Love, Death & Rare Books

by Robert Hellenga

  “Daffodils,” Alice said, and everyone laughed. This was spontaneous laughter induced by the feelings of goodwill that sometimes come just from being together with other people—not exactly strangers, not exactly old friends, but people who are prepared to be interesting and agreeable, just happy to be sitting at the same table with each other, listening to a beautiful young woman outlining the new sources of meaning ushered in by the Romantic Movement: Nature (Wordsworth and Shelley), Art (Keats and Coleridge), the Romantic Hero (Byron). And the odd thing is, I don’t need a glass or two of wine to experience those same feelings when I think of that dinner—the turkey that Olivia and I roasted, the cranberry-horseradish relish that we made in the blender, Nora Chapman’s tossed salad and Alice’s mince pies, the French Bordeaux and Ben Warren’s bottles of Michigan sauvignon blanc made with grapes from his own vineyard west of St. Anne, Mark Ramsbotham’s explanation of libration and the phases of the moon, Olivia passing around the copy of Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, blushing when Alice Ramsbotham read the inscription aloud: Into her dream he melted.

  That night, after the leftovers had been put away and the dishes had been put in the dishwasher and the dishes that wouldn’t fit in the dishwasher had been washed by hand, Olivia read “The Eve of St. Agnes” to us—to Dad and Grandpa Chaz and me—in the living room. Dad and Grandpa Chaz sat in two armchairs on either side of the fireplace. I sat on one end of our dark red—almost black—leather sofa. Olivia on the other end, holding the book of poems on her lap in a circle of light cast by a floor lamp with a parchment shade. It’s a long poem—42 Spenserian stanzas, 378 lines. Olivia read confidently, without letting her own emotions get in the way of the words. Keats’s words didn’t need any extra help:

  St. Agnes’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!

  The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;

  The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,

  And silent was the flock in woolly fold;

  Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told

  His rosary, and while his frosted breath,

  Like pious incense from a censor old,

  Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death,

  Past the sweet virgin’s picture while his prayers he

  saith

  Grandpa Chaz didn’t get up to go to bed. Dad didn’t get up to pour another glass of wine. We let the old words wash over us, let them mingle with our own secret thoughts and name our own deepest longings, let them open our eyes so we could see the world with a strange new sight.

  We all stood up at the same time, and Grandpa Chaz and Dad both touched Olivia, as if to release us from a magic spell. The fire in the fireplace had died down, but we didn’t poke at it. We could have made some popcorn, but we didn’t. We were all tired, ready for bed.

  Lying next to Olivia in the narrow bed up in my little apartment over the garage, I almost proposed. I would have proposed, but I didn’t want her to feel trapped, and we were both too tired anyway.

  At the beginning of January, Olivia moved back to Snell-Hitchcock. I hadn’t proposed to her—the time had never been quite right—but I was expecting to marry her, expecting her to do her graduate work at the University of Chicago. But she had a different agenda. She’d been accepted at both Princeton and Yale in March—Chicago, of course, and Stanford. This good news didn’t dispel my fantasy. I had waited with her for the results of her GREs; I had read her applications; I had walked with her to the post office on Ellis Avenue when she put them in the mail; I had helped her celebrate her letters of acceptance, and the generous offers of financial support.

  She decided on Yale. She wanted to go out East. I thought she’d be better off at Chicago, which was more historically oriented than Yale, where she’d have to deal with the all the deconstructionists, but she wanted to go where the action was; she wanted to start deconstructing things herself. She showed me pictures of the university apartment she planned to rent on Chapel Street in New Haven, across from Vanderbilt Hall, a women’s dorm.

