Love, Death & Rare Books

by Robert Hellenga

  “Probably not very many.”

  “Have you read it?”

  “No.”

  “There you go.”

  “How about you?”

  “I couldn’t get through it. I don’t think it’s a very good book. It’s like trying to read Tolkien’s Silmarillion.” We both laughed. “Before the fatwa it wasn’t selling very well. The week after the fatwa it sold seven hundred fifty thousand copies.

  “Maybe I could get the Ayatollah to issue a fatwa against my dissertation.”

  “Finished?”

  She shook her head and patted her stomach. The curve of her stomach wasn’t much more than a little bump, but it struck me as a great mystery, like one of the mysterious mathematical curves that I’d learned to map in Miss Hackberry’s geometry class, or was it algebra?—circles, ellipses, parabolas, hyperbolas, and that was only the beginning. I could do the numbers, plot the curves, but I never understood what I was doing, or why. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s a baby, Gabe. No reason to be sorry. I’m going to keep working on it.”

  “The baby?”

  “The dissertation. I don’t need the degree to turn it into a book. I never could figure out how the Prelude deconstructed itself, so I went back to my original idea.”

  “The Romantics,” I said, “were the first generation of writers to write in a universe that had no built-in meaning.”

  “Very good, Mr. Smarty Pants.”

  I didn’t ask her more questions at the time, didn’t ask her if the baby had a father. Maybe I didn’t want to know.

  When I finally talked to the investigating officer, I told him about the waiter from the Middle Eastern restaurant. It was hard for him to believe that someone would bomb a bookshop because of a book.

  I told him about the fatwa and the bombings in Berkeley and New York.

  “If the book is such a problem,” he wanted to know, “why did you put it in the window?”

  Three days later no trace remained of the Persian translation or the signed first edition, but they had been replaced by editions in several different languages. The police tape was gone. The smoke had been more or less cleared out by an ozonator. The arson investigators were long gone, the cleanup crew, in yellow hard hats and brown uniforms, were finishing up. The mysterious waiter had been arrested, But a new development took place: Miss Sullivan discovered a pipe bomb in a wastebasket outside the rare book room. She handed it to me as I was coming up the stairs. Dad was in the office, Grandpa Chaz in the catalog room. I was paralyzed. The bomb was in a paper sack, a full-sized grocery sack. Miss Sullivan had opened the sack to show me. In the bottom of the sack you could see two lengths of pipe stuck together with duct tape. There was no sign of a fuse, and I didn’t hear any ticking. She told me to put it in the dumpster in the alley. I told her to call 911.

  I hadn’t had a lot of experience with pipe bombs, but I’d seen Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor assembling pipe bombs in The Terminator, so I knew better than to put it down. I went down the stairs and out the back of the shop, out the shipping-and-receiving door, into the alley, cradling the bomb in both hands while I waited for the police, or the bomb squad. The police arrived first. I don’t think they’d had much experience with pipe bombs either. They stayed in their cars, lights flashing, blocking both ends of the alley. An officer spoke to me through an electronic bullhorn. “Don’t drop it,” he said. “We’re going to evacuate the area. The Cook County Sheriff’s Police Bomb Squad is on the way. Everyone on the squad has completed eight weeks of intense training at the United States Army’s Hazardous Devices School in Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. They’re going to load a robot that can dismantle a pipe bomb without destroying the evidence by detonating it.”

  It wasn’t easy to master my emotions while holding the pipe bomb. I wasn’t even sure I could have put a name on my emotions. Anxiety? Anger? Paranoia? But also the feeling that I was at the center of the universe. Maybe that was it. The feeling probably wouldn’t last very long, but I was enjoying it.

  Wake up, I thought. Open your eyes. Olivia is back. I don’t know what happened at Yale, and I don’t care. I started to entertain a fantasy about family life that took me a long way into the future. I was imagining that I was holding a child in my arms when Grandpa Chaz came out the back door and started walking toward me. He used a cane now and was hunched a little.

