Love, Death & Rare Books

by Robert Hellenga

  “He didn’t set a date,” she said. “There’s plenty of time; a lot of things could happen—Relax,” she said when she saw the expression on my face. “I’m just kidding.”

  She laughed and tossed her head like a pony and opened her mouth, as if I’d offered her a carrot, but she didn’t blush. Her front teeth overlapped just slightly. “Well, not exactly,” she added.

  Her aunt, who was a buyer for Marshall Field, had given her a pair of orange Ferragamo shoes and a matching orange Balenciaga handbag—a “city bag”—for her birthday. Olivia was wearing the shoes and was holding the city bag as if she knew who she was. She was wearing a purple sweatshirt that said my soul is an enchanted boat across the front in white letters. At the moment I thought I knew who I was too. I’d survived several romances with girls who were probably attracted to me because I always had something else on my mind, something more important than they were, like writing up a catalog description of an Aldine Aristotle. But seeing Olivia in orange shoes and her enchanted boat sweatshirt, I suddenly thought Dad might be right, that Olivia was just what I’d been looking for all along, though it had taken me a while to figure it out. She had my full attention.

  Our stock of Orwells included two first editions, published in London by Secker and Warburg, one with a red dust jacket and one with a green. No one was sure, as is sometimes the case with identical twins, which was born first. Both were slightly faded at the extremities.

  More interesting, and more valuable, was a Russian language first edition. “It was printed in Germany,” I said, “and smuggled behind the Iron Curtain.” Next to it was a 1947 Ukrainian translation of Animal Farm, also printed in Germany. “All the copies were seized by the U.S. government and handed over to the Soviets.” And then there was my personal favorite, the pulpy 1950 Signet Giant edition (#798) with a muscular Winston Smith and sultry Julia backed up against each other—Winston in a sleeveless top and Julia in a blouse with a plunging neckline with an anti-sex button pinned to the lapel, while a poster of Big Brother O’Brien glares down at them from a wall: big brother is watching YOU!”

  On Friday afternoon, Stuart Kaminsky read the “newspeak” passage from 1984. After the discussion, which went on till six o’clock—in which no one agreed about anything—Dad took Kaminsky out to dinner, and Olivia and I finished a bottle of white wine in Dad’s office and sat next to each other, without actually touching, on the comfortable couch where Shirley had taken me by the hand and led me across the border into a new country.

  Olivia touched her nose with the tip of her finger. “Why is there a dog bed on the floor?”

  “That was for my mother’s dog, Punch.”

  “What happened?’

  “She went away.”

  “Punch?”

  “My mother.”

  “She just went away? Just disappeared?”

  I nodded.

  “You can’t just disappear.”

  “Well,” I said, “there was a visiting art history professor at the university who used to spend a lot of time in the shop. He was an Italian, from Rome, and liked to talk to Mamma in Italian. Mamma went to some of his lectures. She went with him to Italy.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Punch disappeared too,” I said.

  “He went with her?”

  “Died. Later. We were never sure how old he was, but he’d be at least sixteen or seventeen by now, maybe older.”

  We sipped our wine.

  “What about the sign on the door: I’d turn back if I were you? Do you think it’s aimed at us? Doesn’t sound like your father.”

  “I don’t think so. That sign’s been there so long, I don’t even see it.” But I saw it now, though it was on the other side of the door. A clipping from the Trib, a photo of a sign—the letters wood-burned into an old barn board: I’d turn back if I were you. I don’t think either one of us wanted to turn back, but something kept us from going forward. Maybe we were too timid, or too shy. Or maybe we were just drawing back in order to spring forward with greater force at a later date. Maybe we just wanted to go slowly. Maybe we felt awkward about my father’s crude attempts at matchmaking. In any case, we did turn back.

  One night at Jimmy’s, just before the end of the fall quarter, she laid out her senior honors thesis on the Romantic Imagination. By this time I was definitely in love. I always liked the way she kidded me, but she never kidded about her thesis. “The Romantics,” she said, “were the first generation of writers to write in a universe that didn’t have a built-in meaning. They were the first generation of poets who had to create their own meaning.”