  The knowledge that she was actually going to leave Hyde Park didn’t become really real—“Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,” as Olivia liked to say—till I looked through the window of car number 8406 on the Lake Shore Limited and saw her sitting by herself. She was looking at a twenty-two-hour trip with forty-six stops. She’d have to change trains twice. I’d offered to pay for a sleeper between Chicago and New York, but she was planning to sit up and read all night. She already had a book in her hand. “What are you reading?” I shouted, but she couldn’t hear me. Her lips moved. She was shouting too, but I couldn’t hear her reply. The train started to move into the darkness at the end of the platform. I walked alongside her car as far as I could. It was almost ten o’clock at night. I watched the red lights on the back of the train till they disappeared into the tunnel, and then I walked to the IC station on Randolph Street and took the train back to Hyde Park. I reminded myself that she had her own way of being in the world, her own memories and experiences, her own history, her own story to write. I could go back to Hyde Park, but I didn’t think I could go back to being who I was before Olivia. I could no more imagine a future without Olivia than I could imagine Fifty-Seventh Street without Chas. Johnson & Son, Ltd. Antiquarian Booksellers. I’d thought all along that she was Madeleine and I was Porphyro, but now I thought that she was La Belle Dame sans Merci, and I was her knight at arms, alone and palely loitering.

  When I got to the shop the next morning, Delilah, who was in charge of our large mystery section on the first floor, was making coffee in the staff room next to the freight elevator.

  “You put her on the train?”

  “Yeah.” I sat down at the wooden table.

  “You look like you got hit by the train. You expect her to change her mind at the last minute and say she’s going to stay in Chicago instead of going out East?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then why the long face?”

  “I think I need a philosophy of life. I didn’t think I needed one, but now I do.”

  “You mean like Plato—getting out of the cave?”

  “I thought I was out of the cave, but now…”

  “Your dad got a philosophy of life?”

  “I don’t know”

  “How about your grandpa?”

  “I think so, but I don’t know what it is. How can I look for answers when I don’t know what the questions are? Why is there something rather than nothing? Does God exist? Do we have free will? Can we ever see things as they really are? Are moral values just opinions? What happens when we die? None of these questions interest me. They’re good questions, but they aren’t my questions.”

  “What are your questions?”

  “Is the coffee ready?”

  “If that’s your question, the answer is ‘yes.’” She filled two ceramic mugs.

  “Have you got a philosophy of life?”

  “Yeah: ‘Get your stuff up off the floor and don’t feel sorry for yourself.’”

  “When you love someone—” I said, but she interrupted.

  “You want to melt into her dream, right? She told me about that.”

  That stopped me. “Go to hell,” I said.

  She laughed. Delilah was loud and always spoiling for a fight. “I need more space,” she said. “You know those shelves under the stairs on the west wall? Let’s get all those civil war books up on the second floor, where they belong. Those books must have been shelved downstairs by accident.”

  “You always want more space.”

  “That’s because I know what people need to read if they want to get out of the cave. They need to hear tough working class voices that tell the truth about the class struggle in this country. They need to read about people who find meaning and purpose in their work, people who actua
lly do stuff as well as thinking about stuff—tracking down witnesses, getting physical with the bad guys, casing crime scenes, bedding femmes fatales, or hommes fatales, whatever. They need to read Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and now you’ve got some strong women muscling their way onto the stage: Sara Paretsky, Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton. They want to hear some black voices. Don’t get me started: Pauline Hopkins, J. E. Bruce, Charles Chestnut, Rudolph Fisher, Chester Himes, Ann Petry, Ishmael Reed. We got a good start right here, but we could do more. And we’d have to do some rearranging. Make use of that space under the stairs. You want to see what I mean? Let me show you. I’m thinking we could have a whole section called ‘Black Noir.’”

  “I’ll talk to Dad about it,” I said.

  “I already talked to him. He said okay.”

  “I guess that settles it.”

  “Gabe,” she said. She put her hand on mine, then wrapped her fingers right around my wrist. “I’m sorry about Olivia. But I’ve got stuff to do.” She was wearing a blue bookman’s jacket that Grandpa Chaz had brought back from the Loudermilk sale in Philadelphia, back in 1971. She wore it over a yellow dress that picked up the highlights in her dark skin and swished as she left the room.