  The police yelled at him to go back, and Dad and I yelled too.

  “I’m eighty-one years old,” he shouted. “Give me the fucking bomb.”

  “Grandpa, no. Stay back.” I hugged the bomb tighter. The eyes in his old face glowed like coals.

  He kept coming, but just before he reached me, two police officers converged on him and wrestled him back to the loading dock. I was stepping backward all the time, trying not to trip on the uneven bricks in the alley. Grandpa Chaz kept shouting: “I’m eighty-one years old, give me the fucking bomb.”

  The robot finally arrived, delivered in what looked like an oversize UPS truck. It had been developed in Northern Ireland, where pipe bombs were the order of the day, and was operated remotely by a technician who watched it on a closed-circuit TV screen as it trundled over the rough bricks in the alley. It was bright yellow and looked like a small tank with jaws on the end of a long robotic arm.

  “Take the bomb out of the sack and place it gently in the jaws.”

  He had my attention now. The bomb was becoming more real, if there are degrees of reality. I was having trouble breathing. I looked into the sack and then at the jaws and then back again. “It’s not going to fit,” I said. “There are two pipes.”

  “Fuck.”

  The bomb squad conferenced.

  Time passed. A rat ran out from under the dumpster behind Benny’s Steakhouse, where we sometimes ate supper after an especially long day, took one look at the situation, and turned around. For one second I forgot about the bomb, but I didn’t drop it.

  After a while two bomb squad guys in bomb suits, looking as if they were getting ready to land on the moon, came lumbering toward me with an X-ray unit. “They’re going to take a picture of the bomb.” The electronic megaphone made the speaker sound like an old gramophone. “The cable they’re dragging will link the pictures to a Telex screen.”

  It took a long time for the two men to reach me. I could see the rat, under the dumpster, watching us.

  “You said they’re two pipes? How big?” I held up thumb and first finger in a circle.

  “Jesus,” he said. “Don’t let go of the sack. Two pipes, about two inches in diameter.”

  They set up a real-time X-ray camera on a tripod, aiming it at the package cradled in my arms. “Hold real still now. Smile. It works like a scanner at the airport. There’s no balance switch on the bomb, or it would have gone off when you picked it up in the store.”

  They took several shots at different angles.

  Another bomb squad guy shouted from the van: “It’s a bomb all right, but it looks like the timer’s maybe fucked. It’s in the bottom of the sack.”

  The robot was standing by.

  “Looks like a kid’s alarm clock.”

  “You’re going to hand me the sack now. Real easy. Make sure I’ve got it.”

  I handed over the sack.

  “Now get the hell out of here.”

  I got the hell out.

  Dad was talking to someone through the window of a police car at the end of the alley. Grandpa Chaz was standing with his back against the loading dock. “You stupid son-of-a-bitch,” he said when I reached him. “I’m eighty-one years old.”

  “You wanted to be the hero, didn’t you?” I said.

  He looked surprised and then he laughed. “So did you!”

  “The bomb failed to explode,” I explained to Olivia on the following Mo
nday, “because the pressure buildup from the chemical reaction had not exceeded the casing strength of the two-inch wrought steel pipes. At first they thought there was a problem with the alarm clock—a‘Tiny Tot’ alarm clock. But the alarm clock was working just fine.” We were standing in front of the shop. “If I’d dropped it, though, the shock would have ruptured the statically pressurized casing. If the bomb had gone off, it would have destroyed all the rare books and killed everyone in the shop. Well, it would have killed me.”

  “Then you’d be a martyr too—Hyde Park’s first Salman Rushdie martyr.”

  “Jesus, Olivia. You’re a piece of work.”

  “What exactly does that mean, ‘you’re a piece of work’?”

  “I means that you’re an interesting person but difficult to get along with. You complicate the simplest thing, set yourself in opposition to the clearest things.”

  “Okay. I can accept that.”

  “Good,” I said. “We’ve reached some common ground.”