  “And how did they do that?”Olivia rubbed her finger around in a circle in some beer on the tabletop, hesitating, as if reluctant to reveal a state secret to someone she couldn’t fully trust. “Imagination,” she said. “Not Reason. Imagination. How do we grasp reality? Not through Reason, but through Imagination. It doesn’t just record the external world, it transforms it. ‘What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth.’” I could feel her capitalizing the big words. “Letter to Benjamin Bailey,” she added. “November 1817.”

  “What is your imagination seizing on right now as beauty?” I asked.

  Olivia looked around. “I don’t know,” she said. “You?”

  “The bottles lined up in front of the mirror behind the bar are nice,” I said. “Lots of interesting shapes and colors, the reflections in the mirror, like an Impressionist painting.”

  “You’ll have to do better than that.”

  “Is this some kind of test? Checking out my imagination?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sure your imagination is working just fine, just like Coleridge’s great esemplastic power—the living power, with a capital P. The prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.”

  “You’re kidding. That’s what it really is? Actually I was imagining what it would be like to kiss you.”

  “And put your hands on my butt?”

  “That too,” I said, “but you’re sitting on it.” The palms of my hands tingled. I could feel a pulse beating along my throat. And beyond that the kind of excitement you feel as you’re setting out on a long journey and aren’t quite sure where you’re going.

  “That’s just ‘fantasy,’” she said, “not ‘Imagination.’ The word the Romantics used was ‘Fancy.’ It’s mechanical. When a man and a woman start talking trash, pretty soon they both want to jump into bed. That’s Fancy, not Imagination.”

  “Give me an example of Imagination, something ‘esemplastic.’”

  “‘Esemplastic’ is from a Greek word meaning ‘to shape.’ To mold things into a unity. Do you remember ‘The Eve of Saint Agnes,’ she said, “when Porphyro sneaks into Madeleine’s room and watches her undress?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “Do you remember what happens?”

  “I can guess.”

  “No you can’t. Nobody could guess. Just Keats.”

  “What happens?”

  “Madeleine’s dreaming about him—about Porphyro—but when she wakes up and sees him, he looks sick, pale. She thinks he’s dying. She’s desperate. He doesn’t match up to her dream. You see what I mean? Doesn’t match up to her Imagination.”

  “And?”

  “So she takes him up into her dream. ‘Into her dream he melted, as the rose blendeth its odour with the violet.’ That’s Imagination!”

  I took a minute to marvel at the transformative power of words. I thought that the real seduction was just beginning. But then I said, “Does she get pregnant?”

  She laughed, friendly and generous, open but not naïve. “Would you like to come up to my room?”

  I was as nervous as I’d been when Shirley asked me if
I’d like to spend some time with her. But of course I said yes. We went up to her room in Snell-Hitchcock. I may not have measured up to her imagination, but like Madeleine in the poem, she took me up into her dream.

  Olivia was planning to stay in Hyde Park over the Christmas break to work on her honors thesis and finish her grad school applications, which were due at the end of December. The dorms were closing. She needed a place to stay. I said she could stay with us.

  “What about your dad?” she asked.

  Dad wanted me to get married, wanted me to marry Olivia, in fact. “He won’t mind,” I said.

  “You sure?”

  “What about your aunt?”

  “She won’t mind either. In fact, she’ll be in London. If I stay with you, I won’t have to go back and forth to Evanston. But what about your grandfather?”

  I laughed. “I’ll give him a heads-up,” I said. Grandpa Chaz wanted me to get married too, wanted another generation to carry on the shop. I felt a current of happiness running through my entire being—firing neurons, tripping synapses, lighting up nerve endings.