  Delilah had written her PhD thesis at Chicago on the hard-boiled detective novel and was pretty hard-boiled herself. She never left a room, she broke away; she never recommended a book to a customer, she pitched it; she never beat the traffic, she slapped it aside; she never walked anywhere, she hoofed it or cabbed it. Her dad collected Langston Hughes and ran a funeral home on Sixty-Third and Cottage Grove and three or four more in different parts of the city. Like Dad and Grandpa Chaz, he was a member of the Caxton Club.

  IV. THE BOMB

  (1989)

  When Olivia left for New Haven in August 1984, she took with her the volume of Keats’s poems that I’d given her for Christmas, and the association copy of Wordsworth’s Prelude—it had belonged to Wordsworth’s neighbor—that Dad had given her. We corresponded for a while for the first year—I proposed to her twice in letters that she didn’t answer, at least not directly. I suppose I was just writing the same words that other disappointed lovers had written before. I had trouble ending my letters: “All the best”? “Sincerely”? “Love”? After a while she stopped writing, so there weren’t any more letters to answer.

  What I knew about Olivia’s life at Yale came mostly from her aunt—Aunt Fern—who had sold her house in Evanston and moved into the 1700 Building in Hyde Park, across from the Museum of Science and Industry. Olivia was struggling at Yale—didn’t like her seminars, didn’t like her professors. Talked about transferring back to Chicago, but this was complicated. Then she found a mentor, a thesis advisor, and was ecstatically happy. And then she was miserable again.

  I saw her briefly, once a year at Christmas, but I didn’t really see her again till March 1989. I was standing on Fifty-Seventh Street in front of the shop. It was six o’clock in the morning and I’d been standing there for two hours. The shop had been bombed in the middle of the night. Police cars, blue lights swirling, blocked the street. The police had called about 3:30. I didn’t wake Dad and Grandpa Chaz, I just threw on a pea coat and left the house. It was cold, there were still piles of snow in shady corners and in the ginnel between our house and the Harringtons’. Signs in the little grocery store on Fifty-Seventh Street advertised the specials in Spanish and English. The sidewalks were empty, though a crowd had gathered up ahead, on the south side of the street, opposite the shop.

  I felt sick to my stomach. But excited too.

  Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, which had been published in September, had been banned in India, Sudan, South Africa, Bangladesh. By October, Viking had been pressured to withdraw the book. In December, seven thousand Muslims demonstrated in Bolton, England. In January, a public book burning had been staged in the city of Bradford. In February—February eighteenth—Ayatollah Ruhollah MÜsavi Khomeini had issued a fatwa against Rushdie, encouraging Muslims to kill the author of The Satanic Verses. Ten days later Cody’s in Berkeley had been bombed for displaying the book. The Riverdale Press in the Bronx had been bombed after publishing an editorial defending the right to read the novel. We’d displayed an illegal Iranian translation of the novel that Dad and I had picked up at the New York Book Fair, along with a signed first edition in English, printed on vellum.

  The whirling lights were making me dizzy. I wanted to speak to the officer who had called me, but I was reluctant to cross the crime scene tape. I could see that one of the front windows of the shop had been completely shattered, the one with The Satanic Verses on display in several languages, including the illegal translation into Persian that had been printed in Germany. The sidewalk sparkled with broken glass. A fire hose snaked into the building but I couldn’t see anything through the smoke—no flames, no lights. Two firemen in black and yellow helmets vanished completely as they entered the shop. I needed coffee, but the Medici didn’t open till seven o’clock. I needed to go home to tell Dad and Grandpa Chaz, but I couldn’t tear myself away. I wanted to be on the scene.