  “Are you going to offer me a job?”

  “Of course. We need someone to work the first floor and keep an eye on the children’s books. Janice Holmes is not coming back. She’s the only one, though.”

  “I can handle that. One more thing, though. How did the pipe bomb get into the wastebasket on the second floor? You wouldn’t throw a fire bomb through the front window and then go into the store and put a pipe bomb on the second floor. Whoever put it there must have left it in the shop the day before. He may be coming back.”

  “Right,” I said. “He or she.”

  “Right,” she said. “Or she. Then we’ll all be martyrs.”

  “The waiter from the restaurant’s still in custody, but he’s got a solid alibi for the Molotov cocktail. The pipe bomb’s more problematic. The lead detective said they’re going to hold on to the waiter for a while and take a good look at the mosque on Stony Island, and all the other mosques too—especially out in Devon—but they can’t patrol the shop.”

  “Mosque Maryam,” Olivia said. “That’s the Nation of Islam. They don’t have much truck with Muslim Muslims. Or vice versa.”

  “But it’s right around the corner.”

  “That’s like looking for your keys under the streetlight,” Olivia said, “instead of looking where you think you dropped them.”

  Dad put on a good front, but Grandpa Chaz was shaken and insisted on hiring a night watchman. The Sullivan sisters’ hair turned white over the next two weeks. The waiter was released from custody. He’d been at work on the night of the bombing, and the fingerprints on the dismantled pipe bomb belonged to somebody else.

  Every morning the floor staff patrolled the aisles, reshelving books that had been left on tables or on the floor, restoring the world to order in a rough approximation of the Dewey Decimal System: philosophy, psychology, religion, social science, languages, science, history and geography, literature, the arts.

  Olivia continued to work at the shop until the end of August. She went into labor on a Friday morning, September 15. Aunt Fern called me at the shop and wanted me to come to the hospital. I walked to Bernard Mitchell Hospital on Fifty-Eighth Street. Aunt Fern was waiting for me in the second-floor lobby.

  “I told them she was waiting for her husband,” she said. “So you’ll be able to be with her.”

  I was surprised but not annoyed. In fact—catching a glimpse of my subconscious—I realized I was secretly pleased.

  “I’m not the father. You know that.”

  “Of course I know that, but it doesn’t matter now, does it?”

  “I’m not sure she’d want me there, to see, I mean…” I didn’t really know what I meant.

  “That doesn’t matter either. Just go to her.”

  There was some coming and going in the maternity ward. A nurse led me into a tiny bathroom to change into a hospital gown and told me to scrub my hands, really scrub them. Which I did. “She’s already in stirrups,” the nurse said when I came out of the bathroom. “The cervix must be one hundred percent effaced and ten centimeters dilated before a vaginal delivery. You’re here just in time.”

  In the birth room Olivia was completely exposed. Her legs forced apart. The insides of her thighs smooth and shiny and white as eggs.

  “She’s already at six centimeters,” the nurse said. “You can put compresses on her face. Here. Just wipe her forehead.”

  Olivia noticed me for the first time. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “Your aunt called me.”

  “She wants to marry me off. She wants someone to look after me. Someone else. Someone not her. But don’t worry. I don’t need anyone to look after me.”

  She went into a contraction and started to scream.

  “Do you want me to call a nurse? What about your doctor?”

  “He was here earlier,” she said when she stopped screaming. “I was on my way to the shop when my water broke. It didn’t really ‘break.’ I thought I’d peed myself.”

  “You’re sure you don’t want me to go out in the hall and call someone?”

  “It’s all right, Gabe,” she said. But then she started to scream again as another contraction came on.

  “When my water broke,” she said again, “it wasn’t like the movies—a water balloon hitting the sidewalk. It went on for hours. And I didn’t have to rush to the hospital right away. I went into the Medici and called my aunt. She called the doctor and picked me up in a taxi.”