  The dorms closed on December fourteenth. Dad and I picked Olivia up in front of Snell-Hitchcock in Grandpa Chaz’s 1977 Cadillac, which had only thirty thousand miles on it because it almost never left the garage. Around town we usually drove our thirteen-year-old Chevy van, but Dad had just traded the van for a first edition of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and we hadn’t replaced it yet. The Cadillac was a formidable car—a Fleetwood Brougham. Olivia put her things in the back seat, and we drove to the Midway to go ice skating. People were leaving or getting ready to leave, or looping around one last time. I was wearing my good Italian sweater, black with a black leather panel in the front. Dad had brought my mother’s old Jackson Glacier skates, which he’d had sharpened for Olivia. We put our skates on in the warming house.

  “I’m such a klutz,” Olivia said as I helped her on with Mamma’s skates. “Really clunky.”

  The clicking of skates outside on the ice sounded like someone dropping ice cubes into an empty glass. I held Olivia’s elbow to guide her, but the moment we pushed off, I understood that she would be taking me wherever she wanted to go. We skated arm in arm, and then Dad, who was an expert skater, joined us. Our skates dug into the ice, which was cold and fast, but soft enough to plant your toe pick for a jump, not that I was planning to execute a double axel. But Olivia’s skates seemed to skim over the ice, the way the warrior Camilla skims over the waves in the Aeneid without getting her feet wet.

  We made several loops, carried along effortlessly in the slipstream that circled the rink, floating past snow-suited children staggering around like drunks, girls holding hands, guys showing off their moves. Dad veered off after a while, and I had the uneasy feeling that Olivia and I were skating not on the Midway but on a thin layer of ice that covered a deep lake and that might crack open at any minute. All the other skaters were ignoring the danger, so I ignored it too. Olivia pulled me along, applying gentle pressure when needed, till she broke away and started to spin, faster and faster, while I circled her.

  “It’s like standing still,” she said, coming out of the spin, “with the whole world spinning around you.”

  The Midway was not too crowded, so we could go pretty fast without knocking into anyone. We raced around the perimeter, skating with the traffic, staying out of the center, where there were people practicing jumps, spins, and footwork. They stayed out of our way, and we stayed out of theirs. “It’s not a race,” she shouted, turning her head as she picked up speed. But of course it was a race. I thought I could catch her by concentrating, but concentrating didn’t make me go any faster. Maybe even slowed me down. Finally she stopped abruptly, next to Dad, in front of the warming center.

  As we were taking off our skates, Dad said, “Did you know that ice skating was invented by the Finns five thousand years ago?”

  And Olivia said, “I wish I had a cigarette.”

  “You’re right,” Dad said. “Now would be the perfect time for a smoke. But we don’t have any.”

  “Do you want me to see if I can bum a couple?” She didn’t wait for an answer, and soon they were lighting up. They both surprised me by smoking. Like characters in an old movie. I’d never seen either one of them smoke before. I didn’t know what they were thinking as they savored and tasted. I imagined how they might look walking down Fifty-Seventh Street, or sitting across from each other at a table in a restaurant, sharing a tranquil moment, and I knew that Dad loved her too. But I never saw either one of them smoke again. Not for a long time.

  Olivia tucked one leg under her and sat on her skate.

  “I hadn’t known that,” she said. “About the Finns. That they used bones for skates. For the blades.”

  We took off our skates and walked down Fifty-Ninth Street to the car and drove home. Seeing our fairy-tale house, Olivia was charmed.

  “It’s just like a bookstore!” she said, looking around as she hung her coat up in the front hall closet.

  “It is a bookstore,” Dad said. “Everything’s for sale. “Well, almost everything,” and I remembered how Grandpa Chaz had sold my Winnie the Pooh books.

  “I’ll have to look around,” she said. “Where should I put my suitcase?”

  “You can put it in Gabe’s little apartment over the garage,” Dad said, “or you can have your own room.”

  Mornings Olivia worked at the Regenstein on her senior thesis and her graduate school applications; afternoons she worked in the shop; late afternoons we went skating; evenings, after supper, we read to each other in the living room, while Dad and Grandpa Chaz sat in the kitchen, and she schooled me in Keats’s Imagination and Wordsworth’s Correspondent Breeze. Nights we melted into each other’s dreams. Or were they just fantasies? Either way, I thought, we were embarking on a life together.

