn, most of the curtains had been closed.