  The nurse came in and cuffed her and pumped up the cuff. “I want you to close your eyes and imagine your cervix opening up like a flower,” she said to Olivia. “You too,” she said, nodding at me.

  “I don’t have a cervix,” I said. I wasn’t sure what a cervix was. I didn’t think I had a cervix. But maybe I did. “Do I?”

  She laughed. “Just use your imagination.”

  I imagined a cervix opening up like a flower. I could feel it. Could feel myself turning inside out.

  “I want you to keep putting these cold compresses on her forehead,” the nurse said.

  “Talk to me, Gabe. A poem, anything.” Olivia wanted a poem? What poem? Keats? Part of “The Eve of St. Agnes”? I didn’t have a copy. Why hadn’t I memorized it? Well, I had memorized the part about Porphyro melting into her dream, but it didn’t seem appropriate right now. All I could think of was Yeats’s “Long-Legged Fly”—a series of private moments: Caesar in his tent before crossing the Rubicon, Helen of Troy practicing a tinker’s shuffle, Michelangelo up at the top of the Sistine Chapel. These were great mysteries, but not as great as the mystery I was watching. And Olivia’s mind wasn’t moving upon silence, like Yeats’s daddy long-legs. She started to scream again. I wiped her forehead. “I didn’t want it to be easy,” she said when the contraction had run its course.

  “Things were too easy for us,” I said, leaning over her. “Dad wanted us to get married. Your aunt too. And I didn’t have a wife to get in the way… Maybe that was the problem. We needed an obstacle. A naked sword in the bed between us.” She started to scream again.

  An hour later the nurse handed me a baby. The baby. Baby Saskia, eight pounds four ounces. Holding her in my arms was like holding the pipe bomb, but even more frightening. Even more dangerous.

  V. 100,000 BOOKS

  (January 1990)

  I was on a high. I’d been right there in the delivery room at Bernard Mitchell when Baby Saskia was born. I’d stepped into the role of surrogate husband and father. I began to fantasize about marriage and family life, and Aunt Fern encouraged these fantasies. In her eyes I was a hero. In my own eyes too, I suppose.

  Olivia, on the other hand, was suffering from postpartum depression and needed cheering up. I invited her to drive out with me to Cardinal Newman College in Lake Forest to look at a large cache of books. The college had been founded
by Monsignor Joseph Reitman back in the sixties. Monsignor Reitman had a pal in the Vatican Library who’d hung on to a lot of duplicates that had been withdrawn and books that had never been cataloged in the first place. When Monsignor Reitman went to Rome to get the charter for the college, he bought them all and had them crated up and shipped to Lake Forest. Now that Monsignor Reitman was dead and the college had closed, the diocese wanted to unload the books to pay off creditors. They needed someone they could trust not to rip them off, and they wanted to avoid publicity. They had a potential buyer for half the campus and were in a hurry to get the books out of the old library. Ben Warren, one of our collectors and a member of the Caxton Club, was on the board of trustees. His brother was an editor at Commentary, and Ben had given them my name. In 1990, it was easier to sell good material than to buy it, so I was eager to look at the books.

  Olivia was waiting for me in the turnaround in front of the 1700 building, where she was living with her aunt, who was going to look after Baby Saskia, who was now almost five months old, not able to sit up on her own yet, but able to recognize my voice and to play peek-a-boo.

  It was January 1990. Ice was chunked up around the edge of the lake. The heater in the van wasn’t quite enough to keep our feet warm. I took the Outer Drive all the way to Green Bay Avenue. We passed McElroy’s, where Mamma got her fur coat. I reminded Olivia of the story.

  “The coat’s still in her closet,” I said. “Would you like it?”

  “Mink?” she said. “Are you kidding?” But at least she smiled. “Where did you say we’re going?” she asked.

  I had to remind her that we were going to Cardinal Newman College in Lake Forest.

  “I thought it was closed.”

  “It is,” I said, “but the trustees still have a boatload of books from the Vatican on their hands that they want to turn into cash.”

  “Are you going to buy them?”