  By this time our curiosity about our bodies had been satisfied, though not exhausted, and we were open to curiosity about our lives, which we offered to each other. Olivia, who came from Goshen, Indiana, which was named after the land of Goshen in the Bible, remembered that her mother always said “yes” and her father always said “no,” and that her father didn’t like the way she made her M’s because the tops of her M’s resembled women’s breasts, and he didn’t like the way she made her W’s because the bottoms of her W’s resembled women’s buttocks; and that they lived across from a cemetery, where her grandparents, who’d been killed by a tornado that killed 147 people on Palm Sunday 1965, were buried. She’d been two years old. She’d attended Jefferson Elementary School and remembered her fifth-grade teacher and kids coming in from other classes to see the volcano they’d built. She remembered that she hadn’t been allowed to see the movie Grease in the summer of 1978, when she was fifteen, and that she’d gone to see it anyway, with a friend, and then in November her parents were killed in an auto accident and she came to live with her aunt in Evanston. Her aunt had taken her to Paris the next spring on a buying trip for Marshall Field, and she’d missed two weeks of school.

  I told her the story I’ve told you—about Mamma’s fur coat that she’d left behind when she went to Italy, and the Italian translation of Montaigne that she’d taken with her.

  “Real fur?” she said. “It’s probably beautiful, but I don’t want to see it.”

  On Christmas Eve, we went with Dad to the afternoon service in Rockefeller Chapel and then Olivia and I took the Jeffrey Express downtown to go skating at Navy Pier. We joined Dad and Grandpa Chaz later and ordered pizzas, which we ate at the kitchen table, and drank a bottle of red wine.

  When I woke up on Christmas morning, Olivia was not in the bed beside me. I tried not to panic, tried to stay in the present moment. As I understood it. Of course, the present moment consists of memories and anticipations, so it’s hard to stay in one place. But when I got out of bed and went to the top of the stairs, I
could hear Dad’s voice in the kitchen. And Olivia’s too. And when I went downstairs, Olivia was opening the present I’d left for her on the dining room table—the first publication of Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes,” in Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems. Printed for Taylor and Hessey, London, 1820, a small duodecimo in dark red morocco that you could hold in one hand. It was a fabulous book that included the “Ode to a Nightingale,” the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “To Autumn,” “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” It was expensive, but Dad had encouraged me to give it to her.

  “You need to inscribe it,” she said.

  “Already inscribed a card,” I said.

  “I’m afraid to look,” she said.

  There were ten of us at the long table with serpentine ends—some members of the old guard, the generation that was passing away—and some new blood too. Old leaves and new leaves. What they had in common was that they all loved books and bought them at the shop, and they all had book stories.

  This was our extended family, at least for the day. I was afraid that Olivia would be bored, but she jumped right into the conversation and even proposed the first toast: “Oh, for a beaker full of the warm south,” she said, lifting her glass of French Bordeaux that Alice Ramsbotham had brought, “with beaded bubbles winking at the brim.”

  Glasses were raised and soon the wine began to lubricate the conversation.

  Olivia wasn’t bored at all. She exhibited a nice mix of awe and skepticism when it came to rare books, and pretty soon everyone was angling for her attention. Even the women. Sitting across the table from me, she filled my field of vision.

  When Alice Ramsbotham, who was supervising Olivia’s honors thesis, invited Olivia to explain her big idea, Olivia didn’t hesitate: “The Romantics,” she said, “were the first generation of writers to write in a universe that didn’t have a built-in meaning. When Alexander Pope went out in the woods, he didn’t see trees. He saw history, and politics, he saw the great chain of being, he saw a hierarchy that started with dirt and stones, went up to plants and then animals—with the ‘half-reasoning’ elephant up near the top of the heap, just below human beings—and then angels, of course. But when Wordsworth went out in the woods, he saw…” She paused and looked around. “What?”