  When I was finally able to speak to an officer, I told him I was the owner. He said someone would come to talk to me. I was not to go away. I tried to tell him about the man who’d come into the shop two days earlier, but he told me to wait. As I was waiting, I was aware of a woman standing next to me. I first saw her reflection in part of the shop window across the street that hadn’t been shattered by the bomb. I couldn’t make out her face in the reflection, but I could see that she was a little bit pregnant and I knew without turning to look that it was Olivia.

  I was stunned. I could see Olivia stretching her legs out in a booth at Jimmy’s, proposing a toast at our Christmas dinner, sitting alone in Car 8406 as the Lake Shore Limited pulled out of Union Station. And now she was standing right next to me. I turned to her. “Will you marry me?” I said, almost (but not quite) without thinking, because I thought that all of a sudden I understood the truth about love, as if my mind had just opened up to drink in the early morning sunlight, as if I’d just stepped out of Plato’s cave into the sun, as if I’d just discovered a new planet.

  She laughed. “I’m not looking for someone to rescue me,” she said.

  I started to protest.

  “I’ve made enough mistakes in my life,” she said. “I don’t want to make another one.” She took a sip of coffee. “But I am looking for a job.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I heard about the bombing on WBBM. I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Where’d you get the coffee?”

  “Medici.”

  “Not open yet.”

  “I know someone. If you go round to the back door…”

  She offered me a sip of her coffee, and I put my lips where her lips had been. I was thirty-one years old. Too old to be knocked on my ass like that, but that’s the way I felt.

  “I meant,” I said, “when I asked what you were doing here—I meant, what are you doing here in Hyde Park?”

  “Let’s go to the Medici,” she said. “It’ll be open by now.”

  I looked at my wrist. I hadn’t put on my watch. “I’m supposed to wait for the officer in charge. I’ve got a pretty good idea about who threw the bomb.”

  “You know who did it?”

  “Not exactly, but— We had an Iranian translation of The Satanic Verses in the window. The Ayatollah issued a fatwa in February.”

  “I know about the fatwa, Gabe.”

  “You know about the bombing at Cody’s too? And the Riverdale Press in New York?”

  She nodded. “And you know that The Satanic Verses was burned in public in Bradford, England, and seven thousand Muslims demonstrated in Bolton?”

  This she didn’t know.

  I called Dad from a pay phone at the Medici. It was hard for him to believe t
hat this was more than a prank, or petty vandalism.

  “It wasn’t a brick,” I said. “They’re saying it was a Molotov cocktail.” I wasn’t really sure what a Molotov cocktail was, but that’s what the newspaper had called the bomb at Cody’s.

  In a booth at the Medici, I told Olivia about the waiter from the Middle Eastern restaurant on Fifty-Fifth Street who’d come into the shop a week before the bombings in San Francisco.

  “Right after we put up the display. He wanted to buy the Iranian translation. But he wanted to buy it so he could burn it. I wouldn’t sell it to him. ‘If that man Rushdie comes into my restaurant,’ he said, ‘I will kill him.’ You think this is normal? You think it’s acceptable?”

  “I think he was upset.”

  “These people are insane.”

  “These people,” Olivia said. “Listen to yourself. These people. They’re just people.”

  “I suppose the Nazis were just people too.”

  “Rushdie attacked their deepest beliefs, he insulted their religion. The Koran. He made fun of Mohammed, represented him as a brothel keeper. It’s like burning the flag in this country, or pissing on it. No wonder these people got pissed off. The reason we don’t get pissed off about literature in this country is not because we’re good and tolerant; it’s because we don’t care enough about literature to get riled up about it. It’s lost its power to get our most important experiences into words.”

  “People got upset about Piss Christ,” I said, “and about the Mapplethorpe exhibit. But they didn’t lynch Andres Serrano or Mapplethorpe.”

  “No, but they sent them death threats.”

  “And you think that’s acceptable?” I was pretty stunned by this position. “You don’t like a book or a work of art so it’s okay to murder the author, or the artist? Okay to send death threats? How many of the people who are so riled up about The Satanic Verses do you suppose have actually read it?”